The generation gap!

[DALederle]

I've encountered this problem before but recently one of my grangdaughters called me and wanted to talk to me at her mother's (my daughter) suggestion. She was studying, in her Social Studies class, which I guess has replace History cleasses today, about the JFK assassination. She wanted to talk to me because I was an adult at the time who watched it on TV the way many people recently watch the 9-11 attacks.
Little by little as we talked I began to sense that there was something wrong with what she was asking me. So I started to ask her questions to see what she actually knew from her class. And it floored me.
She was under the impression that John F. Kennedy was the president right after Franklin Delnor Rosevelt. She didn't seem to know ANYTHING about Truman or Eisenhower. She kept talking about what a great president Kennedy had been. I was in awe at what her class hadn't taught them about the subject they were studying. The entire point of the class was how great JFK was and how bad it was that he died so young before he finished the great works he was doing at the time. With the idea that Vietnam would not have occured had he lived. And equal rights would have moved foreward smoothly without the friction seen when the LBJ signed the Equal Rights Act into law.
I have heard those idea floated before, as discussion of what JFK might have done.
But it alarms me that somehow, some teachers are actually teaching that as FACT!
Huh!
JFK was a tragedy! No one can argue that! It was also one of the most botched up events in US history and the confusion that set in by the way it was mishandled just leads to endlessly, year after year, of dragging up conspiracy theories.
But to teach all this with so many facts ignored.
I had to spend about two hours trying to straighten things out that my granddaughter didn't understand. So what are they teaching today in our schools?
She's in eighth grade, by the way. Who knows what's being taught in high schools now?

Dennis A. Lederle

Grok?

[Since1982]

I had to spend about two hours trying to straighten things out that my granddaughter didn't understand. So what are they teaching today in our schools?

In 2 words, "Not Much"...Lots of words we were taught in our primary schools are not even taught today or just removed from the continuation of sentence construction. Case in point. When I was in ..say the 6th grade, I was taught to say "When we get to the house, get out of the car and go inside"...today, that is shortened to "when we get there, get out the car inside". Which, to me, makes no sense at all. And there are even shorter misuses of what used to be normal English speech.

I have no explanation of what happened to normal speech.

[crfriend]

So what are they teaching today in our schools?

Well, I cannot speak for jurisdictions outside the one in which I dwell, but the entire focus of what gets taught in Massachusetts (USA) is what's on the "MCAS" (a "standardised" test that supposedly provides a metric for how well youngsters "understand" the material taught to them). It used to be that general subjects were taught: basic maths; basic grammar, reading and comprehension skills; enough writing so one could get his point across on the written page; and some history (mainly skewed to "demonstrate the superiority of the American Capitalist system over all others"; I recall reading that in an administration-only curriculum descriptor that I managed to find and get a decent chunk of the way through before getting found reading it; I have been disgusted with "public education" since, and the modern bits have merely reinforced that sentiment).

JFK's foreshortened span in office is primarily remembered for his assassination and the Apollo "Moon Shot" Program. What does not get much mention is the genesis of a half-century of abjectly failed foreign policy when it comes to Cuba, the deepening of Vietnam Conflict (not a War -- no Declaration of War was ever passed by the Congress of The United States), the Cuba Missile Crisis when we came second-closest to nuclear annihilation (the first being Ronald Reagan's famous "The bombing begins in five minutes" crack aimed at an already paranoid and trigger-happy "opposing team"), and the Berlin Airlift.

That the Eisenhower Administration isn't mentioned I find rather interesting because it was during those years that many of the policies that would bedevil the US started to form (MAD, for one, not to mention the Military Industrial Complex which Ike himself warned about in his departure speech) and take on lives of their own. Truman was enough of a national embarrassment that the two-term limit on the presidency was enacted as an amendment to our Constitution to prevent any more "Presidents for life".

Since1982's lament on the usage of the language is likely down to the loss of the notion that the written language is discrete from the spoken one and that a lot of the spoken language relies on contextual clues that are not present in the written one. One can take many more liberties when speaking than one can when writing, and that may no longer be being taught -- which I find interesting in a world that is now dominated by on-line communication which relies on decent writing skills to get a point across in a cogent manner. Of course now we have "txt spk" (text-speak) that abbreviates things to the extreme and leads to inanities like twits -- sorry, "tweets" -- which, like the writings of Nostradamus, can mean all things to all people because there can be no context because of the number of allowable characters.

Where will it end? I am not going prognosticate on that, but I don't particularly like the current trajectory.

[Since1982]

A common phrase used incorrectly in today's vernacular means something completely different when used correctly. What to do about that, I have no idea.

The common phrase used in today's world>> "Get out the car". which...could mean about 10 different things. 40 years ago, when the phrase was complete instead of incomplete it was "Get out OF the car". Which infers getting out of something. Without the OF added, the meaning can be completely different. And there are at least 20 similarly incorrect phrases in todays vernacular.