Hieroglyphs to Virtual Classrooms: Have We Really Progressed?
How are we learning? In recent decades, children have learned through many sources outside family, including daycare, schools, and after-school activities. Learning is in great contrast with centuries past where most things were taught by parents and family. What has changed? Why?
With intriguing background commentary, Relating to Ancient Learning provides an informal look at how civilizations were built by experiential learning, existed by efficiency, and declined with unprepared youth.
By necessity, throughout the world adults provide food, clothing, healthcare, and shelter for their children. Teens legally reach adulthood in high school, yet many are unprepared to sustain themselves. Age for teaching essential life skills has changed—it is delayed. Why are some young adults not inclined to work until formally educated for fifteen to twenty years?
Ancients, without writing, memorized independently. The world keeps changing. For over a century, electronic artificial memory designed to help seemingly made us unable to think and learn for ourselves. Meanwhile, education in group structure reinforced dependence.
There is an evolving change back to independent learning. Toddlers now use technology to learn and entertain themselves in a perceivable drift away from brick-and-mortar institutions.
Wietgrefe’s thought-provoking book, Relating to Ancient Culture, has an engaging sequel Relating to Ancient Learning As it Influences the 21st Century. Topics include:
• Experience cannot be passed on; it must be learned.
• Like destroyers of ancient libraries, systems can vanish not just by destruction, but also by changed learning systems.
• Given everything, including free or subsidized formal education into their twenties, children have no needs. Consequently, their minds have not developed an ability to satisfy a need.
• Some of the world’s most fascinating and innovative problem solvers of the past two centuries were independent thinkers. School was an aid, not a solution.
• Traditional learning relies on memory. The computer literate do not.
• World transition to electronic artificial memory may be the biggest setback in human history.
• The world does not survive on smart people or those that spent the most time in school. It survives and changes when people act, work, think, are responsible, and take risks.
Relating to Ancient Learning As it Influences the 21st Century provides fascinating insight into today’s modern communication and educational trends and is a must read for parents, grandparents, and educators. See: www.relatingtoancients.com.
Tabella dei contenuti
Clouds Disappear. A generation is coming of age that thinks all previous knowledge is accessible on the Internet; it’s sad, but true. Only a minute fraction in the history of man has been written. Of what has been written, little survived into the twenty-first century….
Are we in tune with the current generation, or is it past? Past usefulness?
Contrary to Internet gurus, our current database of written records is being destroyed more quickly than were ancient libraries. What is not currently contained on the Internet is being lost to history . . . lost to our youth. Books will be antiques rotting in the basement of the past.
Electronic drives crash. Information is lost. As a cloud forms and disappears, so goes knowledge when not committed to memory and passed on.
Human genesis will continue. What knowledge are parents and grandparents passing on? Has it changed? Why?
Learning is reversed.
Why don’t we have written plans of pyramid construction rather than obscure references of them? Materials and electronics have replaced memory as a learned skill….
Anthropologists suggest human brains continued to expand by spending more energy thinking. I contend electronic artificial memory and computations are replacing human memory, allowing a higher percentage of consumed energy (calories) for physical movement. With electronic technology and automated transportation, humans have less physical movement. Result: The anecdotal trend could indicate as a percent of the body, brains are likely to shrink. Proportionally, human minds are shrinking while height and waists are growing….
Some parents are capable and disciplined enough to teach their children, but they don’t have to. For thousands of years, parents have paid teachers to instruct their children.
Parents directing school funds for the best education of their children will allow children and young adults to specialize, have responsibilities, and gain work experience far quicker than one teacher facing four walls, twenty students, and a door in a guarded institution. Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago “. . . locked up in steel whose conscience with injustice is corrupted” applies to today’s school system….
Higher tech, automation assembly, operation, and maintenance have provided a satisfying lifestyle since the Industrial Revolution….
Adult children acclimated to living standards of their parents without working, saving, and planning for a more affluent lifestyle….
Education seems to develop a mental block between lifestyle satisfaction and income….
How many years in the school system are needed to begin delivering innovation? Perplexing, isn’t it?
It is certain man started using tools before he could read, write, or do math. It stands to reason that formal education, therefore, is not needed to innovate….
Boys historically participated more in school team sports and prompted the whole movement into having equal sports in schools for girls…. Boys started what girls were encouraged to want—sports, not eventual employment…..
In the history of man, divergence of educated people and technology has never been so wide and it is widening…. When that happens, fear results. It is called technophobia….
Electronic introduction and exposure may explain generational differences between Traditionalists, “radio babies” (1900–1945), Baby Boomers, “television tots” (1946–1964), Generation X, “latchkey kids” with “microwave mamas” (1965–1980), and Millennials, “digital dickens” (1980–2000). Individuals think differently yet enough uniformity exists to group them by age….
Circa l’autore
GARY W. WIETGREFE (pronounced wit’grif)For the past five years without a car or home, Gary and his wife, Patricia, traveled the world with a backpack and observed: Some places have bookstores and family-owned ‘mom and pop shops’; others do not. Some brick and mortar retailers thrive in places while others strive to stay alive. Why?
In many locations, education is intermittent with children helping families survive. Elsewhere, too many children forced schools to operate two shifts. Often in the developed world, children try to skip school. He investigated why there were differences.
As an inventor, researcher, military intelligence veteran, economist, agriculturalist, systems developer, societal explorer, and author, Gary has observed and documented his findings from his many travels and experiences.
What does ancient mean? Could the difference between modern and ancient be the same reason grandparents buy books and newspapers and younger generations read electronic books, blogs, and engage social media on devices?
His books Relating to Ancient Culture and Relating to Ancient Learning help answer those profound questions.
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