hoops902
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Post by hoops902 on Dec 2, 2019 12:58:40 GMT -5
This factoid in isolation proves nothing. You need two points to show growth. Also, how was the question asked? What was an acceptable level of "identify"? A link to the poll is provided in the article. Feel free to click on it. The problem with the statement "ignorance is growing" is that the 2 points are not analogous. One of the "points" is "all US adults", the other is "millenials". You're looking at 2 different populations of people, and then attempting to make a timing determination on the level of knowledge. There's no control for idea that maybe...people learn things as they get older. There will be a lot of millenials in their 20's...I think it's at least possible some of those folks will gain some additional knowledge over their next 50 years of life, which may very well put them in the same brackets as "all US adults". That said, I do think there's probably less overall knowledge of the Holocaust, speaking strictly logically and without data. The further you get away from an event, the less likely people seem to be informed about it. To the point in the study, there are fewer and fewer people who know a Holocaust survivor...and as you become personally removed you lose one more way to gain the knowledge.
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billisonboard
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Post by billisonboard on Dec 2, 2019 13:07:16 GMT -5
Clicked. Executive Summary, not of the poll itself. Hard to gain a true understanding from that. Scroll down to the last paragraph of the link within the link and click on ComRes. There are then links to the survey there. You have to work at it to get to the questions. Sorry, Pretending to be working while looking at this.
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swamp
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Post by swamp on Dec 2, 2019 13:11:25 GMT -5
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Tennesseer
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Post by Tennesseer on Dec 2, 2019 13:14:35 GMT -5
Scroll down to the last paragraph of the link within the link and click on ComRes. There are then links to the survey there. You have to work at it to get to the questions. Sorry, Pretending to be working while looking at this. I'm about to call you OC.
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hoops902
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Post by hoops902 on Dec 2, 2019 13:15:54 GMT -5
The best thing about the internet and the worst thing about the internet is...you can find anything on the internet.
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billisonboard
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Post by billisonboard on Dec 2, 2019 13:17:59 GMT -5
Clicked. Executive Summary, not of the poll itself. Hard to gain a true understanding from that. Scroll down to the last paragraph of the link within the link and click on ComRes. There are then links to the survey there. You have to work at it to get to the questions. I was looking at the link to the 2018 survey in the US as that was where the statistic I was wondering about came from.
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Tennesseer
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Post by Tennesseer on Dec 2, 2019 13:18:58 GMT -5
Scroll down to the last paragraph of the link within the link and click on ComRes. There are then links to the survey there. You have to work at it to get to the questions. I was looking at the link to the 2018 survey in the US as that was where the statistic I was wondering about came from. You will have to search the Internet for that.
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swamp
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Post by swamp on Dec 2, 2019 14:23:46 GMT -5
The best thing about the internet and the worst thing about the internet is...you can find anything on the internet. I don't see how gassing 6 million Jews, Roma, and handicapped persons can help celebrate the Christmas spirit. Usually I'm pretty "to each their own" but this is just fucking wrong!
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Post by Deleted on Dec 2, 2019 14:32:14 GMT -5
Anybody remember that thing called the Magna Carta that was signed in Runnymede in 1215? Yeah, another one of those dates that others had to memorize and that just stuck in my brain. Anyway, let's hope that we have learned something from the Magna Carta. It's what established that no one is exempt from the law, not even the king, and promised justice and the right to a fair trial.
Our justice system has its roots in English law.
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NastyWoman
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Post by NastyWoman on Dec 2, 2019 14:35:29 GMT -5
Very interesting discussion for me looking from the outside in: I grew up when every single adult in my life had active memories of WWII. With a mother who had been in the resistance (so had my grandfather but he died a couple of years before I was born). With a history teacher whose husband was in the resistance and executed before her very eyes. And in my first job after college I had a few colleagues who had survived the concentration camps. We spend Sundays in spring going to war cemeteries, to honor those who had lost their life liberating my country. And on, and on, and on...
