Ageing populations and information lag

[beccaelizabeth]

My 20 year high school reunion is now one month away. I approach it with what I'd like to call mixed emotions, but they're mostly embarrassment and dread.
"So, what have you been doing?"
"I got a degree!"
"And after that?"
"Oh that was last month (*xfingers*)"
"er, okay, before that?"
"Therapy!"
... yep, this is going to go swimmingly, I can tell already...

but it has been making me think on education and the passage of time.

School pours a lot of data in. And I know there are some subjects where I haven't really paid any attention since leaving school. Geography, for example: even though I know the maps have changed a lot since high school, I haven't actually studied how. I've looked in the context of designing alien planets (extreme environments and sparse populations of the world being the best available source for extrapolation), but I don't even understand how much of the world is the EU now. And I read newspapers and on the whole attempt to have a bit of knowing every day. But I haven't kept up.

So the world in my head is the world as deemed suitable for school children twenty years ago. Which is not the world as it was twenty years ago, because curriculum design means time lag. Which means substantial of what I'm basing judgements on is a knowledge of the world that is, well, maybe a quarter century out of date?

I know a bit more in some subject areas. Science, I keep reading, but I haven't seen New Scientist since sixth form so I'm just reading from the guardian website, the BBC website, and whatever someone links to that looks cool that day. I watch a few documentaries sometimes and realise what I learned was incomplete at best and some of the stuff in my head has since been proved wrong. I studied science up to A-level (but don't ask about the results). Other students gave it up earlier. We specialise early and often, in English education, compared to what I glean from fiction about US ed. College seems to have a lot more subjects in the USA. Here, not so much with the choices. So in my specialist subject my knowledge is probably edging into the 21st century, but the vast majority of the books I read were printed before that, late 90s being pretty new ish, unless I sought out newer. Reading lists ... honestly, I think the teachers kept the ones they studied, for some units. Especially the teacher who gave us a list not available in this county. Plus our library is small. So my reading even for my degree is probably not cutting edge, except about Doctor Who, which I keep up with for fun.

I think some of my theory reading is about as old as the radio drama I was complaining of the other day, and the attitude lag on that is substantial.

Most people are not currently doing a degree or academic reading. I don't know what most people do for data flow, really. It seems to involve scarily little. I mean, if I had that little input I'd feel starved, but other people probably think my hermit act is a punishment, so *shrugs*

The thing is, I'm 20 years out of high school, and people my age are maybe, sort of, kind of, beginning to have some influence on big decisions. And I looked up that 35 is the age at which half the human population is younger than me, but that means half is older. So most people doing most of the deciding are substantially further away from their initial data input phase. And far fewer of them ever went to university than is true of younglings now.

I don't know what data set most people are working from, but much of it is probably time lagged something chronic.

There's a lot of SF about the effects of time lag on decision making, and how it makes it all fall apart.

We kind of trust that the people we choose to run the country are keeping themselves up to date... no, actually, I don't, but the system only works if in general we are meant to trust that we choose people who can keep current. But those people in charge had their assumptions formed in a different era and have been shaping their data inputs to specific purposes and the world in their head... on so many points where my lived experience has quite a lot to say on the matter, the world in the heads of the people voted to be in charge just has nothing to do with reality.

The world keeps changing, and most people are not studying up on it or reading the latest data, they're just kind of trundling along doing the same old things in the same old ways based on what has got them this far.

It's kind of frightening.



Right now I'm thinking free continuing education for all is a really good idea for reasons far broader than the economic.

Comments

[philippos42]

Thanks for this post.