I just read the following in a paper given to me by a cherished client:
‘The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.’
My mother has a favourite quote (mine too!) that comments similarly on our experience at work:
‘We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be re-organised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by re-organising. A wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.’
Both quotes are true of our times but the latter is courtesy of Caius Petronius, a Roman general, in A.D. sixty-six, whilst the former is a comment not on the rise of the virtual child, but on the fall of Athens over two thousand years ago, being penned by Plato in B.C.392.
Above anything else I think it speaks volumes about standards and priorities in education at the time and here Dai might agree with me, that the Ancient Greeks and Romans showed such foresight to teach their loyal subjects such perfect written English.