9th January 2022

I need to take my mind off things so I watched the first episode of The Apprentice (UK).  The usual crop of beautiful young things, all saying “I’m the full package” or “I’m a genius”.  My heart sank - along with the cruise ship they were supposed to be marketing! The usual recurring problem between the generations. The older I get, the more I realise how much I don’t know.  But young people are so taken up with themselves and their own egos, they fail to see what they lack. A similar picture when I watch quiz shows like The Chase.  It’s common for university students to get general questions wrong, even in their specialist subjects, and school teachers often show their ignorance of the kind of broad general knowledge drummed into me from the ‘50s.  If teachers have such ‘narrow’ educational routes, what chance their pupils?  And why is it that the Chase experts know so much more over such a broad range of topics? Too much reliance these days on Wikipaedia and video games and not enough on studying a subject in full and comprehensive detail. If only today’s young minds (and their teachers) could be trained to 1950 levels, a little bit of common sense might surface. But, as with the above cruise ship, don’t hold your breath.