Posted on 04/13/2012 9:56:24 PM PDT by grundle
“It became the highest-grossing film of all time”
Yeah, in funny money. Not in inflation-adjusted gross, or in other words tickets sold. Gone With the Wind will not be beat.
They didn’t know Obama is a Muslim, a Communist and Constitutionally ineligible to be POTUS, either, and THAT was only four years ago, so nothing surprises me at this point/s;)
True story: I'm an amateur astronomer, and years ago I hosted an impromptu star party for the neighbors. Wine was passed around, it was a balmy summer evening, and there was a particularly nice alignment of planets to look at, one after another.
So, we get to Saturn (always a big draw, even if you've seen it a million times, but especially the first time). And a neighbor looks through the scope, looks up at me, and says "are those rings?" When I applied in the affirmative, this forty-something middle manager professional woman said, in amazement, "I always thought that was a marketing thing."
No, she wasn't drunk. And there was no smirks or laughter from the other neighbors, just thoughtfulness and a desire to see for themselves.
I went behind a tree and downed the rest of the wine.
Often chat with school & collage age nieces, nephews, cousins and such. Their total lack of knowledge of history, geography, math and science is appalling.
Their identification with movies, music and video games is frightening.
She was undoubtedly that legendary woman who refused to see “Apollo 13” because she didn’t like sci-fi movies.
A very unphilosophic response. I recall depictions of "saturn" in Felix the Cat and the Golden Book, Color Kittens, as my earliest introduction to this image. In my case, I was seeing that image in a more realistic context, e.g. the Herbert Zim Golden Guide to Astronomy, by the time I was in grade school. But not everybody follows this path, and some may be left with Felix the Cat. I say the philosophic response is, "better late than never."
“The RMS Titanic sank April 15, 1912, after hitting an iceberg.”
OK, so maybe they weren’t aware of some incidental factors pertaining to the sinking.
But if they watch the news at all, they’re abundantly aware of what’s truly important about this disaster - “It was ____’s fault!” (they can fill in the blank for extra credit and an added dose of positive self-esteem, of course.)
Gawd, how I wish SHE would hit an iceberg and sink...
When I was in college, one of my apartment-mates came into my room with his friend and asked to look at my globe. He was trying to find Greece.
I pointed to Europe, and he still couldn’t find it. He said, “Italy’s the boot, right?” I said “yes” and showed him where Greece was located.
Now this guy graduated with straight A’s in Accounting in the #1 Accounting school in the nation at the time. He received job offers from all of the big 8 Accounting firms after graduation.
He just never bothered to learn any Geography.
Lord help us all we live in a really ignorant world
Lol!
(Such a cruel fate to wish upon a poor, innocent iceberg...)
wise move....
OK, here’s my question for everybody: What’s the sine of forty five degrees? Exactly.
Of course I realize that a small fraction of adults can answer that question off the top of their head, but that just means that very few people know anything about anything, because if you don’t know this, you don’t know nuttin’ about nuttin’
This just shows how the younger generation are not taught.
They don’t know there’s a Constitution and they don’t have a clue about communism. Muslims....maybe.
Scorpio?
Ive felt for a long time the final Presidential vote percentage is an accurate representation of the Idiot/Non-Idiot index, but it this it true the Idiots have made a major leap forward..
Few know how much of anything works anymore.
So technology has turned into essentially magic.
They can't differentiate between what is real and what is make believe. So they depend on “experts” to guide them as they are incapable of reasoning through issues themselves.
This is why people today are willing to believe nearly anything as long it fits into their larger world view and it comes from an "expert".
So in short, they've become sheep to be herded by their betters.
Not much hope for the future generation.
one over the square root of 2. ;-)
You gave it away!
While I’ll probably not be the smartest guy in every room I’ll ever walk into, I have to relate this story.
I graduated HS in 1983. In my 11th grade year, I missed the entire 3rd Q due to medical issues. I returned to class the day of quarterly exams. My History teacher argued with me about taking the test and wanted to send me to the library for the duration with a make up sometime later.
