Most of the youngsters who will be start college this Fall were deport in 1992 . To aid professors bridge that generational chasm , Beloit College prepares an annual list of cultural and technological touchstones for incoming freshman . Man , shaver are weird .
Every twelvemonth since 1998 , Beloit has roll up the list as a “ catalogue of the rapidly alter worldview of each fresh generation . ” And what a strange worldview it is . Here are a few of Beloit ’s sorta - risible , sorta - frightening findings that are relevant to our purposes :
1 . Few in the class know how to write in cursive .
2 . Email is just too slow , and they seldom if ever use escargot mail .
10 . A quarter of the family has at least one immigrant parent , and the immigration argument is not a big precedency … unless it involves “ substantial ” noncitizen from another planet .
16 . Korean cars have always been a staple on American main road .
19 . They never wrench the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrist while shoot the breeze on the telephone set .
20 . DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed .
26 . Unless they found one in their grandparent ’ water closet , they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides .
27 . information processing system have never lacked a CD - read-only memory disk drive .
28 . They ’ve never recognise that bespeak to their articulatio radiocarpea was a petition for the fourth dimension of twenty-four hours .
31 . The first electronic computer they probably touch on was an Apple II ; it is now in a museum .
43 . Russians and Americans have always been live together in place .
48 . Someone has always get married in place .
62 . Having hundreds of cablegram channel but nothing to watch has always been workaday .
65 . They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus .
OK , some of those are pretty slow , like thing adult think kids might think ( has any scholarly person in the class of 2014 ever really heard of the Michelangelo virus ? ) . Others just make it seem like our high school curricula need a serious overhaul .
But a few of the items on the lean , like kid never having twirled a telephone corduroy around their finger , are really kind of sound , and a small bit pitiful . And when these kids are graduating , the group that ’s matriculating will undoubtedly live in a world that ’s even strange . [ BeloitviaNYT Bits ]
Image creditD Sharon Pruitt
applied science
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