Is it Just the Good Old Days or Were People More Intelligent?

Adults often reflect back to their childhood and recall how their parents or grandparents would laud the ‘good old days’.

We assume they are being called ‘good’ because we were children and the world was pretty.

However, reading a Forum begun by Cely on the topic; when it comes to education, in general the standards were higher and the students,  more committed.

Without computers or calculators, in the old days, kids had to learn.  They had to find themselves in libraries or other research facilities. They had to do their own mathematics. Either they knew how to get the information or they didn’t.

In the old days, education had a hierarchy.   There were the ‘top schools’ and there were the bright classes.

There were special programs for the bright kids, and modified and remedial for the dunce.

When a child took a seat in High School, that child had worked to get there.  That child knew the importance of education.

The teachers held themselves at a certain level of professionalism.  Teaching wasn’t a job you took because you couldn’t find any other.

The dispensing of ‘streaming’ so that to be politically correct we didn’t call children dunce or have dunce classes, was done at the expense of the bright student who is now diagnosed with some invented behavioural problem because s/he is bored to tears.

People have gotten stupider.   They believe hoaxes which are easily exposed, if they had the brains to investigate.

As Cely indicated, kids in school, haven’t a clue what they are there for, don’t know the value of real education, aren’t interested in doing work, and their little tiny brains are easily captured by the stupidest games imaginable.

Computers aren’t a tool for the youth, they are masters.

Ask a question;  the kids don’t think, they jump into a Google to get the answer.   The answer could be a fabrication posted by a kid in Macedonia who gets coin for every hit.

In 2008 I was stunned that anyone could take “Whitehouse Insider” written by ‘Ulsterman’ seriously.   It was clear that it was a spoof.   Yet millions of people believed it.

They didn’t ponder that it was being published on Triond, (and then on it’s own subsection of Stanza which published Triond) they accepted it as if it were the London Times.

They didn’t wonder why a ‘Whitehouse Insider’ would use the Name ‘Ulsterman’ which is only applied to people who live in a specific region of Ireland.   They were too stupid to do that simple check.

In fact, doing a quick check now I find a pile of rubbish where an article, written in August 2016 and published on a ‘independent’ site, quotes the Ulsterman Report and mentions;

Unfortunately the link to the post by Ulsterman on newsflavor. com [a division on Triond] is dead:

“This site can’t be reached, newsflavor.com’s server DNS address could not be found.  But thanks to the waybackmachine… the post and the 40 comments were archived;

The Ulsterman Report: Sex and Murder in The Land of Obama?

This article written by Ulsterman is absolute rubbish from the first to the last word.  It was fabricated to make money as Newsflavor, a division of Triond, paid 1c per every 6 views.

Ulsterman, sitting snug in his home in County Ulster in Northern Ireland, was making thousands of dollars every month because anti-Obama folks were clicking on the site and believing every word he fabricated.

Now anyone with an operating brain in 2016, reading the incendiary rubbish he posted,  finding that the site where it had been posted no longer exists should nod and say, yeah, it was a hoax.

But the mind dead who quoted the Ulsterman Report searched to find the rubbish in the Way Back Machine so as to reprint it and put it up as if it were true.

This kind of bone deep stupidity is new.

It is new because in previous hoaxes people didn’t get the threads which they could grab and examine to prove it’s lack of veracity.     All the tools are there, right there to expose the fallacy; from the name of the writer, to the shoddy site where it was published, to the collapse of a site which if it had any value would still be up.

The closest to this stupidity I can come is when Peggy, who never left Kingston, Jamaica was told by a Farm Worker, who had been in Louisiana,  about the vicious Kangaroos which attacked the cane cutters.

Peggy, who could just about read and write didn’t know where Louisiana was exactly, didn’t know there are no kangaroos in America (save in zoos) and believed what she’d been told because she had no way to verify it.

Peggy has an excuse.

Those who have computer access do not.