Yet the thing that I now as an adult remember most is the lack of individual demonization of Germans. Don't get me wrong, there was plenty to be heard about the SS and others who killed because they could. And the ones that were judged the harshest in all this were the collaborators → members of the Dutch Nazi party. All in all, I have a pretty good idea about what went on in Europe during WWII, but my knowledge of the war in Asia is much more limited and comes straight from the history books and whatever was published later.
What scares me now however, is not that a young person may not know that approximately 6 million Jews were killed in the camps. It is that they don't see that it was the demonization of a single group (expanded by others such as the handicapped, the gypsies, the protesters etc.) is what made it possible for these killings to happen at all. I am not so sure we learned all that much from what happened at that time and we may well be in the process of repeating the past
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swamp
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Post by swamp on Dec 2, 2019 14:39:19 GMT -5
Anybody remember that thing called the Magna Carta that was signed in Runnymede in 1215? Yeah, another one of those dates that others had to memorize and that just stuck in my brain. Anyway, let's hope that we have learned something from the Magna Carta. It's what established that no one is exempt from the law, not even the king, and promised justice and the right to a fair trial. Our justice system has its roots in English law. I remember that too.
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oped
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Post by oped on Dec 2, 2019 14:57:26 GMT -5
I think this is actually a big movement forward in education honestly. Less reliance on "memorize irrelevant stuff" (like dates, etc) and focus on ideas instead (I do think we need to improve the ideas piece, but the fact that kids aren't memorizing irrelevant things seems not only fine, but preferable to the time being spent on it). I was thinking that. I can look up specific details on WWII, thanks to google. So long as we do do it... plus understanding the events that lead to wwii isn’t just a measure of dates and teams... I want to believe we are substituting recall knowledge for more complex thinking and reasoning skills... but I’m not sure the evidence supports it...
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NastyWoman
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Post by NastyWoman on Dec 2, 2019 15:03:12 GMT -5
I was thinking that. I can look up specific details on WWII, thanks to google. So long as we do do it... plus understanding the events that lead to wwii isn’t just a measure of dates and teams ... I want to believe we are substituting recall knowledge for more complex thinking and reasoning skills... but I’m not sure the evidence supports it... The problem with doing away with "recall knowledge" is that we at the same time could be doing away with the urge for complex thinking/reasoning since we may not know there is something around that we really should analyze at depth. All the reasoning skills in the world are not going to do us any good if we don't apply them because we don't realize the problem exists or the scope thereof. JMO
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haapai
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Post by haapai on Dec 2, 2019 15:40:11 GMT -5
Why is it important to know details about WWII? What is still important? The fact that "most were able to associate the Holocaust and the atomic bomb with WWII" seems good enough to me. I remember my junior/senior high school history classes as mainly the study of wars with little attention to the periods of not war that fell in-between. I was raised in an area that worshipped football and all my history teachers were football coaches. I think there is correlation there. I think this is actually a big movement forward in education honestly. Less reliance on "memorize irrelevant stuff" (like dates, etc) and focus on ideas instead (I do think we need to improve the ideas piece, but the fact that kids aren't memorizing irrelevant things seems not only fine, but preferable to the time being spent on it). Memorizing irrelevant stuff can be surprisingly useful when you need to identify b-ll-----ers. Don't discount it so quickly! Have you ever managed to stop a car salesperson's patter to google something that they just asserted?
Irrelevant stuff is also the scaffolding on which friendships between very different people can be built, and a the means for getting yourself through some very dry material.
I am quite a fan of storing irrelevant stuff in working memory.
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hoops902
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Post by hoops902 on Dec 2, 2019 15:44:32 GMT -5
I think this is actually a big movement forward in education honestly. Less reliance on "memorize irrelevant stuff" (like dates, etc) and focus on ideas instead (I do think we need to improve the ideas piece, but the fact that kids aren't memorizing irrelevant things seems not only fine, but preferable to the time being spent on it). Memorizing irrelevant stuff can be surprisingly useful when you need to identify b-ll-----ers. Don't discount it so quickly! Have you ever managed to stop a car salesperson's patter to google something that they just asserted?
