Disclaimer: To some, I am an old coot, and my rants hard to follow. However…
I hear a few rants over and over from old people and they make no sense to me.
One is that “Kids today have digital clocks and cannot tell time on a ‘real’ clock.”
To which I respond that there are analog clocks everywhere, including half of all wrist watches, and especially in the front of every classroom I’ve ever seen. And every kid in the back row knows exactly how many minutes are left until the next break. (They *never *believe this. I can never through, but I still always try).
Another, I heard twice last week was that “Kids today are taught nothing about George Washington, since his birthday is no longer a national holiday.” Again, if you’ve been in a school around President’s Day you will see pictures of Washington and Lincoln on every wall, with little essays with gold stars at the top. (Again they won’t accept this as proof, but will voice the same complaint to the next person to sit beside them. And I don’t even mention that the favorite tales of him they learned in school were mostly nineteenth century fabrications.)
Anything whatever amounting to, “Young people today don’t get slapped around enough at home/in school/at basic training/etc.” As if corporal punishment were one of the building blocks of civilization.
Many old coots seem to take pride in proclaiming how shitty life was when they were kids. I suppose I can understand it; we’ve always been taught not to be “spoiled,” but I strongly doubt there’s any real virtue to be gained from anesthesia-free dentistry.
Conversely, there’s the ranting about how great life was when they were a kid when open bigotry against anyone that wasn’t exactly like them was tolerated and how the end of civilization is near because of “less morals”(!!!) and other such bullshit. There’s a lot that is still wrong with the world but that isn’t one of them.
In all fairness to old coots around the world, I can understand their perspective. I can only imagine how spoiled kids will be when I’m a “coot” in 50 years(I’m 26 now).
I live here in China and with their one-child policy, an entire generation(two now) is being raised spoiled and ignorant. The kids I teach know very little about the poverty of just 25 years, even.
Old people here look at kids with ten-times the “cootiness”(is that word) than we do in the States.
I’ve heard many “good old days” rants, but I’d have to say that quite few of them fall into the “wasn’t it great when bigotry flourished” category. Perhaps I’ve led a sheltered life.
Actually, I’ve seen a lot of kids who have trouble reading “real” clocks. It mostly becomes obvious in language classes, where we’re learning how to tell time in a language, and they are given a picture of a clock and told to say what time it is in the language. Some can’t even read the thing in English!
Poor wording on my part. What I meant to say was that people rant about how great life was fifty plus years ago because the society of today is immoral, evil, et cetera but they conveniently forget that black men could be lynched, women beaten, and homosexuals murdered with little to no consequence while they were growing up.
Now I’m not disputing those same incidents don’t still happen today but they aren’t considered the natural order of things anymore either.
My daughter is a case in point. She could never grasp the concept of analog clocks, and at 32 years old STILL has trouble telling time with one. So it’s not all bullshit.
The one that gets me is that old people often proclaim that “kids just aren’t as smart as the used to be”. They usually claim that it is because standards in the schools have gone down over the years and kids don’t work as hard. Surprise, Surprise, huge amounts of research shows that every measure of intelligence has increased a significant amount over the years with the current generation the brightest of all. If you transported an old coot with average intelligence for his day to a school of today as a youth, he may find that his bus was shorter than the one he remembered.
Bah! Back in my day we used the obelisks to tell time. Never was anything wrong with that system. An obelisk is sturdy! Strong! Unfailing.
Then they switched to those new-fangled sundial contraptions. Just laziness, is all it is. Spoiled kids. shakes fist
Ahem. Anyway. My father, lovable old coot that he is, is fond of the old “walked to school in the snow” story, which was kind of odd, since… well, since I walked to school in the snow, as well, and about an equal distance as he had to. Uphill, too. :dubious:
Well, in the Good Old Days, it seemed like learning to tell time and count money were a sort of rite of passage. Once you could do those things you were officially a kid, and no longer a baby. That may be why the ability to tell time seems important to us geezers.
According to a recent pit thread, current students ranked George Washington our seventh greatest president, behind, among others, G.W. Bush at fifth. I can certainly see a valid reason for concern here…
I’m another one who can’t read analog clocks. Well, okay, I can read them but only if I stare at it for several minutes and count all the little lines. Even then I mess up the hour often as not. I’m 20, btw.
I find it amusing that some “old coots” really have no affection for the Good Ol’ Days. My grandfather, for instance, was born in 1905. He never seemed to regret indoor plumbing or central heat/air. When rock 'n roll and boogie-woogie came along in the '50s, he was the first to get out and dance. He had a really crappy childhood and really enjoyed the newfangled stuff. In contrast, my uncle, who was born in the 1930s, loves nothing better than to talk about how great yesteryear was.
The thing is, these things weren’t nearly as frequent as many have been led to believe, so most people from that era had no experience with them. What they did experience was societal interaction in the main, and that is what is much worse now.
The bigger problem than lynching (with the exception of those lynched, of course) was the second-class citizenship that blacks – and to a certain extent, women – lived under at that time. There is no question that life for both blacks and women is better now, but those of us who lived under the more well behaved and civilized society that existed then feel like the baby was thrown out with the bath water in making these changes. We feel equality for blacks and women could have been acheived without the wholesale abandonment of many of the qualities that made life better then in so many other ways.
Very well put. As a woman, I appreciate the opportunities that are open to me now that were unavailable when I was young. However, I am horrified by the rudeness and incivility that have largely replaced manners, and I am disturbed by the trends of popular entertainment toward brutality and value-free sexuality.
