What young ones can teach the older generation :)

[zymeth02]

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? There is nothing that young people can teach older people. Use specific reasons and examples to support your position.

We live in a world where there are innumerable facts, ideas, and information about the things around us. No particular person can know all of them because they are boundless, and some are yet to be discovered. Even with several years of experience, there are things that the old generation doesn’t know, and the young ones might know. In fact, there are lots of things that the young can teach the older people.

One good example is brought by the technology boom where only during the recent years computers had become a ubiquitous tool among the young generation. Majority of the older people have no idea on how to use a computer, some even fear it since it appears so alien to them. Understanding that computers provide functionalities that are extremely useful to everyday lives, the young generation can encourage and help teach the older generation how to use them.

Things that can be taught to the older people are not limited to new technologies. There are things that have changed in the past few years, one of which is fashion. Many old people still wear the same style of clothes as 30 or 40 years ago. The young ones can recommend a new style for them to wear so as to give them a fresher look. They don’t have to wear what teens nowadays wear. They only have to pick more suitable clothes for them since fashion is evolving and something better keeps coming.

Surely, there are a lot of other stuffs that the old generation can learn from the younger generation. The world is a big place, and there are lots of things to discover. The experience of one generation could not cover all aspects of reality. That is why it is most beneficial for everyone to learn from one another. That way, we are all winners.

[dan42386]

I do believe you may teach older generations a thing or two about computers. I have found that it simply takes then a lot longer to remember and there also exists in many of them, a fear of somehow ruining their computer.

I have helped out multiple older people with their various computer problems and I've noticed that their responses have one thing in common. They're always amazed and wonder how it is that I know how to do all these things with computers. Now I'm not talking about anything extreme like manually entering in all my commands via the command prompt, but simply checking a few settings on their computer to make sure everything is installed appropriately. When I respond that I've simply played with computers until I gradually learn tricks, they respond that they're fearful of doing so because they may cause permanent problems in the future which they feel they will not be able to fix.

Jumping a little into why they may feel so requires us to go back in time a little. Both my grandparents grew up during the great depression. They had little and if something worked and functioned as it should, you wouldn't dare "play around with it" to see if you can get it to do new things because the risk of breaking it would bring on consequences that greatly outweighed any positive outcome that would result in finding some new sort of functionality with the device. Hence the mentality of, if it works, don't touch it.

One of the reasons our generation is so much more computer literate is 1) we grew up with computers, and 2) if we were to break something, it could and would quickly be replaced by something else.

I hope this helps.