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My Granddad Used To Say...

In the old days, not so so long ago actually, wisdom passed from generation to generation. Knowledge was in low supply compared to today, and advice from the elderly was listened and valued.

One of my strongest movie scene memories from my childhood is from a Wild West movie where an old and a young Cherokee Indians/native Americans were sitting by the fire and the old man said: "All the words that were ever said are still in the air". I was around 12 at the time, and probably at the right age to go into months of thinking about that line. Was he referring to spirits? Or was it about the acoustic energy not being transformed? In any case, I learnt quite a lot from trying, rather unsuccessfully, to figure that one out.

The shortage of what I call high-intensity information like this scene when we were young allowed us time to go into deeper thought about what we heard, but children today cannot afford this reasoning time. They are bombarded with all kinds of information, and even school teachers have difficulties to secure their dedicated and undivided attention - thus the growing levels of ADD diagnosis.

From there I draw two conclusions. First, that education must reinvent itself, or diagnose itself as obsolete.  Second, that my grandchildren are unlikely to come looking for granddad's pearls of wisdom.

They might, however, have automated systems that will find all our lifetime blogs, tweets and posts in FB and G+ and report summaries to the children with the key points and outlining our profiles and views. Of course, this will be delivered by a humanoid holographic assistant, and will included a bit of  sarcasm and humor (fueled by artificial intelligence) about how old-styled we were back in the early 21st century.

So, all our efforts today might provide a few minutes entertainment to our grandchildren in the future, before they go back to their self-managed personalized and highly entertaining computer assisted education.

Comments

eKsKog said…
mac, you are a lot smarter than i ever noticed (maybe i am the overrated bummer)

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