Old people don't know more than young people

You hear it all the time, and it seems like it came up again after the new Ken Burns documentary about WWII showed: these damn kids today, they don't know anything. They don't even know who commanded the British Eighth Army before the First Battle of El Alamein! Can you believe how stupid they are, with their Britney Spears tapes and their reality television?



I see two problems with this line of thinking. First, it assumes that because you know one (or three or five) facts and another person doesn't know them, the other person is stupid or ignorant. And in order to believe that, you have to think that what you know is important and what someone else knows is unimportant. That's not a position I'd want to take.

Second, people forget that when they lived through events, that makes them news, and not history. To a kid born in 1990, knowing details about the Vietnam War is the same as someone born in 1950 knowing details about the Paris peace conference of 1919. If I had to bet, I'd bet neither person knew anything about either one.

So if you want to say nobody knows anything, maybe I'd agree with you.