Why Kids Don’t Know What the Titanic Is
There is a page quickly making its rounds on Facebook, consisting of tweets from idiotic tweens who didn’t know that the Titanic was actually a real ship. If there is any justice in the world, when these kids apply to college and jobs in the future, those with the power to make decisions will pull up the tweets, shred the applications, and send these kids on a spaceship headed far away from this planet.
How did this happen? That’s what everyone wants to know. How did we get to the point where people are so stupid that they didn’t know the Titanic was a real ship? In my mind, the answer is pretty simple. There’s too much technology related crap taking up kid’s time and because of that, they’ve stopped reading books. So I’m making an argument here with two clauses, so I guess I have to *prove* them.
Okay, you’re a 12 year-old. Your life consists of getting up in the morning, going to school, maybe doing an after school activity, eating, homework and going to bed. So what do you do in your spare time? You could go upload pictures of your cleavage to Facebook, show everyone what you like on the Internet via Pinterst (I spelled it wrong and I don’t fucking care), you can play Angry Birds for 5 hours straight, you can watch the world collectively make fun of people who just want to try and sing on American Idol, you can watch 16 year olds whine about their birthdays on MTV, the list goes ON AND ON AND ON. All this crap that is basically looking at some sort of screen, reading/watching some sort of crap that does nothing to educate you.
You know what I did at that age? I fucking read books. I didn’t have cable, so TV was basically pointless to watch. There weren’t cell phones and there sure as hell weren’t games on them. The Internet wasn’t invented (or maybe it was, but it wasn’t fast enough to even load Gmail) so I didn’t waste time on a computer. I walked to the fucking library in the shopping mall nearby and I read books. You know what I learned from reading before I was a teenager?
-all about Steven Spielberg and the making of Jaws
-how an early special effects technician pasted cutouts of sailors onto ants and had them run around a burning model ship to film a disaster sequence
-that the “crash of 1929 didn’t involve any vehicles
-that there was a chemical leak in India that killed a LOT of people and one guy saved a bunch of people on a train by not allowing it to stop in his station
-that there are things called space shuttles and one of them exploded in 1986 and it was a national tragedy
-that there was a series of children’s books involving a kid named Fudge
-that King snakes could eat other snakes
-that there are a lot of blurry photos of UFOs
AND YES, THAT THE TITANIC WAS A REAL FUCKING SHIP
Dum Ideas 
Not to hijack the comments here, and not that I disagree with what you say, but I think the root of the issue is the parents.
I’ve been complaining for a while about kids these days, and I realized recently when a nearby town actually passed a law that outlaws SWEARING in public due to older townsfolk feeling threatened by the youth in the neighborhood, that the problem isn’t the kids, is their upbringing.
When I was growing up, if I did something wrong, I got smacked upside. Friends of mine got the belt, and I considered myself lucky that I only got open hands. When a neighbor yelled at us, our parents yelled at us again.
When I was around 10 or 12, some little kid got pissed off at his parents, dragged them to court and actually divorced them. Put himself into DSS care or something like that. This set a pretty shocking, scary precedent. Now parents were afraid to discipline their kids.
Obviously, I’m not saying that today’s problems are because people weren’t smacked enough. There was more to it than that. People thinking you had to patiently explain to your two year old that they were being unreasonable, redirecting difficult kids instead of meeting them head on, not keeping score in kid’s organized sports, swing at the ball until you hit it, positive reinforcement only, etc…
So those kids got away with whatever they wanted, without repercussion, and when they did something right, they got rewarded. There was never a good reason NOT to do the wrong thing. Worse, they have an inflated sense of entitlement.
Depending on the age of those kids, some have grown badly equipped, and had little a-holes of their own now. It’s no wonder nobody pays attention in schools, you can pass your classes just by showing up these days.
I’m stern with my kids, although I don’t hit them. I’m not afraid to raise my voice though, and they know when I mean business. I get looks in stores like I’m a maniac when I shout, but I don’t care. I’d rather raise kids that know right from wrong, and understand cause and effect.
Part of making sure they grow up to be functional members of society is making sure they get an education. Lots of kids today were raised in less than ideal situation, lots of times by people who didn’t know how, or didn’t care to raise them. People who grew up getting their way and disregarding the folks they should have been listening to.
Love the blog, by the way. Excellent beer reviews. 🙂
July 1, 2012 at 4:35 pm