Just get my daughter onto a political topic if you want to see how long a human being can talk without breathing. Hind legs of donkeys are everywhere.

If it came out like 'gargle gargle', how come you understood what he said? < rolling eyes smiley belongs here.

I also think its a lazy generalisation to imply that all generations follow similar patterns and that older generations are just as ignorant as the current day younger generation, when they were young.

Somewhere along the line there has been a shift to narrow focus education resulting in a pronounced shallowness of youth. Seeking knowledge for knowledges sake seems to be frowned upon. Of course this is a generalisation and doesn't apply to everyone who is young, it's a comment on an apparent trend.

There has always been a general disinterest in politics, especially among the young. Poor spelling and bad grammar isn't a new thing, either, but with the advent of the internet, it's made to seem much more prevalent.
Using BB as a bell weather for the state of the nation is downright laughable.

Years ago, long before the advent of t'internet, I recall seeing a range of people in the street on TV being asked to name the Government roles of various current (at the time) MPs. One middle aged lady proceeded to say that everybody named was "A Prime Minister".

All the information and education in the world cannot mitigate against disinterest. Horses, water and all that.

I know what you mean. My fingers itch to correct some of the dreadful grammar and spelling on here. Do people not know what punctuation is these days and as for people using "of" instead "have" don't get me started!!!

Yes but John James was Australian wasn't he?

I'm minded to agree with this. There does seem to be the attitude amongst certain politicos that education exists purely to prepare you for the work place, rather than a means of attaining knowledge for its own sake.

There is a significant percentage of the population that isn't good at this sort of thing, and of course it isn't always their fault. As someone who has assessed literacy students I can generally tell when it's genuine learning difficulties or simply "missing the boat" (or in some cases simply not using what they have learned).

Language does evolve and I wonder how long it will be before written communication consists of little more than "hashtags". It will be sad to see the richness of written language lost IMO, but the less time we feel we have for everything, the less I think we appreciate the value of anything.

You are critical of lazy generalisation, but then make one yourself. I wouldn't expect the majority of young people to have much knowledge of politics or foreign affairs, this doesn't mean they are uneducated, just uninterested. We all continue to learn throughout our lives becoming interested in different things as we mature. I would allow the shallowness of youth, let them enjoy their stress free lives without criticism.

Cant help but think of Bill Hicks. 'What are you reading for?'

That's what I meant in my post. It's not everyone and there has always been people who just don't have general knowledge but I have noticed a change with the people we recruit at work in that even some very educated people now don't seem to have any knowledge that they haven't been taught in a classroom.
There seems to be a lot more people who are absolute experts on their specialist subject but know very little outside their own bubble and that has definitely increased in the last decade or so.
There does seem to be more of an attitude that you don't really need to know stuff when you can just google to get an answer.

That's pretty sad, i don't live there and even i know who the PM is. Normally i disagree with tearing them down based on not knowing general knowledge, or not knowing a few things, however... not knowing that is kind of inexcusable.

'Should of' is a corruption of 'should've' and it's been around a long time, only it was heard rather than seen. The arrival of the internet changed that. We now see a plethora of written pieces that wouldn't have existed before the net. It's this that creates the illusion that standards in grammar and spelling are falling across the piece.

What bothered me the most was Pauline, a woman only slightly older than me, answering the question about the capital of Japan. Her answer, is it Tokyo or Hong Kong? I mean come on, the Commonwealth handover (or hand back) of Hong Kong to the Chinese was ALL over the news when we were already adults. It was a GIANT story of the late 80's and early 90's. How someone of our age doesn't know that, or have a vision of Chris Patten burned into their brain, just plain wasn't present. AT.ALL.

PS Japan and China are two different countries, even Steven could tell you that,
Last edited by DLS1 : 25-07-2014 at 10:21

I kind of agree. I don't think all of them are as stupid as they make out, they've all seen the show (Jade with East Anglia, is Rio de Janero a footballer, tictacs etc) and many are trying to emulate that - Mark is a prime example with 'escape goat'!!! But saying that, I do think there are a few who are just downright thick - as someone else said on here, they can recite the cast of bloody TOWIE and that's about all.

