These are the scores of the kids who think they are capable of going to college. Can you imagine how stupid the kids are who don’t take the SAT test? The Department of Education has been around for 33 years. We pay $80 billion per year in taxes so these government drones can produce this result? How come scores were 28 points higher in 1972 when we didn’t have a Department of Education and student to teacher ratios were 30% higher? Do you think government teacher’s unions really care about educating your children?
This is the consequence of decades of liberal educational policies that teach kids how to feel rather than think. Why teach kids to read when you can show them movies in class? Yeah, they can text better than kids from 1972. Politicians use kids to sell any bullshit policy they want to jam down our throats. Obama poured an extra $200 billion of your tax dollars into Education between 2009 and 2012 as part of his $800 billion porkulus plan. I’m guessing the payoff will come next year. He didn’t just hand your money to teacher’s unions as a payoff for voting Democrat. Right?
Obama and his minions will use these results to reach further into your pocket. Do it for the children.
@ Admin
Do you have any statistics on homeschooling or the Amish/Mennonite 8 grade one room schools? I deal with these people almost daily and they and most on SS are the only ones who can make change without a computer and with pencil and paper most of the time.
Without electricity or newspapers they are better informed than most HS students and graduates. Their ability for critical thinking has not been destroyed. I ask them for advice on gardening and country living that I have forgotten from my childhood.
Roy
I’m sure there isn’t any statistics on the Amish. They are far better prepared for what is coming than any group of people.
The reason for the education bureaucracy is not to educate children. This is a thinly disguised vote-buying scheme, although they’ll use their own failures to justify bigger budgets. Bigger budgets mean higher dues. Higher dues translate into more campaign bribes to crooked politicians.
Seen in that light, the Department of Education is a resounding success. The fact that they churn out millions of ignorant peons is simply a bonus to the government drones that want to avoid a public that is well informed.
Jim
Technology has made tremendous progress while mankind is still the same as described in the Bible and other literature. The same savage who would bash your head in with a rock to steal your piece of Mastodon meat now has the capability to wipe out your family, tribe and all neighboring tribes and is looking for an excuse to do so.
It is much easier to herd lemmings than cats so our owners have initiated programs to condition people to automatically obey government rules and regulations no matter how stupid the rule. I see little kids wearing helmets on tricycles and bicycles and requiring school crossing guards to cross the street. The Mennonites ignore all this crap. It is instructive to live among the Anabaptists who believe a person should be free to make their own decisions and not have decisions made for them by some “authority”. This greatly upset a Pope who ordered them all killed so many fled to America. My forefather was given a 1000 acres now part of the city of Lancaster PA. Wm Penn, a Quaker and Pacifist gave many land grants to German and Swiss Anabaptists
I have 30 acres with stream and wood lot in a fairly sparsely populated area and like minded neighbors. The Mennonites will not defend themselves preferring martyrdom. We will defend the Mennonites since they know how to be self sufficient and can provide for us until we can do it ourselves. I cannot predict the future but plan on what I consider probabilities. I fear the government more than the FSA. My comment about FEMA’s Continuity of Operations plans being equivalent to building Noah’s Ark for our owners till the dust settles drew one negative comment. Most seem to ignore hard realities and embrace trivia as a means of denial. People that think like you and I are an endangered species. We need more like us to keep from being overwhelmed by savages.
Most kids today do little reading. A small percentage likes to read for pleasure. Textbooks are thin on text and fat with pictures, diagrams, and charts. It is currently considered poor teaching to ask students to read a section of a textbook and then write out answers to comprehension questions. The preferred method is to have them read with a partner and then create a graphic organizer of some sort to show they grasp the ideas presented. I watch kids “read.” They have the open book in front of them, they occasionally turn a page, they go through the motions, but their brains are mostly not engaged. When this is the drill in elementary and middle school, it takes a serious intellectual toll. I can easily spot the few readers in middle school because their vocabularies are noticeably larger than their classmates’, they can write coherent sentences quite naturally, and they just know a lot more stuff. I wouldn’t expect SAT scores to rise anytime soon.
The greatest compliment I ever received as a teacher? “Ms. D taught me to love books.”
Teachers aren’t magicians. Of course I;m assuming the teachers are worth a shit and not beaten down dogs.
