Across the
nation public schools often fail to educate, and children fail to learn, either
with or without "legally" prescribed or illegally acquired drugs
intended to put their minds on temporary life support. Meanwhile, Obama's fellow fascist wannabes at
the Dept. of Education continue to push "Common Core," holding state
funding for ransom as teachers are forced to submit or perish professionally,
hating every minute of the federal usurpation strangling their classroom hours
with some bizarre leftist agenda which is no friend to the educational system
in the USA.
But, hey, at
least we have the computer to inform, educate and allow every human kid to push
buttons and administer mouse clicks on the road to success.
Unless -- could this digital miracle be our undoing?
Yes, according to prognosticators of that ancient year, 1980.
The National
Enquirer of April 29, 1980 enlisted the views of several professional
educators regarding the burgeoning computer era, and what was their consensus
of thought 34 years ago? Beware.
The late Dr. Max
Rafferty, whom we've quoted on previous occasions, put it bluntly: "The human brain is endangered. Our
powers of thought and creativity could shrivel up through sheer mental laziness
if we allow our own machines to dominate us further." Was Rafferty correct? Just take a gander at high school students
with zero ability for critical thinking.
Education
professor Dr. Gerald Boardman at the University of Nebraska warned, "We
may be producing a generation who views math as simply a process of pushing buttons
on a little black box."
Dr. James
Shields, Jr., professor of education at
the City University of New York believed we would end up as a nation of
"intellectual cripples" as we turn to machines to make decisions for
us, giving up our own human intuition as computers tell us what to do. Even
back in 1980, Shields realized and warned that people in executive positions
were becoming fearful of making decisions on their own, preferring instead to
put their faith in the electronic digital judge. "We must guard against this," he
continues, "or we'll end up as a bunch of simpleminded zombies."
We suspect, Dr.
Shields, that many of us have become simpleminded zombies -- even TV
shows honor the zombie now. Why
not? Zombies don't need math classes,
they invent nothing and they get all the brainpower they desire merely by
eating the brains -- or make that intellectual property -- of
others. We've gone from bite to byte and
back to bite in just a few years. Which
came first, the chicken or the egg?
Which came first, the computer or the digital zombie?
Then, four years
later, this from a Chicago Tribune article in late July, 1984: "Mankind Evolving Backward, Theorist
Says." Biochemist Allan Wilson, of
the University of California at Berkeley, speaking at a symposium in Maine,
asserts, "I'm afraid we've reached a plateau and that Homo Sapiens is in a
nose dive." Wilson believed that
our abilities to invent and adapt using our own ingenuity instead of awaiting
the agonizingly slow process of natural selection and genetic evolution has put
us on the fast track to waving goodbye as a species.
Having taken
about 400 million years for brains to become their largest -- in humans --
Wilson concedes ". . .the size of the human brain stopped increasing about
30,000 years ago, primarily because of 'cultural' behavior. . ." He, along with other scientists, accepts that
brain growth occurs because of a need to gather information about coping with
the environment, and the pure need for innovation caused an expansion of the
human brain. Alas, according to the
article, humans eventually learned to imitate the behavior of others rather
than innovate -- thus providing no reason for the brain to grow larger.
If you bet all
your money on Pac-Man, Pac-Man is all you're going to get. Education in days of old at least taught
subjects one could use as a backup plan in case of something
unanticipated. Pixels, on the other
hand, are one-trick ponies of momentary pleasure.
Taken together,
the warnings in these two old articles don't bode well for Our Wonderful Age of
Computers, and we won't even bother to comment further on the status of human
brains currently. But just look around,
from the White House to Congress, to the Supreme Court, to TV, to hand-held
devices, down to a measured flow in the fetid undercurrents of national, state
and local political sewers.
