I sometimes wonder what the history classes of the future will be like. When they reach our section in their readings will it be seen as a golden age, when people made some of the most important discoveries? or will it be seen as the beginning of a second dark age?
The Dark ages, for those of you who don't know, got their name from a lack of enlightenment. A time when only the ruling classes had any kind of formal education. The formula was very simple: Keep the lesser classes uneducated and they will be easier to control. Religion also played a part in this game. This was a time when Christianity and it's church held power over the major European thrones. Other religions were denounced as pagan devil worship and their practice forbidden. This led to the loss of a great deal of knowledge, some of which we are only now rediscovering.
Fast forward to the present day. Once again we have a ruling class who limits the amount of information that the great unwashed can get their hands on.
No, I take that back. This is not about a limit on information, it's about putting a limit on who can understand the information. There is a new religion that dominates our new rulers; The religion of cheap entertainment.
Each day we are bombarded with information. So much information that we do not process a lot of it. Given that about 95% of this information is all but completely useless, it would seem that being able to dump most the information would be a good thing. The problem is most of us don't seem to have a filter that can dump just the useless information. As a society we have become trained to accept more chaff than wheat when it comes to information we seek. The recent online uproar over the possibility that the Presidents "State of the Nation" speech might knock the premier of LOST back a week was a wake up call.
Something I had suspected for a long time was confirmed with that story. The cycle is almost complete and we are reaching one of those metaphorical crossroads. Are we going too continue to let the education of future generations be eroded year by year? Are we really willing to risk losing all of the wonderful discoveries of the last 200 years be lost again? A decision must be made by each and everyone of us who reads this.
I still wonder what those history classes will look like. If we aren't careful, we may find out sooner than we might like.