They can’t fix kids from fucked up families, or from 3rd world parents who hold no value for learning and don’t even speak English and never will. They can’t fix the violent moron that was mainstreamed into their class by White upper class pieces of shit who were embarrassed their little tyke had a room temperature IQ. They can’t fix the budding criminal who if disciplined issues death threats against the teachers with impunity. They can’t fix the half-witted school athletes who think they are allowed to do as they please because they have a letterman’s jacket. They can’t fix the black society’s hatred of White society and their knowledge which now has gotten to the point where black students who study are now targeted for attacks by other blacks. They can’t fix schools where the blacks are the majority of students and are out of control. The fact that schools have to put in metal-detectors and have police officers on campus doesn’t show a failed school system but a failed segment of society that thrives on violence but is allowed to fester because politicians lack the guts to condemn it and speak truth to the people.
Maybe start with the notion there are a lot of kids who have no business in school. The morons, the spazticks who need a truck load of Thorazine to function, junior thugs, jocks, drug users/dealers, etc.
Public education in this country was predicated on parents at least offering some semblance of a home where learning was at least tolerated. Teachers expected their students to be civilized not out of control animals like Treyvon and have something approaching a decent attention span. That’s rare today in today’s multi-ethnic/PC city schools where all sorts of electronic diversions are at hand and where it’s almost impossible to discipline kids without blowback or accusations of racism or xenophobia.
As for teachers. Who in the hell would want to be one if they could apply for a career in a technical or scientific field or even that of a plumber. The pay is shitty and you work with morons and creeps every day(the other teachers) and until you get enough seniority you get sent to the crappy schools that inevitably drive out the best and the brightest who have other options.
The system stinks. it needs to be brought down so we can start over.
Cynic
Thank you for bringing up the issue of discipline. In my district (inner city), there are a fair number of chronically disruptive students. This is what a teacher must go through before getting administrative assistance.
1. You keep a behavior log. You write down the rule violated, the behavior observed, and the action taken by the teacher in response. After a couple of incidents, you call the parent and if the phone is still connected, you request support for behavior change.
2. After 5 entries on the log, you can move over to the Low Level Referral form. You again record each incident, determining what the student’s motivation was for the bad behavior and again, what you did about it. The Low Level Referral form has space for four incidents. The form will not be accepted by the administrators unless you have documented two more phone calls to the parent.
3. A fifth incident worthy of a referral allows you to fill out a High Level Referral form. By now a teacher is ready to murder the child, who has disrupted countless lessons and impinged on the learning of other students. If all of the referral entries are not properly filled out, the High Level will not be accepted until corrected.
If the administrators deem your documentation worthy, a mild consequence will be given the child. It might be a couple of days of after school detention or picking up trash at lunch. You can be sure the child will remain in your classroom. What to do next? Get out a new behavior log and start over. After another round of paperwork, administrators will take some further mild action, but the child will remain in your class and usually there is little effect on his or her behavior. Why would there be?
The only time quick action can be taken is when a student actually breaks the law (assault/fighting, theft, destruction of school property, etc.). A High Level Referral is immediately written, and the student will be suspended for 1-3 days and then happily reappear in your room.
Can you see that all the burden has been placed on the teacher and not the disruptive child?
In the good old days a naughty male student would be dispatched to the principal’s office to be swatted with the Board of Education.
What Steve Hogan said +1! The last thing the establishment wants is anyone to challenge their authority!
Flash, nice cut and paste job, again.
Where’s Zara?
Roy, why would COG be of concern? They will have forever lost their legitimacy, and will be that for which the American Revolution was fought, a blight on a free society. It will be necessary to fight a 2nd American Revolution simply because the states lost the War of Northern Aggression, when all 50 states secede.
Obama has already laid out his war powers act, that private property rights no longer matters in a declared state of emergency, read “martial law”.
However, we’re reflecting upon education, and the winner of conflicts gets to write the history books.
I would submit a knowledge of God’s Word is the highest education there is, and the enemy of God has been unable to defeat his word lo these many millennia. There’s nothing to suggest he will succeed now, nor stop trying.
He literally has pulled out all the stops leading up to the turn of the 21st century. Again, with no indication he has given up, nor any expectation he will.
Education isn’t knowing facts and figures, it’s knowing right from wrong, and that is the last thing the spawns of hell in our federal bureaucracy want anyone knowing. Too f*g bad!
You guys just don’t get it. The DOE is functioning EXACTLY AS PLANNED.
You see, ALL of these fed.gov alphabet agencies with the feel-good names are designed to acheive exactly the OPPOSITE of what they are sold to the public as.
It isn’t just “unintended consequences”, which is just your denial about the true nature of your fed.gov speaking. Folks, NO ONE can acheive the same consistently evil results without true MALICE, not incompetence, as the driving force.
