Are We Entering A New Dark Age? https://btimeandagain.runboard.com/t572 Runboard| Are We Entering A New Dark Age? en-us Fri, 29 Mar 2024 15:33:25 +0000 Fri, 29 Mar 2024 15:33:25 +0000 https://www.runboard.com/ rssfeeds_managingeditor@runboard.com (Runboard.com RSS feeds managing editor) rssfeeds_webmaster@runboard.com (Runboard.com RSS feeds webmaster) akBBS 60 Are We Entering A New Dark Age?https://btimeandagain.runboard.com/p8515,from=rss#post8515https://btimeandagain.runboard.com/p8515,from=rss#post8515It worries me that so many people just assume humans and human society are on (and always have been on) a one way path to BETTER. We're smarter, we're healthier, and our standard of living, our knowledge and sophistication, have all gone nowhere but UP UP UP. I read "The Dumbing Down of America: A Chronological Paper Trail", but I didn't need that book to alert me to what I have witnessed with my own eyes. The education system is poorly arranged, test standards set lower and lower, and material removed from curriculum on the excuse that kids need "more time to study math" (for example). Philosophy was removed before I started school, and now Canadian schoolboards are considering removing HISTORY from our schools, because their method of teaching math has had very poor results. Not long ago, I heard a speaker on the radio who discussed the fact that many adults, including business owners, needed their parents to continue helping them do their banking and book-keeping. Callers phoned in to confess that it was true. So what's the explanation for parents who have superior math skills, even though they ALSO studied history and philosophy while they were in school! When my children were young, I noted that teachers were strapped to a strict curriculum, and I remembered that MY teachers had had the freedom to add material and information that they thought we kids needed. For instance, one day our Geography / Math teacher decided we needed a lesson about tricks in advertising! As my kids got older I was shocked to discover that my daughter was entering Grade 9 without knowing how to write an essay! I learned that in Grade 4 or 5! We dissected essays, analyzing the points made in each paragraph, translating metaphors, and then built our own essays. Yet less than two decades later, no one had bothered to teach my kids how to write an essay before they got to highschool! In more recent years, I've watched so many people easily impressed and hoodwinked by people who are such obvious self-serving liars. I've seen people who don't believe in magic, yet still believe in events that are a physical impossibility, just because someone in authority 'said so', and others believe it. Everywhere I look I see businesses, government, hospitals and schools run so incompetently, as if all these institutions are brand new on Earth. Specifically about hospitals, when I was a teenager, the WHO said Canada had the Number One healthcare system in the world. Less than 20 years later, it was hobbled the abuse by manufacturers who drained our tax-supported health insurance, aided and abetted by our 'government', leaving insufficient amounts for the public and what they really needed: more doctors, nurses, technicians, and medical supplies and equipment. And everyone shrugs helplessly, and lets it go on.. Almost daily, I go to buy or use something, like an appliance, or boot up the new operating system because I've been given NO CHOICE but to move "forward" (Ha!), and as the glitches, bugs and other problems pile up, I observe that once again 'progress' is rolling backwards downhill. Pointless 'modernizing' changes often ruin designs that worked perfectly well until some dufus needed a make-work project to justify their next pay. And the public allow it to go on, forking out more and more money for garbage that isn't as good as what they could buy 10 years ago. Their complacence guarantees that this nonsense goes on. Companies couldn't afford to sell trash if no one bought it! Where are teachers like the one who taught my class about tricks in advertising? We more teachers like him now! Please don't think I am a narrow-minded dinosaur who balks at change. I'm really not. I just think that people seem to be dumber and more obedient all the time, and they don't even know it. They are told that the internet is an "information highway", that new designs are all improvements, that science is solving all our problems one after another, and that things are better today than they've ever been before. They don't demand proof, or question inconsistencies. They are told that they are smarter and more savvy than their parents, and way ahead of their grandparents (except when it comes to math, apparently), and they believe it. They eat it up like candy floss and go on smiling and spending. And some of them are tomorrow's school teachers. nondisclosed_email@example.com (starzlookdoun)Thu, 20 Sep 2018 21:12:32 +0000