I refused and demanded to take the test with the caveat that pass/fail, that was the grade I’d get. Now bear in mind I sat desk to desk with the teacher so no cheating was possible.
I finished before the rest of the class and the teacher said ‘I told you you’d blow it”. I replied, “No I didn’t, I got at least a 90.”
While the rest of the class finished, she graded the test. She then called me outside and said “You got a 93. How the hell did that happen?”
The answer was that I was taught the very same material in 3rd grade by a Nun in Catholic school. And I remembered it because it was interesting to me.
Now for my point. In 1983 the educational system was teaching once 3rd grade material to 11th graders. In fact ALL of my high school English/History class material had been taught to me by G4 in Catholic school.
In 2012 I can only imagine seniors graduate by singing a partial rendition of the Barney theme song. And I am not kidding.
This afternoon somebody tweeted that Obama had never had to meet a payroll. A UC Berkeley alumnus shot back “doesn’t being a professor and a lawyer count?”
Michelle Malkin tweeted “Dear Lord. Clueless tweet of the day. This woman thinks meeting payroll means cashing a paycheck.”
I went thru the girl’s tweets and she admitted she had to look it up. She also admitted that her parents had owned their own business for years. You would think that knowledge would have seeped into a family conversation from time to time.
Some teen girls were at our kitchen table about a year ago.
The topic of our oldest daughter going to France came up.
One of the girls asked if France is in our country.
One wonders if the girl, her parents or the school district should be shot first.
Looks pretty bleak sometimes.
I do have to say that my granddaughter is a freshman in high school and is taking world history. She was fascinated by the Holocaust and how in the world something like that ever happened.
I don’t know what she knows about American history. Shame on me for never asking her. I’ll remedy that this weekend.
Again I say, a question such as this is cause not for lamentation but rejoicing. And never mind the parents and the school board. It's all up to her.
I would assume those “people” are twenty-something Obama fans.
“..but especially the first time..”
At the local grade school they had astronomy night with lots of telescopes for the kids (and parents!) to look through.
It was AMAZING to see Saturn, with my OWN eyes! Yep - not sure why - but it is one thing to see it on paper, another to see for yourself.
I don’t doubt this for a second. On a brighter side, I was volunteering at reading groups Thursday for my daughter’s first grade class. The second group I had was reading a book about the Statue of Liberty. We got off on a slight tangent talking about the date on her book: July 4th, 1776 and what that day means. The little boy on my right was telling me about King George and the Revolutionary War. It turns out they are currently studying our Founding, but it was nice to see he was really paying attention to what he had been taught. I think he probably already knew a little bit anyway. We went off on another tangent when I asked them what famous place other than the Statue of Liberty they would like to visit. The little boy on my right wrote “the great piramids of geesa [sic]”. He loves pyramids and Egypt. One day he came in wearing a pharaoh’s hat. He’s just too cute with his personality and the way he talks and expresses himself. The next boy wrote “a hotel” which was surprising because he seems like he might be kind of a smart little boy and I thought he would come up with something more specific. When I inquired a little further, he said it was one with a wishing well. The little Hispanic boy wrote: “The Great Wall of Chinea[sic]” which was impressive because that’s not a place you would think an average first grader would be interested in. The last little boy didn’t have time to write. He just told me Disneyland and that he had already been there. Unfortunately, we only get 20 minutes for each group to read and discuss. I wish I had more time with them because often I have to cut them off and some of them really have a lot to say.
I wish you were my neighbor. That would be fun. My kids would love it.
Big boat ping
As a kid, I would spent hours upon hours in our den reading through the World Book Encyclopedia.
My daughter (8th grade) gave a presentation on the Holocaust for History Day a few weeks ago. At the end several boys were asking questions like “How could one guy kill millions of people - that’s impossible”. “If he did that, someone would have stopped him”. “You can’t kill people just because they don’t have the same religion as you”.
She politely answered the questions, and afterwards I told her (it was a parent’s night thing) that she did a good job with those boys teasing her. She gave me a puzzled look.
