Re:the nature of students

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

> On Sat, 6 Sep 1997, Hugh Haskell wrote:
>
> > Let me suggest another possible reason why students do not interact with
> > the real world as much as they used to: complexity. They now grow up in
> > homes that have such complex devices, including their toys that they either
> > don't dare or aren't allowed to take them apart to see why they work.
>
> I'd say that it's not complexity that's the problem.  Taking apart old
> products is a prime method of exploring the world.  Kids who do this early
> in their lives grow up to be very different than kids who don't.  Reading
> is another method of exploring, and again there is a very big difference
> between reading and non-reading kids.
>
> Has complexity really changed things that much?  Yes, cars are different,
> but if I took apart a tube-amp record player in 1940, wouldn't I be just
> as baffled as if I did the same with a VCR today?  And if I couldn't make
> it work afterwards, wouldn't I catch just as much hell?  Both VCRs and
> record-changers (if partially working) are full of cool mechanisms.  In my
> opinion the VCRs are more fascinating, and are the source of many more
> creativity-inspiring weird parts.
>
> If I had to point to a reason why kids aren't curious, I'd look at what
> makes *me* less curious than usual, and then assume that most other people
> are subject to the same forces.
>
> The prime anti-curiousity force in my life is TV.  If I watch a lot of TV,
> I feel like I've been out doing important things, that I've reaped some
> accomplishment, that I've used time productivly.  Therefor I don't go
> looking for such things in the real world.  If I turn off the TV for a
> week, I'm immediately dazzled by how little has recently been happening in
> my world, and how little I've been actually doing on my own.  I'm
> embarassed to find that my perception of "accomplishment" and
> "productivity" were mostly illusory.  After a short while without TV I'll
> get ambitious (or bored) and start chasing pastimes which give REAL
> accomplishment and have REAL importance.
>
> TV isn't the devil though.  I've seen friends lives eaten by continuous
> reading of romance novels, adventure gaming, music, etc.  There are all
> sorts of traps which give an illusory sense of accomplishment, and they've
> always been around in some form.  I think that the changes in people (and
> students) over time are not due to what the environment offers so much as
> due to changes in society's idea of what is acceptable.  If most kids saw
> TV (etc.) as a waste of time, then society would be full of kids out doing
> interesting things in the real world.  (I find it self-referentially
> hilarious that, in the future world of Star Trek, there is no TV!  Maybe a
> few people will get the message that if you want to have the adventurous
> life of a future space explorer, then that ol' TV set must go...)
>
> The recent push to have parents read to their kids is one good cure to the
> numb-yourself tendency which our society promotes.  Let me suggest
> another:
>
>    Take our kids to garage sales to buy old junk to take apart!
>
> The less-complicated toys and gizmos are still around, you just have to
> get out to neighborhood estate sales more often.  And if the device is old
> and half-dead, then there is no fear of breaking a valuable item.
>
> William Beaty

I like the slant yu put on what I had to say. Whether TV is the ogre you
claim, I'll have to leave to others. Since, with the help of my present
wife, I managed to kick a serious case of TV addiction about ten years ago,
I haven't watched more than a dozen TV presentations. We have two TV sets,
but they are seldom turned on unless we have a movie to watch, or one of
our respective alma maters (?? what is the plural of mater?) hapens to be
playing for a national championship in some sport that is carried on the
one or two channels that we can reliably get.
(We were a "ratings family" for one of the national services a few years
ago, and actually turned in a blank log to them. They never asked us
again.)

What I have found since kicking the TV habit is that I no longer have any
idea what the "hot new products" are, and that I am totally out of touch
with the lives of my students, who are all as addicted to TV as I used to
be.

Nevertheless, I still contend that the problem is more complex than just
TV. as I pointed out in my last posting, the problem is complex and there
are many reasons, TV and complexity are just two of several.

The garage sale idea is a good one, but it has to be started before the
kids get beyond the stage of tearing apart everything they own, or it will
just be junk in your carage rather than your neighbor's. I'm not a big
devotee of garage sales and my kids are grown and gone so i probably won't
spend too much time nosing around in them in the near future, but I have
this feeling that the sort of things we are talking about--that you can
really see interesting junk in when you take them apart--are long gone from
the garage sale scene. Those things are now to be found in antique stores
and so are now after lo, these many years, too expensive to take apart
(thanks, in part, to the ones we destroyed when they were new, by taking
them apart).

Well, if I've learned anything from this thread, it's that figuring out
what the problem is, is not much easier than figuring out what the solution
is.

Hugh.



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Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better." So I bought a Macintosh.
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