evapetty:
“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” — Carl Sagan
That is so true. I have noticed many children have lost that innocence and wonder for science that was so strong just a few decades ago with the founding of the space program and all the research and development that NASA has done. It seems that most people today only want the new technology in order to fuel their status or appearance. Such as, “Oh, I have the iPhone 4. That makes me better than you.” This is the direction our children are headed. We all need to get off of our computers and our facebook and our youtube for just an hour a day and take a walk in the park. Maybe camp out in the backyard and look at the splendor of the galaxies of stars above. When I say this, I’m not necessarily downing technology, but we don’t need to lose the appreciation and responsibilty for what Providence has bestowed upon us. I look around my neighborhood and I no longer see children taking nature hikes or playing in the yard like I did just over a decade ago. It saddens my soul to witness this ignorance of what children really need. Parents so often allow themselves to believe that as long as they “provide” for their children materially, that they’ll grow up fine. This is so wrong. Children don’t really care about the newest piece of technology on the market, they want the love and attention that only the parent can fulfill. Parents, if you want your children to appreciate you, then you need to take the time to nurture and teach them. Because if you’re not, then who is? Is that really how you want your children to be? Think about it, please.
This is an incredibly good point. However, I think parents are missing their boat in a couple ways.
First, Eva is exactly right—kids need to be taught that there is more to life than having stuff. There needs to be an emotional appreciation for what we have in the universe—not just for “what’s the next big thing.” Absolutely the case and if it weren’t we wouldn’t hear about people being trampled at Wal-Mart every year on Black Friday.
Second, parents have failed to teach children how to appreciate intelligence. Ever since I was a small kid, I’ve been mocked for being smart. I read voraciously as a child but got made fun of so much, I swapped out the books for comics by the time I was a teen. I still remember being made fun of because I compared a tornado to a black hole in science class.
Back in June of this year I saw Neil deGrasse Tyson do a Q&A session at the American Museum of Natural History. One of the many things he talked about was the culture of ignorance that we have in America. It’s a culture that all but encourages stupidity and actively discourages learning. He added, if we don’t change this, the next time we run into a major environmental catastrophe, we’ll ask the experts what to do and they’ll say: “Throw golf balls at it.”
This was a reference to something that had already happened days before Tyson did his Q&A—the BP oil spill, where BP execs proposed the exact thing Tyson mentions—which did not work.
So, what does this all have to do with the digital watch I mention in the title of this post? Simple—I recently came across an old digital pocket watch I bought for 20 bucks at a JC Penny in 2004(ish) and I couldn’t remember how it worked. See, I have a thing for pocket watches but I stopped using watches all together due to my cell phone(s) having a clock on the display. But this pocket watch had a compass on it. This is useful to a person with an old iPhone 3G (yeah, I’m not cool cuz I don’t have an iPhone 4 :( ). So, I started carrying this thing around with me and actually using it as a watch!
The problem arose when Daylight Savings Time ended. I sat there trying to remember how to work this technology—this bloody, simple technology!!
WHAT DO THE BUTTONS DO?? WHERE DO I SWIPE? CAN I JUST SYNC IT TO MY LAPTOP’S CLOCK?
WTF?!?!?!
Finally I got it changed and everything was cool.
But still, it’s just like that episode of Star Trek where Kirk, Spock and McCoy visit a planet where a people live enslaved by this master computer because it has become so foreign and mysterious to them it became a god to them. They let themselves fall into ignorance and trusted the IT guys, only to have the last IT guys die and have the information on how to regulate the machine lost forever. This allowed the computer to take over.
OK, so my digital watch isn’t going to enslave me, but if, say, I couldn’t work out how to turn off the alarm, I would be enslaved to that thing once a day.
But this is why parents need to encourage their kids to learn about the world and the technology they use every day. Hell, we, as adults, need to encourage each other to learn this stuff, too. I know so many people who willfully remain ignorant about computers despite using them every day. One acquaintance of mine recently admitted that she didn’t know how to refresh her browser.
She’d never clicked the “reload” button on her browser before. >_<
SO, LEARN!!! LEARN LEARN LEARN!
STUDY STUDY STUDY.
We’ll all be better off the more intelligent we are.