“You know - with them asking stupid questions and stuff.”
“Um - dad - they were serious.”
“Huh?”
“They were serious, they didn’t know anything about the Holocaust.”
“Huh? Isn’t that what you’ve been studying and why you did the presentation on it?”
“No, we haven’t learned it in school. I did it because it was interesting.” (We had the Diary of Anne Frank in the house that she had read a couple years earlier)
Thanks for the pointer to this thread and here's an "all aboard" bell to those on the Titanic ping list.
And, everyone, here's one final reminder: Don't forget that A Night to Remember will be shown tonight at 10:00 PM (Eastern Daylight Time) on TCM.
I highly recommend the movie "The Devil's Arithmetic" for your granddaughter. (The film is "Based on the popular novel by Jane Yolen, a typical American teenager gets transported back in time and experiences firsthand the horrors of the Holocaust and discovers the meaning of her family’s heritage.")
From Amazon.com:
Executive producers Dustin Hoffman and Mimi Rogers present the truth of the Holocaust so a new generation can understand why it must never be forgotten. Kirsten Dunst plays Hannah, a modern teen more concerned with trends than history. During the traditional Passover dinner, she zones out as her relatives harp about concentration camps. But then Hannah passes through a portal to the past, where she becomes her own ancestor in Poland during the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Post of the day! And only 25 Minutes into the day at that....
I too spent many an hour reading through our old World Books.
Ours was from 1957 so it was a bit outta date for the 70s but I loved reading them just the same.
I believe it.
Simmilar story for me. Short version Daughter in HS. Report on Revolutionary war. Result, passed with high grade.
The report ENDED at Revere’s ride. I asked “Where’s the war?”
She replied...”That’s all they taught us.”
I taught her the rest.
He just never bothered to learn any Geography.”
Your roomie sounds like Sherlock Holmes (the following from “A Study in Scarlet”):
“My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
‘You appear to be astonished,’ he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. ‘Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.’
‘To forget it!’
‘You see,’ he explained, ‘I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.’
‘But the Solar System’ I protested.
‘What the deuce is it to me?’ he interrupted impatiently: ‘you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.’”
My daughter incurred $600 in international charges on her cell phone bill for calling her friend in Panama. She said she didn’t know it was international. Publik skool steenks.
She said, “Mind if I ask you a question?”
I said, “No, go ahead.”
“When we've talked in the past, you say things in such a ‘matter of fact’ voice and assumed I knew about them. Often, I've never even heard of these things. Where’d you learn all this?”
I was dumbfounded, but I said: “I've always been a reader and I've always been fascinated with history. Who are we as people? What kinds of things did other people do that we can learn from? Why are things today the way they are — cause and effect. Learning never stops. Just because you've graduated from school means your learning about life continues until you breathe your last. We live in a marvelous age of information, but there's a downside. The sum total of all human knowledge doubles every ten years! Think about that — then realize how much you have to learn about the world you live in.”
History teacher here. I can only try to teach them what I can. *sigh*
Don’t get me wrong. I know there are still good teachers. And I personally know two that quit the system because ‘the system’ made them ‘not’ teach, just babysit. I do not envy you. To want to teach, to be able to teach and to have PC BS stop you has to be incredibly frustrating.
All I can say is thank you for trying.
You’re quite welcome. I really enjoy teaching. It’s nice to be able to put my degree to some use. :)
I have a wonderful boss, she lets me teach, just I have to deal with some of the other teachers wanting to put me in their box. It’s irritating to be working with those with so much more life experience that just don’t seem to get it.
It’s one thing with the kids, but ignorance in the teachers is something else.
A marketing thing? Come to Saturn! We have rings!
Ping. You might be interested in the anecdotes on this thread. Then again, as I think about it, you’ve probably heard it all before, and then some.
For those who don’t know, FReeper LS is historian Larry Schweikart. His A Patriot’s History of the United States is required reading. See all of his books at his profile page:
http://www.freerepublic.com/~ls/index
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