Irrelevant stuff is also the scaffolding on which friendships between very different people can be built, and a the means for getting yourself through some very dry material.
I am quite a fan of storing irrelevant stuff in working memory.
If it is irrelevant, then it is by very definition not useful...that's what makes it irrelevant. Since we're talking about history and the dates of battles or historical occurrences, I'm not sure why I'd ever stop a car salesperson to google their assertion if they somehow decided to assert a date on a certain historical event while I'm buying a car. Even if they're making it up, why do I care? If a salesperson wants to tell me something irrelevant but also untrue...I don't really care. I'm not looking to play "gotcha" in catching them in an irrelevant lie. If they want to tell me Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 25, 1800 and that's why we celebrate Christmas now...I don't care, it's not relevant to buying a car.
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swamp
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Post by swamp on Dec 2, 2019 15:49:48 GMT -5
Memorizing irrelevant stuff can be surprisingly useful when you need to identify b-ll-----ers. Don't discount it so quickly! Have you ever managed to stop a car salesperson's patter to google something that they just asserted?
Irrelevant stuff is also the scaffolding on which friendships between very different people can be built, and a the means for getting yourself through some very dry material.
I am quite a fan of storing irrelevant stuff in working memory.
If it is irrelevant, then it is by very definition not useful...that's what makes it irrelevant. Since we're talking about history and the dates of battles or historical occurrences, I'm not sure why I'd ever stop a car salesperson to google their assertion if they somehow decided to assert a date on a certain historical event while I'm buying a car. Even if they're making it up, why do I care? If a salesperson wants to tell me something irrelevant but also untrue...I don't really care. I'm not looking to play "gotcha" in catching them in an irrelevant lie. If they want to tell me Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 25, 1800 and that's why we celebrate Christmas now...I don't care, it's not relevant to buying a car. I'd probably back away slowly and go to the next dealership. However, if he told me that it wasn't over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, I'd feel obligated to buy the car.
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NomoreDramaQ1015
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Post by NomoreDramaQ1015 on Dec 2, 2019 15:55:11 GMT -5
Memorizing irrelevant stuff can be surprisingly useful when you need to identify b-ll-----ers. Don't discount it so quickly! Have you ever managed to stop a car salesperson's patter to google something that they just asserted?
Irrelevant stuff is also the scaffolding on which friendships between very different people can be built, and a the means for getting yourself through some very dry material.
I am quite a fan of storing irrelevant stuff in working memory.
If it is irrelevant, then it is by very definition not useful...that's what makes it irrelevant. Since we're talking about history and the dates of battles or historical occurrences, I'm not sure why I'd ever stop a car salesperson to google their assertion if they somehow decided to assert a date on a certain historical event while I'm buying a car. Even if they're making it up, why do I care? If a salesperson wants to tell me something irrelevant but also untrue...I don't really care. I'm not looking to play "gotcha" in catching them in an irrelevant lie. If they want to tell me Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 25, 1800 and that's why we celebrate Christmas now...I don't care, it's not relevant to buying a car.I'm going to be sure to not leave any contact information before I head to the next dealership. Otherwise I don't care either. And I can safely say I have never had a conversation with anyone I've just met start with "Hey do you know the date when D-day happened?"
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hoops902
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Post by hoops902 on Dec 2, 2019 16:04:54 GMT -5
If it is irrelevant, then it is by very definition not useful...that's what makes it irrelevant. Since we're talking about history and the dates of battles or historical occurrences, I'm not sure why I'd ever stop a car salesperson to google their assertion if they somehow decided to assert a date on a certain historical event while I'm buying a car. Even if they're making it up, why do I care? If a salesperson wants to tell me something irrelevant but also untrue...I don't really care. I'm not looking to play "gotcha" in catching them in an irrelevant lie. If they want to tell me Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 25, 1800 and that's why we celebrate Christmas now...I don't care, it's not relevant to buying a car.I'm going to be sure to not leave any contact information before I head to the next dealership. Otherwise I don't care either. And I can safely say I have never had a conversation with anyone I've just met start with "Hey do you know the date when D-day happened?" Next dealership? My DREAM is to find this guy trying to sell cars, and I should be able to safely assume their sales manager isn't that bright either if they hired this person. I might end up trading 3 shiny nickels for their entire fleet of cars!