Proof that the DOE has exceeded beyond the wildest dreams of its creators is the election of Barack Obama given the thinnest resume on planet Earth and troublesome associations, and the reelection of BO given the worst economic performance of a US president ever and his myriad scandals.
The very last thing a tyrannical (=progressive driven) central government wants is citizens who are well educated, with good critical thinking skills, with an understanding of the Constitution/Bill of Rights and our place in history, that are economically free to pursue their OWN destinies, not the ones centrally planned for them.
What central governments want is exactly what they have gotten with the 47% – dumbed down, perpetually aggrieved, impoverished and indoctrinated TAX SLAVES, CORPORATE DRONES AND CANNON FODDER.
Mission Accomplished, I’d say.
@Gayle – It starts at home.
If the parents care about their children’s education, then their child can get educated with nothing more than a library card, some pencils/paper, and time.
But the government has told parents that they don’t need to worry about their children, because the government will care for them. The government will feed them, cloth them, train them, and take care of them. Then, when they come of age, the government will give them a job, or if they are unable to get a job, take money from someone else to give to the jobless so that they will also continue on.
If your child has one of their own, do not worry, the government will take care of them as well, providing for them the same that was provided for yours.
And finally, when the children have grown old, and become the elderly, the government will protect them, provide them with shelter, medicine, and food at the cost of the young.
Of course, its all a lie, but damn doesn’t it sound good? Give up your freedoms, which less be honest, are abstract ideas that 99% of Americans don’t really pay attention to anyway, except lip service.
The food the government feeds your child is chemically altered nutrient free non-food with a half-life longer than Uranium 238.
The clothes the government provides are paid for with money taken from the pockets of the working without their consent (unless silence is considered consent).
The education your child is receiving is indoctrination and falsehoods, not a true education. The sciences are reviled and mathematics scoffed at. Grammar is non-existent as is penmanship. Lifeskills (cooking, sewing, home maintenance) are no longer taught, as one can simply pay someone else to do those things.
The roof the government provides for your children is paid for by the sweat of those making the “right” choices, and again without consent.
As for that job? The military is always hiring, and it pays better than any other job the child can get on their own with no training or experience.
All of this, all of this “free stuff” if all you do is vote for the government. In the face of all of those benefits, who would willingly choose to wake up from the comfortable dream rather than face the cold reality?
As you guys have all said before, this country is primed for a revolution, but it will never happen until the free shit river dries up, and that won’t happen until they kill the cow for the milk.
In case you missed it, thats us few producing members left in this shit hole.
Hope, girl, thank you.
You have it.
It is IMPOSSIBLE for these “errors, oversights and mistakes” to have caused the complete breakdown of everything that once made us great (kind of, even the history I used to be so proud of was a lie, ah well).
Bernake and every single one of his predecessors – both complicit and clueless – and CONgress for that matter, have NEVER, not ONCE, not EVER actually been working to make things “better” for us serfs.
This cabal of the elite have been actively pouring pieces of their fortunes into our downfall for well over a century.
To think that this freaking disaster was created by highly-educated, “brilliant” (their words), men and women is nothing more than cognitive dissonance.
We have EXACTLY the system (and results) that WE the people signed up for.
We give the thieves money – and if you think school teachers are “underpaid” for their less than 30 hour, 9 month, work lives, puh-lease – and then we give them more and more and more. Because if the first trillion doesn’t fix the problem, one of the next dozen surely will.
The LOWEST paid teacher in my district is making more than $50k a year with a BA, $70k with a MA – and in 95% of the cases, we the taxpayers PAID for the degree. Cry me a freaking river teachers are “underpaid.” On an hourly basis there are few (if any) jobs with that kind of pay ANYWHERE.
As for the stats falling off the charts. I have a variable/explanation that might reason it.
In 1975 ditch-diggers, waitresses and factory workers, did not believe they had the means and intellect to go to college. So their parents would go in debt for it, they wouldn’t either AND the state (rightly) said, no money is available. Those FEW that later decided they were wrong ALWAYS had the opportunity to go forth, earn & save the money, and go without their parents, or mine, help.
But back about that time in the 70s was when we started thinking that ALL of us have the same ABILITIES, if only some magician from the DOE could come along and unlock it.
Also the same time we started “mainstreaming” the special children. Which resulted in lowering the expectations and results for the rest of us. (I know, we can’t speak of such things because 1 kid somewhere that was thought to be screwed in the head turned out to be a genius, so we’ll spend trillions waiting for that to happen again)
This is what you get when you start believing that equality is more important than reason and tens of thousands of years of human development/history.
