Uploaded Ms. Kathleen
This is my salute to presidents on presidents day posting. I remember people talking about history when I was growing up. They said it was much harder to know history to day because there was so much more to remember. In fact, when my father was in grade school, he only needed to know the presidents up to Hoover.
I think it’s really hard to compare an education today with an education from 30, 40 or 70 years ago. It’s a different world and in a lot of cases all the facts have changed. The worlds of medicine and science are completely different. A lot of what people thought was right turned out to be wrong and there’s also a lot of stuff that noone every dreamed of that has become common place. Here’s to quick examples. If you studied Einstein in physics, you would have heard that the universe is curved. Turns out that last year they proved that the universe is perfactly flat in all directions.
If you graduated from Harvard with a Ph.D., in communications in 1960, you would have no idea on how to text message or do a simple Google search. You won’t find it in any curriculum for another 30 years or more.
How about geography, try comparing a map from 1980 and 2007? You’re straight As in 1980, become an F today. You even have to change your 2007 map to make Kosovo an independent country.
Are you keeping up with your reading? In 1900, only a few thousand books got published. Today, it’s over 100,000. And your vocabulary? In 1960, there were about 200,000 words in the English Dictionary. Now there are over a million. Can you define “woot” and use it in a sentence? Most 10 year olds can.
As with many things, the good old days often aren’t as good as people’s memories. It’s tough to measure new world oranges against old world apples.
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