The Idea Shop

I thought that Tim "GnawMit" did a great job writing that reflection. I definitely can't match his way with words and being an econ major...using more words often leads to diminishing returns =P. But the way Tim went about it reminded me a lot about "The Giver", something that most of us read in middle school. That book, too, paints the "condensing" of our past: history, literature, grammer, in a dark light and even pushes it to an extreme, forcing one "Giver" to bear all of the memories of color, heat, and emotions . Most of us, me included, don't bother to learn latin or what happened in countries that are far far away in times long long ago. Obviously when these topics come up in conversation, we tend to feel a little stupid and wonder if we should know these events. Tim called latin "useless" in a light-mannered tone in response to other people's belief that it was a "dead language".

The question is, is learning about our past and languages such as "latin" useless as suggested by popular opinion? Like Tim said, learning our past is important for our society to move forward. If we see Latin/History as our roots, people like Tim are the stem. By understanding how we as a culture developed, we move closer and closer to understanding the amazingly complex system that we call "human interaction". It's just like when you're building a tower of cards and looking to put the next shaky piece onto the already fragile base. As you're putting on the next card, each previous top-layer is a new base, a new beginning. In the case of progress, to find the path of greatest probability of success, one looks for information. This information of how to move from the present to the future is found in the ways in which society has made her moves in the past. Scientists today look to how nature created eyes, ears and hearts millions of years ago so that they can apply the information to mechanical progress. Similarly, the ways of government, culture and hierarchy of Japan were studied by business administrators for more effective ways of using employees. Basically, it is possible to learn from the past...and from our mistakes.

But then what about the rest of us?...Are we the ones that ought to join Tim as stems?