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these modern times
Feb. 16th, 2004 04:58 pmThis is an excerpt from a very interesting post on the Inner Temple list sometime this weekend, which I am just now reading (having been at Pantheacon since about noon Friday - more on that later):
I once saw an excellent BBC documentary about the tremendous pressure that their schooling system places on young Japanese. It seemed inhuman, to put it kindly. They work *so* hard, and for such long hours, that they scarcely have time to sleep. I wonder how anyone can remain (or become) a human being (as opposed to an obedient robot) under such a system. Work and obligations are piled onto them as though the human system had no limitations on its capacity. No wonder they produce great electronics but *relatively* fewer great writers and poets.
This overloading of student syllabuses has been happening to students all over the world for decades now. It is a deeply disturbing phenomenon. I have edited first-year university textbooks that were so overloaded with material that they actually comprised a whole three- or four-year course in themselves. If you calculate the amount of TIME that students would need just to READ the material (let alone do the exercises and practical work) in some "one-year" courses, then it comes to something like... 37 hours in every 24 for 365 days of the year... Such is the vanity, stupidity, inhumanity and arrogance of many teachers (at all levels).
But students are not the only ones affected. Many companies expect more from their employees that it is possible for non-drugged, non-robotic human beings to deliver. Somehow we've managed to duplicate (with a modern gloss) the extreme cruelty with which ordinary workers were treated in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when men, women and children labored seven days a week in sweatshops, mines, plantations and factories... and sometimes often just died where they sat, stood or crawled.
But being smart and modern, we have managed to cover our cruelty to employees with all the glossy buzz words of modern economic and managerial double-speak. Ruthlessness is alive and well and as potent in 2004 as it was in 1804. Ever wondered why so many of our products are "Manufactured in China"? Like some part of one's computer? There're over a billion Chinese people with no labor or environmental laws, unions or protection from ruthless employers and bosses. What is manufactured by virtual slave labor (call it what you will) in China for a pittance can be resold by First World countries for many thousands of times what the seller paid to have it manufactured.
This is called "international trade" or "globalization", and has been going on for centuries.
To return to the insane overloading of syllabuses... I noticed this trend already in the 1970s. It is far, far worse now. I'm not surprised that children have to take refuge in drugs, crime and anti-social behavior in order to obtain *some* sense of personal identity. My view about drugs (legal and illegal) is that many people feel so pressured by the craziness of modern society and the pressures of unrealistic demands, that they use drugs to BLOT OUT the pressures of society and to escape into some Neptunian world. Of course, the pressures are still there when they get back, and then they are even more relentless.
One *has* to contrive to have an "attention deficit" (personally created or drug-induced) when one is bombarded with so much useless, insistent, loud and irrelevant information. Many people use electronic music as a way of inducing a Neptunian trance with or without drugs. Hence the inhuman volume of so much "music" which will leave many young people deaf by their mid-thirties. There is too just much stimulation in the modern world (most of it produced by people savagely competing for economic advantage).
To mention Japan specifically for a moment, it seems to me that a lot of Japanese culture, particularly youth culture, does employ the same kind of extreme blot-out-the-stimuli technique... hence why we Westerners often find ourselves going "Do what now? ...the Japanese are so weird sometimes!"
I once saw an excellent BBC documentary about the tremendous pressure that their schooling system places on young Japanese. It seemed inhuman, to put it kindly. They work *so* hard, and for such long hours, that they scarcely have time to sleep. I wonder how anyone can remain (or become) a human being (as opposed to an obedient robot) under such a system. Work and obligations are piled onto them as though the human system had no limitations on its capacity. No wonder they produce great electronics but *relatively* fewer great writers and poets.
This overloading of student syllabuses has been happening to students all over the world for decades now. It is a deeply disturbing phenomenon. I have edited first-year university textbooks that were so overloaded with material that they actually comprised a whole three- or four-year course in themselves. If you calculate the amount of TIME that students would need just to READ the material (let alone do the exercises and practical work) in some "one-year" courses, then it comes to something like... 37 hours in every 24 for 365 days of the year... Such is the vanity, stupidity, inhumanity and arrogance of many teachers (at all levels).
But students are not the only ones affected. Many companies expect more from their employees that it is possible for non-drugged, non-robotic human beings to deliver. Somehow we've managed to duplicate (with a modern gloss) the extreme cruelty with which ordinary workers were treated in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when men, women and children labored seven days a week in sweatshops, mines, plantations and factories... and sometimes often just died where they sat, stood or crawled.
But being smart and modern, we have managed to cover our cruelty to employees with all the glossy buzz words of modern economic and managerial double-speak. Ruthlessness is alive and well and as potent in 2004 as it was in 1804. Ever wondered why so many of our products are "Manufactured in China"? Like some part of one's computer? There're over a billion Chinese people with no labor or environmental laws, unions or protection from ruthless employers and bosses. What is manufactured by virtual slave labor (call it what you will) in China for a pittance can be resold by First World countries for many thousands of times what the seller paid to have it manufactured.
This is called "international trade" or "globalization", and has been going on for centuries.
To return to the insane overloading of syllabuses... I noticed this trend already in the 1970s. It is far, far worse now. I'm not surprised that children have to take refuge in drugs, crime and anti-social behavior in order to obtain *some* sense of personal identity. My view about drugs (legal and illegal) is that many people feel so pressured by the craziness of modern society and the pressures of unrealistic demands, that they use drugs to BLOT OUT the pressures of society and to escape into some Neptunian world. Of course, the pressures are still there when they get back, and then they are even more relentless.
One *has* to contrive to have an "attention deficit" (personally created or drug-induced) when one is bombarded with so much useless, insistent, loud and irrelevant information. Many people use electronic music as a way of inducing a Neptunian trance with or without drugs. Hence the inhuman volume of so much "music" which will leave many young people deaf by their mid-thirties. There is too just much stimulation in the modern world (most of it produced by people savagely competing for economic advantage).
To mention Japan specifically for a moment, it seems to me that a lot of Japanese culture, particularly youth culture, does employ the same kind of extreme blot-out-the-stimuli technique... hence why we Westerners often find ourselves going "Do what now? ...the Japanese are so weird sometimes!"
