Hi Bill, nice to speak to you again.
The "average person" today worries about the same things he did 3,000 years ago.
I don’t like to disagree with you doc but I feel I have to here. I really don’t think people worry about the same things at all, some people may find things to worry about but they don’t compare to 3000 years ago.
Look at the things that the average person would worry about 3000 years ago. Sanitation for a start, disease spread by poor sanitation caused countless deaths, it still does in certain areas of the world, but as we are talking about the ‘man in the street’, he really doesn’t worry about sanitation.
Talking of disease, relatively speaking we are all a lot healthier nowadays, we don’t die from simple infections anymore, an abscess in a tooth could be lethal, now some penicillin and you are normally ok, and this goes for a variety of illnesses that were fatal 3000 years ago.
Better farming methods means there less of a worry about feeding yourself, a poor harvest 3000 years ago could devastate a community.
Lower infant mortality rates, people in developed countries are having fewer children, 3000 years ago they worried about having enough kids so that a few would survive to help with farm work or look after you when you were old.
There are a lot more but you get the idea.
Watch "Weakest Link" or any other show which attempts to elicit such sophisticated information as: The location of Iraq on the world map; The name the vice president of the United States; or other "simple" knowledge about the world we live in. Do your own such poll. I believe you will find that few people are availing themselves of the increase in knowledge
That show is on cable here in Scotland, I watched it for 5 minutes one night and that was enough! I wonder how many of these examples on shows like this are actually set-ups, I know that they all won’t be, but these people who do not know the vice president’s name may be able to tell you a whole variety of things that you may not know. They may not know these answers because they aren’t that interested in the subject.
Sure, there's more knowledge around nowadays but I'd bet a dollar to a doughnut that the average, per capita, awareness of that knowledge has changed little over the centuries.
I would have to disagree again. Free state education has at least equipped most people with basic academic skills. Sure you get morons in every society even Kent Hovind can read and write.
Some people today graduate college without so much as mastering the three "R"s. Free public education has produced many highly trained slaves but little more. Wouldn't you agree?
I agree to a certain extent, I think some academic institutions have lowered their standards in the last 10-15 years. But these highly trained slaves still can regurgitate information and communicate it through written work or some other medium.
I would maintain though that certain universities are keeping their standards, I know for a fact that you wouldn’t graduate from Glasgow University unless you produced good quality work. Some other uni’s in Scotland, which I wouldn’t like to name, are not as strict as they should be, but I would say that the ‘Ancients’ (universities) are doing their best to keep their reputations.
Brian.