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haapai
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Post by haapai on Dec 2, 2019 16:08:31 GMT -5
If it is irrelevant, then it is by very definition not useful...that's what makes it irrelevant. Since we're talking about history and the dates of battles or historical occurrences, I'm not sure why I'd ever stop a car salesperson to google their assertion if they somehow decided to assert a date on a certain historical event while I'm buying a car. Even if they're making it up, why do I care? If a salesperson wants to tell me something irrelevant but also untrue...I don't really care. I'm not looking to play "gotcha" in catching them in an irrelevant lie. If they want to tell me Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 25, 1800 and that's why we celebrate Christmas now...I don't care, it's not relevant to buying a car. I'd probably back away slowly and go to the next dealership. However, if he told me that it wasn't over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, I'd feel obligated to buy the car. You are a sentimental fool. I also don't believe you. If the price or terms were bad enough, you'd walk away in a huff, wishing that you had the next line of the movie in working memory so that you could toss it back at the shark that tried to use this sentimental trick on you.
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swamp
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Post by swamp on Dec 2, 2019 16:10:58 GMT -5
I'd probably back away slowly and go to the next dealership. However, if he told me that it wasn't over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, I'd feel obligated to buy the car. You are a sentimental fool. I also don't believe you. If the price or terms were bad enough, you'd walk away in a huff, wishing that you had the next line of the movie in working memory so that you could toss it back at the shark that tried to use this sentimental trick on you. Wow. That was harsh for apparently no reason for something that was a joke. You've been going off on a whole bunch of posters recently. Do you need a hug?
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haapai
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Post by haapai on Dec 2, 2019 16:21:07 GMT -5
No hugs please. I just need more sleep, which I will set about getting almost immediately. But wouldn't it be great be be able to come back with something like, "Yoi're on a roll, but this is over" in such a situation? Having this irrelevant knowledge in working memory is definitely worth something.
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swamp
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Post by swamp on Dec 2, 2019 16:24:29 GMT -5
No hugs please. I just need more sleep, which I will set about getting almost immediately. But wouldn't it be great be be able to come back with something like, "Yoi're on a roll, but this is over" in such a situation? Having this irrelevant knowledge in working memory is definitely worth something.
Germans? Forget it, he's rolling.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 2, 2019 18:31:49 GMT -5
Anybody remember that thing called the Magna Carta that was signed in Runnymede in 1215? Yeah, another one of those dates that others had to memorize and that just stuck in my brain. Anyway, let's hope that we have learned something from the Magna Carta. It's what established that no one is exempt from the law, not even the king, and promised justice and the right to a fair trial. Our justice system has its roots in English law. Actually, it promised justice and the right to a fair trial to the aristocracy. It didn't really help the peons that much. But it did lay a foundation.
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NoNamePerson
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Post by NoNamePerson on Dec 2, 2019 18:42:02 GMT -5
Anybody remember that thing called the Magna Carta that was signed in Runnymede in 1215? Yeah, another one of those dates that others had to memorize and that just stuck in my brain. Anyway, let's hope that we have learned something from the Magna Carta. It's what established that no one is exempt from the law, not even the king, and promised justice and the right to a fair trial.
Our justice system has its roots in English law. Seems like that concept has gone by the way of the DoDo bird for the most part
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swamp
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Post by swamp on Dec 2, 2019 19:37:01 GMT -5
I just asked my 13 year old son all sorts of questions about WWII. He actually has a really good understanding of the events, the players, and General time periods. I’m impressed. He says he read about it on the internet. They haven’t gotten there in school yet.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 2, 2019 19:51:39 GMT -5
I just asked my 13 year old son all sorts of questions about WWII. He actually has a really good understanding of the events, the players, and General time periods. I’m impressed. He says he read about it on the internet. They haven’t gotten there in school yet. Wait. What? He's 13? When did that happen? How old is your DD? I'm impressed, too. A 13-year-old who uses the internet to learn things because he wants to know. Dang!
