Issues That Still Affect Us Today

While I was reading the course reader for this week I found a couple connections between issues that the readings were talking about and issues we still have today, which I thought was interesting.

The first was in the Port Huron Statement, in which the education system is critiqued, saying that much attention "too, is paid to academic status (grades, honors, the med school rat race). But neglected generally is the real intellectual status, the person cultivation of the mind" (158). This greatly reminded me of the way high school seems to be focused these days. High school students care less about actually learning and more about whether they get good grades, they care less about feeling connected to activities than they do having a list of extracurriculars with which to pad their college applications. So too, it seems, was the case in the public school system of the 1960s.

Also on the topic of education, the statement complains about "the administrative bureaucracy" and "under-financed colleges" (159). As students at UCLA, we surely know that these are issues today, when our university depends on the greater UC system in order to receive funding for our education.

The second area in which I found similarity was in "The Vast Wasteland", in which the Chairman of the FCC bemoaned "Why is so much of television so bad?" (53). In the MTV/VH1 dominated era, we have all seen our fair share of consuming, but ultimately worthless television programming. When I saw this question in the reading, it made me wonder, was there ever an era in which television wasn't bad? What happened to good TV? Evidently, both us and TV-watchers of the 60s have the same question.