But day-uhm, doesn’t it feel great to spend half your life working so that little Susie with an IQ of 50 gets to sit for the SATs and go to college?
No?
You must be racist.
@TeresaE: + 1,000,000,000.
The Money Quote of your most excellent post:
“This is what you get when you start believing that equality is more important than reason and tens of thousands of years of human development/history.”
Sigh.
A society can ignore Reality for only sooo long before the RESULTS of ignoring Reality come and bites its collective ass.
Don’t forget AWD’s law:
The smarter iCrap and phones get, the dumber people get.
I’ve noticed also, people have so few actual human interactions any longer, as people are mainly staring at their phones 24/7, they’ve forgotten how to interact with an actual human. Since the only other thing they stare at besides their phone is the T.V., people are starting to act like people on T.V. more and more. They’ve been zombified, imagine how bad it’s going to be in 10 years? The average I.Q. will be 65, but everyone will be fully lobotomized by techno-narcissism to think they’re geniuses.
[img]http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples_resource/image/25797[/img]
what would we do without it???
if there was no dept of edgamikashun, we would all be better off, our children would be better off and future generations would be better off.
Wow GenX and Millennials… We suck. Lol.
Boomers – all those drugs you did fucked us up, thanks a lot. Boomer moms, many of you were crazy druggies in your hey day… Well, all your eggs were in there with you the whole time, so thanks for poisoning us in the ovary for 20 years (1965-1985) with drugs sex and rock n roll, before you decided to clean up your act and become divorced yuppy soccer moms. And who are we kidding, a lot of you Boomer ladies who had kids young were probably doing drugs in the 70s while preggo with Gen Xer babies. And Boomer dads, all those crazy drugs and the partying you did back in the day undoubtedly mutated a lot of your cells, so thanks for giving us chromosome malfunctions on your mutoid sperm. Plus, a lot of you Boomer Peter Pan dad decided to wait until you were way over the hill to have kids — or you decided to spawn with your younger 3rd wife and pop out some Millennials in the 1990s. Older dads have more mutations anyway. So, tons of drugs plus old age – if you see us as retards you know why. And then you guys set up the feminist nazi education we have been subjected to from the late 1980s-present. No wonder we are idiots.
We have a socialism in the schools. The “party members” (union teachers) are victorious, and well taken care of, but their work and results are a joke. Socialism makes everyone equally stupid and equally poor.
[img]http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples_resource/image/25762[/img]
[img]http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples_resource/image/25772[/img]
I would be interested in seeing this same chart divided between children of single parent homes and children of 2 parent homes. It’s well known that children of single parents suffer academically. It’s also well known that children in poverty suffer academically – poverty is strongly linked with single parent homes. The problem is much deeper than the Dept of Ed. It’s culture, economics, genetics, government on all levels. Boomers are set up to suck the fat at every life stage, Gen X and Millennials have been set up to fail on every level. This is why I have given up all hope. The problems are too deep, pervasive, complex, and profound. If you were born 1965-present you are absolutely fucked. Regarding the 2020s and beyond: abandon all hope, yeah who enter here. We are fucked. There is no point, it can’t be fixed.
“I’m sure there isn’t any statistics on the Amish. They are far better prepared for what is coming than any group of people.”
—-Admin @ Roy
I’d add the Mennonites and other German Baptist sects to that mix.
I learned something new today.
Poisoned eggs and mutoid sperm created all the idiots.
I guess that would make it a good thing that the boomers had a gazillion abortions. Fewer idiots, right?
SAH says:
“Boomers – all those drugs you did fucked us up, thanks a lot….No wonder we are idiots.”
According to secular thought, we boomers are closer to the apes from whence we ascended.
At some point or other, when we boomers are gone from the face of the earth, you will have no one to blame but yourselves.
Good thing the Japanese, Germans and English didn’t throw up their hands when they inherited bombed out cities after WWII.
If we boomers are that bad, dont forget we brought you up. So…. You may not be as smart as you think. Recall it is you that tell us that the education system is getting worse over time.. So are boomers smarter than you are not. Yep we are partly to blame but take a honest look at yourself youngster. Just what did thr boomers produce. Where are the younger generations at where is the rage. OWS, nope, tea party nope. Now is the time or all rights amd world status goes away and we become 3 rd world. Step up. We boomers are to fat and lazy you know.
