it would be a curved graph, not a straight line, so it doesn't mean that our parents could just play a couple of minutes on the computer per day and remain sane.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Most people who say this are grandparents, and most of them worked in a farm field. How is that easier than getting a desk job?

by Anonymous 12 years ago

It's mental. And I'm talking about school. School today is a lot more mentally taxing that that long ago, and on a farm. Your body is tired on the farm, so you need sleep/rest. Your brain gets tired at school, and often in the office, so you need to play to relax the mind. And i guess my parents are old enough to be grandparents if they had me earlier.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

School is not more mentally taxing today. For example; have you ever tried doing problems with sine, cosine, and tan without the simple click of a calculator? My Granpa did and it was shit for him as his work usually took up the whole page.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

We're not that far along yet. And back then, they didn't even have to learn it at all. They could go pure humanities, or pure sciences, depending on what they're good in. And with all the new rules, concepts, laws and theories, the sciences and maths are getting a lot harder. My dad didn't even have to do ANY trig or calculus.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Ha bullshit they didn't have to! My grandparents tell me nonstop how they had to figure out sin, cos, and tan without a calculator, and how all their math equations were done by hand.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Then he picked those subjects. My point is that people weren't forced to do everything and could concentrate on what they were good at or liked

by Anonymous 12 years ago

So can you, man. College. Study whatever the fuck you want.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Not if I can't get into a good college science course because I forgot one of the effects of Hitler's reign in tenth grade.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

You have to learn sin cos and all that before you're of legal age to drop out of high school so no. My mom would help me with school work during high school and tell me she didn't learn it till college, and when she helped me in middle school some of the things she didn't learn till college. I went to the same elementary school as my cousin and learned how to do long division in 4th grade, while she is learning simple algebra. School curriculum defiantly got a lot harder as time went by.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I dunno about you but 30 or 40 years ago makes me think of my parents not my grandparents. "Most people who say this are grandparents, and most of them worked in a farm field." that's too much of a generalization.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I know what you mean. It's much harder for me to have to move the dishes //all the way// from the counter to the dishwasher than to hand wash every dish. Not to mention how much harder it is to use the riding mower as opposed to the push mower. Much more buttons to press and such.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I'm talking about school work. They didn't have calculus when they were 16, or trigonometry, or even mole calculations or even the Schrodinger model of atom. We have to learn all this shit, have more homework remedial classes etc. We have less play time, so we need more intense entertainment.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

We don't have a dishwasher. ;_;

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Neither do we.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

This sounds really bratty. Intense work? Working on a computer is not intense.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Then explain my my parents can't understand my 8th grade homework from two years ago. We have more shit to learn, and the same amount of time to rest. If a tank is filled with water and there's a small hole in the bottom, a small tap is needed to keep it full. If the hole is bigger, we need a bigger tap. Of course, you could plug the hole (stop work) but then mosquitoes and algae multiply in your tank. You could ass bleach, but that's poison. The tap is play, the hole is work, the water is your mental capacity, stopping work is dropping out of school, or quitting, bleach is suicide. Retirement is when a new, airtight, hole-less tank arrives, and you can just slack. Or maybe it's because I live in Singapore, an Asian country.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Sorry man I think it's different here.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Yeah Singapore was pretty backward under British rule forty years ago. Maybe that's the reasom

by Anonymous 12 years ago

They're kidding themselves, if they had video games and computers when they were kids they would spend just as much time as we do.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

You think No Child Left Behind makes for harder work?

by Anonymous 12 years ago

No child left behind, my ass. Before, if you were good in science, you excelled in science. If you were good in art, you excelled in art. Now, to get into a science course you need science. Make sense, right? But to get into a school that offers a science course, you need a humanity too. So a guy whose a maths, physics, chemistry and biology god but sucks at history and geography wouldn't get a decent education because no good school will take him. That's how it is here, not sure about the US. The idea behind no child left behind is that if you're mediocre in everything, everyone has to be at least as good as you in everything, so if someone twice as good in humanities as you but one mark lower in science than you is competing for a place in a course, you'll get it because you're 'well-rounded'. And yet, specialists are considered better than jacks of all trades, masters of none. I know I didn't articulate that very well; it's late and I'm a little sleepy.

by Anonymous 12 years ago