Corrections to the blogosphere, the consensus, and the world

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

How Time Flees

For a fifteen year old today the second world war is as far back in time as was not the first world war, not the second, but the Matabele war of 1896 when I was fifteen. Complaints that kids today don't know their history seem to be based on the view that history should stop dead at the point it was when they learned it, leaving all relative importances exactly as they were then.
Another way to look at it, I suppose, is that history is easier to learn when you have a five-year world war every twenty-five years: you just have to count on your fingers and say "Uh, 1970? Third! Laying the groundwork for the 4th in 2000."

1 comment:

Adelaide Dupont said...

That point about relative importances is a relevant one.

Scarier, to me, is that the 15-year-old born today was born in 1994 or 1995, depending on where their birthdays fall.

And I'll always remember that the 50th anniversary of the Second World War was given much more air time than almost anything else that year, apart from the Womens' Conference in Beijing and the Waco terrorist attack.

Blog Archive

Search This Blog

Followers

Total Pageviews