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swamp
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Post by swamp on Dec 2, 2019 22:13:12 GMT -5
I just asked my 13 year old son all sorts of questions about WWII. He actually has a really good understanding of the events, the players, and General time periods. I’m impressed. He says he read about it on the internet. They haven’t gotten there in school yet. Wait. What? He's 13? When did that happen? How old is your DD? I'm impressed, too. A 13-year-old who uses the internet to learn things because he wants to know. Dang! DD is 12. DS is in 8th grade and DD is in 6th. I’m now the shortest person in my house, amd I have the smallest feet. I’m 5’4” and wear a 9show, so it’s not like I’m tiny.
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thyme4change
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Post by thyme4change on Dec 2, 2019 22:14:11 GMT -5
I don't know much about WWII. I'm sure anyone could make me look like a total idiot if they asked me enough questions, and "enough" may be like 3 questions- depending on which ones they chose.
I also can't recall any of my teachers' names, or the last name of most of the people I hung out with. I don't know which actor was in any of the movies, or who sung what song. I just don't catalog that stuff. I may start telling people I had a brain injury or something, because people think I am a dolt because I can't remember a bunch of stuff.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 2, 2019 22:16:54 GMT -5
Wait. What? He's 13? When did that happen? How old is your DD? I'm impressed, too. A 13-year-old who uses the internet to learn things because he wants to know. Dang! DD is 12. DS is in 8th grade and DD is in 6th. I’m now the shortest person in my house, amd I have the smallest feet. I’m 5’4” and wear a 9show, so it’s not like I’m tiny. With your height, the shoe size is good. You won't tip over
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tskeeter
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Post by tskeeter on Dec 2, 2019 23:01:57 GMT -5
There is a concept known as "cultural literacy." It is not the random memorization of facts, but a body of knowledge that we as a culture share. "Everyone" knows that George Washington was the "father" of our country, was our first president, crossed the Delaware, etc. Someone not knowing the exact number of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust doesn't bother me. Someone not knowing that WWII was Germany against the world (with some help from Japan, Italy, etc.) bothers me a lot. That's like knowing that George Washington had "something" to do with the founding of our country. WWII is an important aspect of our culture because it changed us as a culture. It helped create the middle class. Cultural literacy goes far beyond history, of course. But it does include it. linkAs you point out, there are a LOT of aspects to cultural literacy that don't include history...or more specifically, don't include any traditional core curriculum. So the question is, does it really need to be taught in schools (as opposed to being a happy byproduct of other things taught in schools), and if so aren't there an awful lot of aspects of it that aren't? It also generally doesn't mean much more than "getting a reference" without any real understanding. Everyone knows about Washington, father of the country, first President, crossed the Delaware...none of that is all that significant by itself other than purely for the cultural piece of it. Same for knowing WWII was Germany + others against the world. It doesn't require any real understanding of WWII. It also seems (to me) that people seem a lot more bothered by the history aspects of it than other aspects of it. If a 30-something looks lost when talking about Germany in WWII it's "a failure of the education system". If a 60-something looks lost when talking about technology which is also cultural literacy, people just figure it's fine. All of this is to say that a lack of cultural literacy isn't necessarily a failure of an educational system (IMO). It also TENDS to kind of work itself out if an individual cares to. If an individual hears "Luke, I am your father" and doesn't get it...they can figure it out if they want either by looking it up (so easy today to look up things online) or by asking the person who said it or a friend. Everyone knows that piece of pop culture. And I use that piece specifically because it's something that has become a part of culture that isn't even something "true". Hoops, one thing to consider when you compare 30’s and 60’s is that we have a system and process for teaching young folks about events such as WW II. We do not have a system and process for teaching older folks about technology. Older folks are expected to identify, locate, and use the resources they need to learn about technology, while we have 3.7 million people we call teachers whose work is dedicated to spoon feeding information to our youth (whether our youth wants the information or not).
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