The state of things

Yep.  This is pretty much it.  But why?  Here's my thinking. My boys are homeschooled.  We use a classical curriculum.  That is, low on textbooks, high on original sources. They don't read a compilation of Greek mythology.  They read The Iliad, The Odyssey, Oedipus, and so on.  For Roman history, they read Livy, Marcus Aurelius, and so forth.

In terms of papers and assignments, they have to do research as best they can before they consult Google.  And here's why.  Those of us old enough remember that research was part of the learning process.  You learned as you researched.  The goal was to learn about Subject X.  But as you researched, you learned a host of things, sometimes about Subject X, sometimes about subjects A,B, and C.  Part of learning was the research.

But today, with social media, blogs, Facebook and worse, Wikipedia, research is a button.  You Google, click, and have the information.  Whether it is accurate or not isn't the point.  The point is, you didn't' even have to work for it.  There it was. There was no learning in the process.  Hence it could be absolute B.S. and there's a chance you won't even notice. And there sits our position on an issue.  We won.t even discuss people who reference places like Comedy Central as their primary sources!

Watch this.  The key part isn't 'the rape of the natural world.'  The key phrase is 'it didn't require any discipline to attain it.'  Which might be why we can no longer recognize the evidence for the positions we take as the bilge it is. The doom of the Social Media generation.