Shift Happens

The video, Shift Happens, was quite mind-boggling. After watching it, I wondered if our society is in trouble, education wise. I realize that China and India have a much larger population than ours, but I did not realize there was such a vast difference. I think the thing that scared me most about our future was the fact that every other country puts more into their education system than we do. I think its great we have the technology we have, but not at the cost of education for our people.

We lived in Japan for 3 years, and my younger sister was in Elementary school, while I was in high school. We both wanted to go to the local Japanese schools, but they said I was too old to start. However, they accepted my little sister, who was in 2nd grade at the time. She moved so far ahead in education, especially Math, that when we came back to the United States, she had to be skipped a year ahead, and 2 years ahead for Math. They poured a lot of money into the schools, and not so much in conveniences at home. They even hired someone to come in and teach my sister to read, write, and speak Japanese fluently. She was the only American in the school, and they wanted to show us how much they care about the education of everyone. It was not like that here, so my Mom took over homeschooling her, so she could continue to advance. I think the education system needs to have a major overhaul, and for us as a society to care more about that, than material things. If we don’t find a way to educate everyone better, even the poor, that is what will scare me most about our future.

In addition, the statistic that what a college student learns their first year of college, is obsolete by their third year of college, really disturbed me. I think our education system needs to really look at what they are teaching, and if it barely applies now, then don’t waste the student’s time, because it is not going to apply 3 years from now. I also think that if a student pays thousands of dollars to get an education, and some of the information they received for their major is obsolete, they should be given free classes that will give them updated information before they graduate.

I think information and technology is great. They have opened up the world to us in ways my parents did not know. For example, if I need to see photos of Germany for a school paper, I can go on the internet, and not only see pictures of Germany, but I have actually found sites with live web cams in various parts of Europe. It’s amazing. While going there is much better, at least we get to see it. We have loads of information at our fingertips, and that is an advantage for this generation. However, I think our society can be too technical, and it has damaged us as a society to a degree. We are not as in touch as we were before all this. While it opens up worlds, I think it is not the same to meet someone online and marry them, as meeting them in person, and getting to know them the old fashioned way.

I think this video did a great job of making things more clear in some of the topics we studied in this class, such a globalization, class and inequality, work and the economy. Seeing the facts and figures as to the number of people in China and India, the education facts, how many times we switch jobs in the United States, and the fact that we are actually behind many other countries in Internet development and usage, really shows how we have been affected by globalization, and how it has affected our class and levels of inequality. We are supposed to be a powerful country, but we have a large amount of homeless people, a low education system, unemployment that is high, and neighborhoods where we still force the “undesirables” in, and let those neighborhoods be taken over by people who have no hope, and commit crimes, and push drugs, affecting even more of our people.

Finally, I think its funny that we used to calculate time by B.C. and A.C., but now we have B.G. (Before Google). I think in order to pull this country out of the hole we are falling in; we have to go back to the basics, or at the very least find a better balance between technology and human beings.