Every time I mention anything negative about Boomers, everyone’s panties get all crammed up their ass around here. Look, Boomer People of TBP, I will say this for the last fucking time: I am speaking about your generation as a whole and not you TBP Boomers personally. If it doesn’t apply to you personally, then why get offended? Just like when TBP Boomers talk shit about Gen X / Millennials all being covered in tattoos, illiterate, unemployed and living in parent’s basement (none of those things apply to me personally) I can have enough self awareness of my generation to know its sadly true for people my age as a whole.
Boomers have serious cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, Boomers talk proudly of all the changes they made as if they saved society and civilization (civil rights/political correctness, feminism, gay rights, counter culture, “me, me, me, self-realization”, divorce, absentee parenting, drugs, casual sex, rock n roll) but then if you say they changed the world and made it shitty (political correctness, feminism, gay rights, counter culture, “me, me, me, self-realization”, divorce, absentee parenting, drugs, casual sex, rock n roll) then every Boomer wants to freak out and say it isn’t so.
You seem to all forget that we (Gen X and Millennials) know you very well, where as you have never been able to break away from self-obsession long enough to understand us, we have STUDIED you guys our whole lives. WHOLE LIVES spent being indoctrinated with Boomer self-mythology, watching your damned documentaries about counter culture and Woodsock, hearing you drone on and on about your eternal youth and self-importance. Hmmm…. How did I form my opinion of Boomers? 95% of the Parents of my Peers, teachers, professors, bosses, etc have all been Boomers. I know how my friends and I and every other Gen X and Millennial grew up. We (Gen X) were latch key kids. Millennials were Daycare kids. The majority of us have had horribly shitty, narcissistic parents. Most the parents (Boomers) have been throughout our lives: alcoholics, drug addicts, divorced multiple times, never growing up, totally immature and selfish, absentee/neglectful parents. The few I knew with more “normal” Leave-It-To-Beaver type married parents were Gen X kids a bit older than me (early 1970s kids) who were the youngest “oops” babies of Silent gen parents (usually the youngest, after a gap and some older Gen Jones Boomer Sibs). Those of us with Boomer parents, about 75% of us were raised horribly shitty by Boomers. But we know all about you guys, so please cut the shit. If you TBPers are SO fucking sensitive and sick in the head that you can’t see your generation for what it is as a whole (I can see mine for the tattooed, illiterates they are) then there really is no hope, because you folks ought to be representing the best most hopeful segment of Boomer society and even you TBPers for the most part refuse to admit anything. Deny, deny, deny.
Back in the 1990s (greatest decade ever) New Jack Swing Soul singer Joe had a song called Stutter that begins: “my dear, my dear, my dear you do not know me but I know you very well”. You Boomers have no idea what I am talking about because you’ve been so self-focused you never got to know us truly (your Gen X and Millennial kids) but we know you very well. Your music, your culture, your lives, your history. We’ve studied you (both willingly and by you FORCING your bullshit culture on the rest of us) every single day of our lives. Please cut the bullshit.
Best Boomer Ever: Steve Jobs
Best Gen Xers Ever: Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Best Millennials So Far: our kids in the military for the past 10+ years
I will say this for the last fucking time: I am speaking about your generation as a whole and not you -SAH
Well dont take it personal when I lambaste your lazy ass generation of iIdiot phone zombies. =)
BTW Steve Jobs had nothing to do with creating the Apple operations system That would be Wozniak and FYI the newer operatig system of Apple are based on the open source system of FreeBsd.
Jobs was just a marketing guy.
SAH says:
“We’ve studied you (both willingly and by you FORCING your bullshit culture on the rest of us) every single day of our lives. Please cut the bullshit.”
Like you did not force us to put up with crap rap, hip-hop, synthetic drugs, walmart fashionistas, and tapas.
glad to see you are back full force!
Kill Bill says:
“BTW Steve Jobs had nothing to do with creating the Apple operations system That would be Wozniak and FYI the newer operatig system of Apple are based on the open source system of FreeBsd.”
so why was gates stealing apple’s ideas? why did apple rehire jobs when they could have done just as well hiring a talking gecko? why did RIMM stumble so badly if jobs was simply a marketing maestro? couldn’t they have hired flo?
