Dantastic

The pamphlets and flyers they passed out on the street during the american revolution are graduate college level reading now, and back then they handed this out on the street.

so explain to me how education is getting better?

Ever since ww2 the govt has made EVERY effort to dumb down schools, I mean do they really want a table full of well educated Americans who can discuss how they are getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 years ago?

First it was give kids a head start, now its no child left behind...

Someone is loosing fucking ground here.

Kompressor

That's implying literacy rates are the same then and now, which they obviously are not. If you could read you most likely went through graduation and printed words needed to have the same clarity as legal documents today. There were no tabloids back then.

In fact most news in 1700s was still more word of mouth than print, and still needed town criers.

Education isn't just about government, it's about science, history, mathematics, etc., and it's not a one way street. You get out of it what you put in, and we have a lot more input than we had centuries ago.

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HTAM

I think it's fair to say there was a percentage of townsfolk that were certainly very well educated. A small percentage.

In the Colonial Period of Education, at Harvard, at Yale, as well as schools that eventually became Princeton and Rutgers, were strictly for men, and white men at that. That's changed.

In the South much of an education was crafted by a private tudor if you could afford one, or through relatives that might be literate. Regardless of race, lower middle class, and nearly all of the poor were all but uneducated. That's changed, but not as much.

Nobody had a clue about 'modeling' things out with a computer though, let alone even conceptualizing the idea. Space Flight? Shit.

However, to be fair, then, just as TODAY, there still isn't any consistency in education across the country.

'No child left behind'.....FAIL.

It's up to the parents to educate their children and to use whatever the child learns while at school as ally in doing so. IMO.


'Tudor'

Waves

well you cant look at the lowest common denominater in this situation

im talking about the smart people, the people responsible for making the big decisions and running shit on a large scale. you cant compare the founding fathers to your average joe who cant figure out how to fucking press the buttons on his iphone after all. they were the smartest people of their times, literally.

even so, the smart people of todays world would blow the minds of the smart people that were around in colonial times when it comes to running a country

we have people who are better equipped at solving the problems that face us today. the entire worldview has changed, my point is simply that its like talking apples and oranges to even theorize what the founding fathers would think of todays world. they would have no clue what to think for a long long time.

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The Rev

Where technology is concerned, today's minds would blow the founding fathers away. However, where politics is concerned, it would be SSDD to them. The degree to which the federal and various local governments are required to directly bullshit the masses would be new, but how they do it would be the same old crap. Political machines created by buying constituencies off with favors, for example, are no different now than they were in the 18th century. The rich tricking the poor into fighting wars for their interests is just the same. War for Oil in the Gulf is no different than fighting the British over the Stamp Act (which, as it effected only documents, applied almost exclusively to the literate, and therefore, rich). It's just dressed up a little better because of TV, that's all. They subtly imply you're a terrorist (McCain/Obama) rather than come right out and call you a "howling hermaphrodite" (Jefferson/Adams). Otherwise, it's all the same bullshit.

Since the dawn of the Progessive Era, we have seen the banking industry using the government to loot the country on a scale never before seen in history. This sort of thing has happened before on a lesser scale (Jay Cooke and National Banking System, for example), but never to the degree where everyone has run up so much debt that the banks literally own the majority of the country by way of mortgage and bonds. I doubt the founding fathers would be anything but awed and appalled by how far things had gotten, but they would understand it perfectly. These were the same guys who issued the first paper money, the continental, to loot the public in order to fund the Revolutionary War.

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Politically, it's all the same shit, just wearing different clothes.



The Rev

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FourtySecondRip

this isnt just about the founding fathers but also includes europe and other renaissance era people.

i think that the brightest minds back then blow away todays brightest especially in technology. its one thing to be able to model things with computers and using technology to further our endeavors like we do. its another thing completely to make new technology up from scratch that sticks around for hundreds of years. coming up with a light bulb that is efficient and doesn't hurt your eyes indoors doesn't seem that crazy now but imagine coming up with it when your only tools were candles and various raw metals. there was no widespread power supply system until lightbulbs came out because there was no reason for them. they came up with ways to record video and sound using raw materials. they came up with the steam engine and railway system after thousands of years of horseback travel. they came up with the assembly line and factories after thousands of years where everything was hand made one at a time.

we have alot more tools in our arsenal now and we havent made anything that will stick around in the last 50 years besides computers cell phones and space flight. all of our advances in food have just been building on past knowledge gradually with better preservatives and production methods. our medical knowledge is better now but not leaps and bounds above the best that was available then. they were doing surguries and had sterilizing agents just like we have now we just took it a step further which is expected with 250 years to do it.

they literally transformed massive aspects of daily life for everyone on the planet in a very short period of time. we have had some breakthroughs sure but they were having them in every field imaginable and in ways that were never even conceived of by the majority of human beings in the history of the world.

our housing is simply an improvement on what they made, our travel is just improvement on what they made, our communication is just improvements on what they made. that period of time was really special. i doubt there will be anything like it in our lifetimes.

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John F. Kerry

wow guys this thread is fantastic, i was gonna thank every one of the last 7 posts but i figured that would be retarded. each one made me think of interesting shit. good work!

i like waves comment "the smart people of todays world would blow the minds of the smart people that were around in colonial times when it comes to running a country"


kinda plays into the talk about computer modelling higher than a mile was talking about.


the smartest people today probably are smarter than the smartest people back then - its not their fault, they just have so much more availible to learn today ...

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OldMan&TheWeed

The common denominator for ALL the founding fathers was simply the maintenance if the US an independent sovereign nation governed as a republic, its leaders rising to power as a result of their wealth and merit, not royal bloodlines.

Any and all other considerations were secondary.

Thus far these modest goals have been met.

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Entity

This part I don't agree with.

The "smartest" today have super computers to do the modeling/number crunching.

Back then, the closest thing to a computer was an abacus.


When you think of the degree of discoveries compared to devices available..

we pale in comparison.

For example...... I dunno of anyone that even has the pyramids figured out.

Not how they were built.
Not how they were held to such a degree of accuracy.

The Mayan's?
Have you ever looked into them?
They had the cycle of Mars to within .08 days... back THEN.... and that's with us using SUPER COMPUTERS to calculate it's solar year.

Tech toys... yeah we're advanced...
but to think we're somehow smarter?

I ain't buyin' it.

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SageTree

where is this said poll??

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The Rev

I remember giving my son shit when he was in High School, because he had no idea who Winston Churchill was. My daughter stopped me, tho, and told me that "they don't teach us that". Kids today get a great education in metal detectors, drug dogs, and bullying, tho.

I read an article recently about how public education is not only useless, it's actually counter-educational. The Anti-Educational Effects of Public Schools - Gennady Stolyarov II - Mises Daily It was educational, as well as surprising (I didn't know there was anyone out there with a bigger chip on his shoulder about High School than me).



The Rev

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