I only turned my back for a minute

There comes a time when the new blood of the Internet has made it all a bit hard to keep up with. Those of us who leapt into cyberspace the moment the window opened got used to things the way they were. In many aspects, they were very good. Sometimes they were a bit hard to learn. I recall without affection the list of DOS commands one had to enter simply to get connected - and the general hiccups of getting online at all with the old dialup connections from "backyard ISPs" through 14k modems. But, ahh, the sweet music of those electronic trills and buzzes as connection was made and there was the world right there at your fingertips - wonderful, living people on IRC. That was the early 1990s. It is incredible to think that we now have a generation which has not known the world without the Internet. Back in the 90s, people thought you were mad to spend so much time on it, to be so enthusiastic about it... They wondered what it was. Now they have taken ownership of the technology - along with the new breed who are making their living and often their fortune from it. But they can't leave anything alone. If it ain't broke, they bloody well will fix it. And thus is Facebook so appalling with its obfuscating Timeline. And what on earth have they done to StumbleUpon. What a mess of a wonderful application - the most civilised open online community ever. Now we are transitioned and transported on Google. I have been busy on other things - and I turn around and find the blogging world about which I have written so much over the years has had some sort of a facelift. I should merge other applications with it. Um...now which password do I use for this? The original blogger password was outdated some time ago. It is all Google now? Let's not get on to the subject of passwords. The new generation, who I have nurtured and adored and in whom I have oft expressed my trust and hope, has been being too smart and too short-sighted and, methinks, not listening and certainly not reading. Just making changes because they can - and they wish to make a mark. They wish to impress whoever is paying their wage. We all do that, I guess. But it's not improving things. If only there was some sort of artistic director, a Steve Jobs to arbitrate quality control and logical elegance of style. If only.

Visuacy? Visuacy? Idiotuacy, I say.

Where do teachers get off, making up words?
They'd mark students down for making up a word and yet here they are, introducing "visuacy" not only as a word, but as a whole educational concept.
It's a travesty, or should I say "travestuacy".

The teachers are reported in The Australian to be creating this word to encompass a broadening span of education in the arts. It opens students to further possibilities in visual arts education - the possibility that they should see fashion models as art. This, of course, may extend to seeing Paris Hilton as art, for she is her own work of art, as we all know. Next students will be able to do PhD theses on Paris Hilton as an art object. Why not?
Already they study Buffy, the Vampire Slayer as part of the university English curriculum.
She, apparently, is preferable to the onerous erudition of those hideous "dead white men" responsible for that vast body of English literature.

So, we have the dumbed-down contempory teachers adapting education to what interests them, what they are able to deal with without the requirements of too much education of their own.

Students can forgo art galleries and dead classic artists for the joy of gossip magazines and young celebrity adornments. I daresay the fashion accessory puppy-carrier will be provided extensive source of study.

An academic called Mr Strong (dare I laugh that his name sounds as if it came straight out of that high literature, the Mr Men books)
has "called for the visual arts to form the basis of the national curriculum alongside English, maths and science, arguing that it had more of a right to be among the first curriculum to be developed than history".

Huh?
Ditch history for visuacy?

Yes, siree. It's now and tomorrow, the great dumbed-down tomorrow shimmering with its indifference to the achievements and enlightenments of the past. The brave new world in which knowledge is excused by the fullstop statement "that was before my time".


Today's educationalists suggest that students should be able to look at Picasso's work alongside the pure and glorious art of lingerie ads like this one on WikiBuy. "Viewers can respond in different ways to each image in still enjoy both," says an arts professor, potentially relegating the great galleries of the world to dust-coated tombs.

As one commentator put it, this is like equating a ship's foghorn to a Beethoven symphony on the basis that they are both made of sound.

And who knows, "sounduacy" may indeed follow "visuacy" as the world steps backwards into a sea of trite - and idiotuacy becomes the outcome of an ever-declining education system.