Age, Wisdom, and the College Crowd

Someone told me about a person they knew recently. This person was an older lady, say, in her 50's, I think it was. Every time there was a discussion about anything involving this woman, she thought she always knew the right way to go, (and was wrong quite often), because she was older, and therefore, knew more about everything than the younger people around her.

WRONG!

Just because you are older, doesn't necessarily mean you're wiser. That's a ridiculous assumption.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the college kids, who think because they've had a class on something, or got their degree, they are instantly the fount of all knowledge.

WRONG AGAIN!

Both sides are wrong. Both need to realize that they have different types of knowledge. The older people have life experience, but often they try to base every decision on a subject on their personal experience with something. Take, for example, lawyers. If they had one bad experience with a lawyer, they're going to assume all lawyers are scumbags, and should never be trusted.

The same goes, in a way, for the college kids I mentioned. If it was in the textbook, or a teacher said it, it must be true! The sky is yellow, darnit, because the book said so!

In the end, it really comes down to the fact that no one knows everything. Which is a good thing. If someone knew everything, he'd share the information with everyone else and the world would become very, very boring very fast.

The mystery is what makes life good!

So all you college punks, are you listening to me?

Your moral of the story is this: Listen to your elders, and take their opinion into account. Don't decide it's wrong just because they don't have a degree.

...and for all you older folks, turn up the hearing aids!

Your moral of the story is to listen to what those young'uns say, too. That book-learning that you never got, cause you were picking cotton so you could feed your twenty brothers and sisters? It's good for some things. Life knowledge isn't the only useful knowledge.

It kind of makes me wonder what it'll be like once the generations who didn't go to college are gone. Will the Doctorates and the Bachelors fight over who knows more, and whose knowledge is better?

Maybe the new "cotton fields life" will be found in the community colleges, where they worked hard to make it in community college to help feed their twenty brothers and sisters.

I donno.

I do know this, if I don't go to bed, I'm going to fall asleep on the keyboard.

(...and go read the novel! It's the reason I'm sleepy!)

Oh, and one more thing. Yesterday was my birthday (the 13th). Yay me. I'm 25. That's a fourth of the way there. I hope the next 25 are a little more exciting. ;)