THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 24, 1995 TAG: 9502230141
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Jo-Ann Clegg
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
I woke up in the middle of the night recently with a frightening thought meandering through my mind.
When I was younger such thoughts used to race through my mind at breakneck speed, meet up with other frightening ideas and battle it out right there somewhere between my frontal lobe and the place that tells me that chocolate tastes good and Brussels sprouts taste yucky.
Now that I am more mature (a polite way of saying that no one has carded me in the checkout line since Eisenhower was in office), my frightening thoughts, like everything else, move about more slowly.
The latest one plodded through my brain at about the speed of a 10-year-old walking into the schoolhouse when he knows he has two tests to take and the dog really did eat his homework last night.
Anyway, I'm sort of off on a tangent here. That's something else that the mind does when it gets a little age on it.
A tangent is also something which, if pressed, I could define. That's because Miss Makuen insisted that I learn about sines, cosines and tangents before she would let me out of her introduction to trigonometry class.
I am not a math person. I took not one more course in the subject than was absolutely required. So far as I know I've never had even a nodding acquaintance with a tangent in the mathematical sense since I walked out of Miss Makuen's class, grateful for getting a C instead of a D.
It is, nevertheless, a bit of knowledge that I'm happy to possess. Just as I savor all of the other bits of miscellaneous knowledge that I've picked up along the way.
Because I was the product of school systems that believed in such a thing as knowledge for knowledge's sake, I came to adulthood knowing how to tell a pine tree from a spruce and a spruce from a fir, how to diagram a sentence and conjugate Latin verbs and who Dred Scott was.
I, and generations of students before and after me, had to learn things just for the sake of learning them. We may not have wanted to learn all that much math, English, science or history but our elders said we must and so we did.
All of which gets to the heart of the frightening thought that meandered through my mind the other night. Make that two thoughts. The first is that adults are no longer telling kids what they should learn. The kids, through their excuses and resistance are setting the content of the curriculum and the methods through which it is taught.
Witness the discussions of the rewrite of ``Little Women,'' one that would ``make it more meaningful'' to children. A news article the other day mentioned such things as the ``archaic and convoluted'' Victorian language of Louisa Mae Alcott's original, along with its setting in a period of time that was not relevant to today's children.
And the final argument for a rewrite, as it always is in such rationalizations, was that youngsters raised on Nintendo would find the original tedious and boring.
That brings us to my second frightening thought. We now have a new division of time: Before Nintendo and After Nintendo.
I have heard the After Nintendo argument used by parents and teachers to explain why children can't be expected to memorize multiplication tables or learn a time line of American history.
A second-grade teacher once told me that her students were bored to tears at a local historical museum because its exhibits held no interest for children raised on video games.
How sad that we accept the excuses instead of taking the time to instill a sense of history and pure knowledge in today's children. How sad that we are making them the first generation ever to grow up knowing nothing about what went before.
It is especially sad because they are not the first generation to be raised on electronic entertainment. My generation grew up on a steady diet of radio comedians and Saturday afternoon movies. My kids' generation watched television until their eyeballs would glaze over.
These youngsters are, however, the first generation that has managed to parlay its own lazy brain cells and desire to be entertained into an educational system that demands not one whit more of them than they are willing to give.
That they have managed to lay the blame for doing so on a bunch of electronic figures scampering around a video screen is truly amazing.
What is even more amazing is that so many adults have accepted the excuse without question.
The thought occurred to me the other night that this is the watershed generation, the first one to be A.N. - After Nintendo. The most frightening part of that thought was that, if we continue to teach only what these youngsters deem relevant or fun, there will be little knowledge Before Nintendo to pass on to generations to come.
And that, to those of us who have studied history, is a frightening thought indeed. by CNB