Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Kids today can find any fact in the world in a minute, but they don’t. Is it that they don’t appreciate this gift or is it that old folks are putting yet another impossible-to-achieve standard on them?

We live in a world where any fact in the world is available in one minute:

• How to spell unnecessarily
• What the stars in the PRC flag mean
• How to say “blue” in German
• What are the dimensions of a .45 ACP cartridge
• What is a flying buttress
• What is the integral of sin and what does that mean
• and so on

Kids today, let’s limit that to those age 20 through 30, have this wonderful gift. Yet, in my experience, they don’t realize they have this gift. Why, in my day (here it comes), we had to dig through big dictionaries and encyclopedias and libraries for hours with a hope of perhaps finding answers to these and all other factual questions. Kids today, don’t use the tools they have to find answers.

What is wrong with them?

• One answer is that they do not realize they have these tools.
• Another answer is that they do not appreciate the value of these tools

Here is another answer:

There is nothing wrong with Kids today. It is us old folks who are putting an impossible-to-achieve expectation on Kids today. We feel that these kids should have all the facts correct all the time and do wonderful things with them.

Perhaps us old folks need to relax a bit. Kids today will do wonderful things just as we amazed old folks a generation or two ago by doing wonderful things.