The passage that stood out most to me was “your education.” This stood out to me because it’s been a topic largely discussed about my generation, so it hits home. Growing up in an environment where the difference in intensity of information you’re being taught and the information you experience definitely shapes your world differently. I never thought of bringing school education into this conversation; I have always considered it a comparison between “child appropriate memories” vs “adult memories,” but it’s clear that school education plays a factor in this as well. There are varying degrees to this too, depending on how much you are affected by these events in the news: do you have relatives that are directly affected by war, is your household income enough to keep up with inflation, is it safe to go to school? It brings into question whether the education children are given is enough to keep up with their world. A real-world example is how people say, “TikTok is teaching them more than they ever learned in school.” While I argue that many times it shows that many people just did not care about certain topics, the bigger picture is that the “scarce but ordered” education system needs to be updated. I immediately see the pros and cons with this; there is only so much information for a child to take in via school learning, and it’d be impossible to streamline education standards, but it’s safe to say that changes should be implemented. I do not particularly enjoy the choices that are being implemented; my education process growing up was so different from what younger students are experiencing, but I do not see improvement. The intention behind education has changed from wanting children to walk away with knowledge, to testing scores, and it feels like just pushing children onto the next person to handle.
But in the context of the passage, growing up as a child of today is definitely absurd.