A pedant writes:
it doesn't evolve all that much. New words are introduced and old words disappear or change their meaning, but it would be perfectly possible to have a conversation with someone from 1750.
Admittedly, if you were talking about the Internet or Doctor Who they wouldn't know what you were talking ABOUT, but they'd understand the language perfectly well.

Or indeed education existing as some sort of badge. My neighbour is a university lecturer and she describes a big change in the last decade. She finds that each year many freshers arrive ill equipped to take advantage of the degree courses they pay for.

She talks of the inability to write or to think and students unable to research or listen to information and put two apparently disparate ideas together and reach a conclusion. I think we see a lot of that in BB and oe here which is how I came ( perhaps unfairly ) to connect the two ideas.

University lecturers are now in the unfortunate position of students now feeling that they buy their degrees, which in a sense they do. So the expectation is that they pay their money and turn up for three years and voila they get qualified. Yet she finds they don't have the basic skills to meet the traditional requirements of essay writing etc.

Complaints against universities are on the rise. A significant proportion of those who complain about their grade and feel that the university should have done more in terms of spoon feeding to get them a higher mark. This WAS not what a university was supposed to be about. It was supposed to be about providing resources and guidance so that people learned to learn and think for themselves, not about spoon feeding answers.

When I recruit, I find it very difficult to find people with the necessary skills to write a decent business letter or e mail, for example. I don't have this problem when I recruit older women (older men rarely apply for service work) its the younger people that have this difficulty. They are the lion's share of applicants and few are fit for relatively simple and low skilled work.

To be fair many of them know more about how e mail works ( such as the hidden functionality) and can whizz around the net and social media in a way that leaves me breathlessly plodding behind. But when they get to where they are going they don't seem able to use the information or express themselves in writing. Its like a dog chasing a cat, when they catch them they don't know what to do with them.

Employers expect to teach people how to listen to customers, how to listen and how to analyse the problem, in the context of that specific operation. They don't expect to have to teach their staff to write a response in proper sentences or structured such that it can be understood by the customer or that reflects well on the professional image of the business. I think employers are also entitled to expect a general understanding of the world and a basic general knowledge from someone who has had 12 years of state education.

Meanwhile other countries are stealing a march on us. My worry is that we, our economy will fall behind. We also have an issue with youth unemployment. But within the general youth unemployment there is a core who just don't have satisfactory skills to do the jobs. It feels like that core is getting bigger. Yet as a society we seem to be at best enabling poor skills and at worst applauding them.

I can't help wondering, when I read some of the attitudes expressed on these boards, if part of the problem is that it has somehow become infra dig or prejudiced to notice poor literacy or poor thinking skills. As I said earlier it is frowned upon as if it were a racist or homophobic comment. But I don't feel it should be. People are the race or orientation they are. To me it is no different to being blue or brown eyed, left or right handed. But to chose ignorance and then demand to be judged equally overlooking this detail seems bizarre.

Funny how in demonstrating what an easy trick question it is, you've got it wrong.

Julie?

There are loads of that kind of trick question and most people of all IQs get them wrong when they come across them for the first time.

Not saying the housemates aren't insufferably ignorant on the whole, though. They always are. It must come with the territory of only being interested in yourself.

Im lost I always answered June too PS I got every other question right.I must have read question wrong .any chance someone might remember what the question was please.

^ Clue in the post directly above yours zolug.




Cuh, you get right to the end and then loose it.

Bloody tweeting, txtspk, permanently-staring-dumbly-at-their-portable-brain-microwave generation.

Oh thanks for that I totally read question wrong and also answered incorrectly.
I feel so ashamed

That poster got the question wrong too, it doesn't work like that, it needs to be three children to make you answer "June", which is a name, while "July" isn't.

Bugger.: How humiliating. Trust you to notice!

In my defence, I finished my post one handed while on the telephone giving someone advice on bid writing for the USAF. That took some of my mental processor power out of the game. Too late to correct my mistake now.

Yeah, well, I noticed your DISASTROUS error while I was in the middle of chairing a conference call with Putin and Obama about the Ukranian buffer zone and trying to avert WWIII. Putin was having a giggle about Dr Karl Kennedy's middle name being Marx. (True, believe it or not.)