Mea Culpa dear Boomers. I admit I started frequenting tapas restaurants in 1998 with the other 20-something young Gen X proto-hipsters. And yes, I loved Nintendo and SEGA, I admit it. I got a BA in Dead Languages and Western Civilization at a gross cost of about 140k. And everything I have ever posted on TBP has been via Apple device (iMac, iPhone, iPad). And I eat organic, local, non-GMO, slow food and shop at farmers markets. Yep. And I hand knit wool socks and live in the mythical hipster land of “Cascadia” where gay, pot smoking, environmentalists dressed as bearded retro lumberjacks roam their natural habitat being ironic and snarky (only to be rivaled by the East Coast hipster kingdom known as “Brooklyn”). There, I admit the part I (and the 1970s-1980s Gen X/Millennials) have had to play in the downfall of America and Western Civilization.
So why was Gates stealing apple’s ideas? -juan
Why did Jobs need an operating system based on the one created by AT&T UNIX?
FYI Gates did not create DOS, he bought the rights to it and sold it to IBM.
I know alot of people think of a smartphone as something that is ‘high tech’ because of the way electronics have shrunk, but Gates nor jobs were responsible for that, the chipmakers were.
A smart phone is nothing more than a web-browser on a digitized walkie talkie. Notice the proliferation of these devices since the end of analog.
And yes, I loved Nintendo and SEGA -SAH
im sure you were locked in some basement by your evil boomer parents and brainwashed into playing such things.
why did RIMM stumble so badly if jobs was simply a marketing maestro? -juan
What did Jobs or Gates have to do with Rambus or Intel?
In 2003, Intel introduced Intel 865 and Intel 875 chipsets, which were marketed as high end replacements of Intel 850. Furthermore, the future memory roadmap did not include Rambus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDRAM
@KB – *sigh* you are speaking technical jibberish that means nothing to most computer users. You are also proving why Steve Jobs was such an amazing genius.
Are there probably a million better engineers and programmers than Jobs? Yeah, probably in India and China alone. Are there better marketers? Yes of course. What Jobs had was a cohesive vision for how to make non-user-friendly geek tech appealing and user friendly to the masses. He was able to bring together the best elements and delegate each to the right person.
Was Steve Jobs the world’s greatest calligrapher? No, but he had the gision to understand how important FONT is in expressing nuance and feeling. The tech geeks were more than happy with blunt dot matrix ugly writing, while Jobs understood what humans want. Was he a brilliant artistic designer? No, but he had the vision to hire Sir Jonathan Ives. It was not an accident that the G4 Cube and Sir Ives’ other Apple designs are in the MoMA. Was Jobs an expert sound technician? No, but he had the good sense to put Harmon Kardon speakers (sleek gorgeous clear ones, thanks Jony) standard into the G4. Apple works seamlessly. I remember getting my first iMac, and thinking “where the hell are all the manuals? How will I ever learn to use this thing?” How? It’s easy, intuitive, user friendly, it works, and it’s stylish and sounds good. Jobs had the vision to put a built in web cam… To put music and photos and data all together on the iPod… To eventually produce an all-in-one device in the iPhone (phone, text, camera, video call, email, web, watch, alarm clock, music, calculator, live stock market ticker, etc plus any and every type of app imaginable for the interests of individual users). Jobs was brilliant. He took an inaccessible world of radio shack geeks and fused it with art, music, photography, ergonomics, user friendly design, and made the most revolutionary product line of the 21st century. There is a reason Gen X loves Jobs, he made the only part of the damned Boomer revolution that truly enhanced our lives. Millennials don’t care as much about Apple (Samsung and LG are following the lead) because they don’t remember the horrific ugly almond-colored giant boxes, cantankerous stupid PCs, designed by soulless tech geeks who write 500-page manuals and speak in tech jibberish.
Jobs made technology belong to US – Gen X – in a way that is intuitive to what we wanted to do. In my opinion, the accessibility of computer technology, and Steve Jobs specifically, may be the Boomer elder we will follow. If tech goes on, we will continue to use it to connect with each other and manage our lives. We will use it to share ideas and information, to make art, and document history. Our love affair with tech has made us generationally aware of open-source, Internet freedom, digital privacy etc. These ideas make us think about freedom v tyranny, freedom of assembly and belief, and may be the factor that unites the youth in a pro-freedom movement.
Jobs was a fucking genius and visionary. He wasn’t some cog in the Apple machine, he was the man with the plan – not a perfect man, but prescient and very aware of what Gen X (and Millennials) want.
I understood KB. I just did not have the ‘gision’ to buy amat when smart money recommended it on its premiere issue.
SAH, that is a nice analysis of the apple magic. Jobs was a good student of Japanese total quality management initiatives they adopted from our own Dr. Deming.