What the hell are we doing? We like to think our teachers and our leaders know better, whatever better means. We like to think they know what they are doing and we try to give them the benefit of the doubt. Very often, because we are busy or simply interested in other things, we defer to their judgment, again with the notion that we trust their judgment.
But what the hell are we doing? Really?
So let’s start here. Many of the key executives of the major internet and computer companies don’t allow their own children to have unrestricted use of electronic equipment in their lives, or, these parents carefully determine what use their kids will have from computers, tablets, cell-phones, calculators and other electronics. Their rationale is that they want their children to use their minds, use their brains, develop their brains. If their children rely upon computers and calculators to do things for them without knowing how to do them themselves, these parents think, their children’s brains will not develop as they were meant to and their children will not learn the things they need to learn to get along well in this world. These parents, of all parents, have the research on these matters. They use the research to benefit themselves and their children and then use it not to benefit us, the consumers who buy their products.
As business people and computer developers whose livelihoods depend upon sales of computers and software, etc., they go into their daily business lives and push the sale of these machines and their software which encourage people, including other people’s kids, to use them all the time. In fact, they build into these machines and into the social media on them devices that will capture and retain choices made and footprints taken such that the machines will continue offering new choices the executives know with a high degree of certainty will be exercised. Or, these same people who restrict their own children’s use of machines build machines that continually lead people to disregard their minds and follow what are often subconscious messages to continue usage.
On some level it is called mind control.
So a teacher was standing in the hall in a high school in the Bronx, NY during a change of periods. The teacher was watching the kids go by, ushering them on to their next classes and welcoming the kids coming into her classroom. A kid that the teacher didn’t know, maybe fifteen or sixteen, stopped by her and asked her what time it was. Across the hall and maybe five feet away was the clock on the wall, a prominent clock that stood out over the doorways.
“There’s the clock,” the teacher said.
“I can’t read it,” the child said.
It was an analog clock and like so many children nowadays this child had never learned to tell time. This was a child of the digital, electronic world. This child could not spell whole words but this child could text in text code where you is u and love is luv and things are said with abbreviations. DGMW BTW LOL IOW WTF.
Got it? They can’t read, they can’t write, they can’t tell time, they can’t multiply, divide or figure out the right amount of change without a machine. And those same people who don’t permit their own kids to end up like this and without a context of real basic knowledge push our kids and us too to become dependent upon their machines.
What the hell are we doing?
TBC
Coming Soon
