Not so long ago I received an email whose intent was to garner some sort of appreciation for my parent’s generation. It contained a list of various activities that we ‘kids these days’ don’t have an appreciation for: having to post letters by way of snail mail, playing outside due to a lack of TV options or video games to play, not having access to mobile phones, and so on. While some of the items listed were certainly before my generation’s time, a lot of the mentioned moaning points were also applicable to my generation.
In fact, my time during compulsory education was fascinating because of how it cusped on the more traditional approaches to teaching and the popularisation of mainstream technology (such as computers and the rise of the internet). The internet was slow and still considered a ‘for your information’ starting point (and that was only when it arrived in high schools), more-so than a credible source of information that was able to be referenced in an assignment. But the times, they have a-changed.
The new education syllabus that was guinea pigged on my senior high school years is now mainstream, educational terminology and understandings have changed, we no longer sing ‘God Save the Queen’ (yes, seriously) anywhere and technology has allowed new and, more importantly, interesting ways to capture the attention of wandering young minds. Children are having access to computers from a young age and the internet, though still somewhat feared and revered, is being finally acknowledged as a source of credible information.
But forget the educational part of things for a moment; I’m more interested in the potential for kids to practically apply their imagination today. When I was 13, my friends and I fantasised about building rafts and pedal-powered tanks, complete with peg-gun armaments; nowadays, kids are brainstorming and coming up with practical ways to be superheroes. Take Hibiki Kono as an example (as featured in this story on the front page of PopSci). He loves Spider-Man; so instead of going out and buying some trashy cash-in costume from a department store, he constructs a device that allows him to scale walls.
The possibilities of the practical application of an unbridled young imagination can only get better as younger generations are exposed to increasingly improving technology. With such an idea as Hibiki Kono’s, a child can jump online and Google possible practical ways to bring their imagination to life (and that’s only one option). While my parents regularly lament over future generations who are obsessed with movies, TV shows and video games, I see the possibilities of forward-thinking young minds that have yet to be stifled by social conventions that constantly reaffirm the pursuit of comfort, safe thinking and that which is accepted as a practical pursuit.
Conformity doesn’t excite me, but empowering young minds to start thinking outside of the box at an early age does. We’re not just raising tomorrow’s innovators, today; we’re seeing tomorrow’s innovators innovate, today.
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At my highschool, they made us sing ‘God Save the Queen’. Every week. Then again…it was a fairly pretentious school. No wonder I hated it there. Anyway…
It irritates me that a lot of those emails go around, or how you hear a lot of older generations grumbling about how it was when they were young compared to now. Society and culture changes. It’s inevitable - surely their parents and grandparents had a totally different lifestyle growing up as well - that’s no grounds for judgment.
It’s pretty awesome that kids these days now have the resources and the capability to realise their dreams like little Spiderman up there. Sure, when we were kids we just had to pretend we were flying or sailing or whatever, and that was a great exercise of the imagination, but just because these kids don’t have to pretend those things anymore doesn’t inhibit the growth of their imagination. I think it just pushes it further in new directions, because now they are able to fathom ideas that wouldn’t have even occurred to us at that age.
Awesome. I love the internet. If you are about to say ‘is that it Dude, that’s what you take away from this’ I say to you ‘Yes, that and that if i want to keep my job i have to kill all the children. all of them’
Stupid kids with their music and their games.
But in seriousness i heard recently that the agregate IQ of the world is only just getting to the point it was at before the Dark Ages in Europe and the Mongolian Purges of the East. Think on that for a second. Kids are scientifically verifiably more brilliant than their parents, and the internet is giving force feeding them knowledge on a daily basis. I love it.
Something else I am looking forward to is the day when intelligence is something which is lauded and not hidden away until you turn 25 and realise ‘hang on, I enjoy thinking immensely!’. Damn the future is a fascinating place that i would love to visit but, like Europe, i have to save up and enjoy it when i am a retiree.
@ Muffin - I think you’re onto something there. It stands to reason that parents pave the way for their children, so the developments of their generation that younger generations reap the benefits of are all par for the course! I think it would be scarier if, say, my generation sends an email around to much younger generations saying ‘back in my day we had it exactly the same’.
@ Dude from Sydney - I wasn’t aware about the IQ thing; that’s rather fascinating. One of the problems I have with the education system that I went through is that it seemed so poorly suited to a lot of people (myself included). I really didn’t care about much of what I was learning because it wasn’t capturing my attention… of course, back in those lovely teenage self-esteem days, I wasn’t fully aware of that.
speaking from personal experience, i concur with the above article.