Nostalgia Tinted Glasses: The Biased Generational Perceptions.

“You glorify the past

When the future dries up…” U2 – God Part 2 (a song from their Rattle and Hum album).

This thought came to me when I was reading up another bunch of comments (online, of course) saying that our education system is bad as if, in the past, everyone was taught by Socrates and read books by Plato. If I recall well, all the way back to the 80s someone has always been complaining that education was bad at that moment of time. 

The only time anyone remembered fondly of the great education system are my parents’ generation, and of course it is the leaders from their generation that came and revamped the system, and to quote Jim Morrison, the whole shithouse burned in flame.  

Yet, I have long refused to ride on that bandwagon. First, let’s face it, the quality had already started petering out during the time when kids from our generation hit the school, because I have seen my parent generations’ text books – as mentioned -and have been incredibly amazed. In fact, for some times, I had my mother’s, Little Women by Lousia May Alcott – a novel they studied for literature. Likewise, I am sure that my father thinks highly of the education standard of his parents which were directly under the purview of the Brits. So on, so forth. 

Yet (again) with the forever bitch-able system of our generations, we still had newspapers, limited, but many households had those. I recall going visiting relatives and friends of our parents, and finding ourselves not interested in those folks, but my brother and I (Balan, the newspaper maniac he was, and me, who only read the entertainment section) would peruse whichever newspapers were folded neatly on the undertray of the coffee table at those places. 

We had few TV stations which were our window to cultures outside of the country. Likewise, the radio. We had the usual diet of Hollywood and Asian films, TV shows, only not as excessive as now. The plantation we live in do not have easy access to cinemas, so we can only wait for it to hit the TV, usually taking years. Which is why the pirated VHS tapes proliferated and we were still pretty up to date, movie wise. Those were part of our education system.

Now, the trouble is, we always view our past with rose tinted glass, and we tend to overrate anything we import from there in discussions. But I no longer want to do that, especially when it comes to education system.

No, don’t drag me into that exclusive club that rejects education system that is not of their era, despite the fact that, borrowing a point from above, most of them are the parents of the kids directly exposed to the very so-called poor education system, and could do something about it. In fact, it is that very older generation who are in power and are responsible for that goddamned system, and they have the cheek to sneer at the resultant system festered down the youngling’s throat. 

The attitude behind looking down on education system of the younger generation also has its root to the very tradition of condescending reaction to the culture of the young, while glorifying the past. In plain language, we always have had the habit of looking down at the younger generation for ages. Here’s a long list of commentaries about certain generations in the history criticizing the young ‘uns. Take this for instance: “…Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased … The ordinary spoken language has also steadily coarsened…."

That was from 14th century Japan, mind you.  

How about this from 1771: “The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth…”

It has always been a thing, as you get old, you sneer at the youth belonging to others because of the bitterness that you were forced to leave your own. 

It’s already embedded in the DNA. Take this explanation for instance: 

"There is a psychological or mental trick that happens that makes it appear to each generation that the subsequent generations are objectively in decline, even though they're not," says research psychologist John Protzko from the University of California Santa Barbara."And because it's built into the way the mind works, each generation experiences it over and over again."

It also makes sense, as explained here, on how we are viewing our past with the contemporary thoughts, whichever thought process, level of intelligence or knowledge garnered over the years. 

“We are imposing our current self on the past,” John Protzko, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara said in this article. “We’re sort of idealizing kids of the past.”

"It's a memory tic - you take what you presently are and you impose that on your memories," explains Protzko.

That’s the point. The memory of past you have today is not 100 accurate, its heavily filtered by the person you are today, your preferences, your outlook, worldview, and often glossy when presented to others. 

And how valuable of these memories of our past are? How about jackshit? As mentioned by Nathaniel Sharping here

"First, we tend to judge others more harshly in areas where we excel. An ardent reader, then, will be more likely to deride someone else's reading habits," explains Discover's Nathaniel Scharping. But second and more interestingly "our memories of what we were like as children can't always be trusted."