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Date Posted: 13:50:24 10/21/02 Mon
Author: FawnDoo
Subject: Are we dumbing down?

There are two components to this post - one a story of mine, and one a story I heard on BBC news this morning. As Goktimus pointed out in another post down below, this board is frequented by some pretty intelligent people (you can feel free to put in a comma if you like to make that "pretty, intelligent people") and I am genuinely curious as to your thoughts about the possibility that great segments of society may be dumbing down.

The first part, then - my story. Recently I had cause to contact a company by phone to request some documentation. The company's name was Churchill, and I did not know their phone number. Now, I would have thought the name of Churchill to be a fairly well known one, so I phoned up the UK Directory Enquiries service and asked for the number.

Person 1 -- Asked me if Churchill was one word or two, then asked me how it was spelled.

Person 2 -- Thought I was asking for some place called "Church Hill" and then asked me how to spell the word.

Now I know what you may be thinking - that these people may not have understood my accent, or it was a bad line, or one of a thousand other reasons. However, I speak fairly clearly, the line was good, and person 1 still had problems when I said "Churchill - fat fellow, fought the war."

Depressed by this, I appealed to others in my workplace and several people in there (all in the 19-22 age bracket) had never heard of Churchill. One thought he was a President, but couldn't place when or what he was notable for. This I thought was profoundly depressing - after all, if people are so close to forgetting who Churchill was and what he stood for, how close are they to forgetting the same about Hitler?

The second part - BBC News. It seems a recent survey has found that more Britons can name five cast members from a soap opera called Eastenders than can name five current Cabinet members. They also found that one of Eastenders' characters called Phil Mitchell was more recognized by the test subjects than - get this - Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. It's embarassing for me even to type this.

So are we dumbing down? Are people forgetting simple facts about the recent history of the world? What does this say for the future?

Anyone has any thoughts, leave 'em here.

FD



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