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Comment by rriepe | Hacker News Reader

"It's a myth that we've fallen from our glory days."

This one seems to pop up a lot. Not just in education, but in everything. Is it just a sort of cultural nostalgia, a collective-but-selective memory? I'd be interested in seeing studies on it.

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America was a genuinely high-growth 'emerging economy' until ~1950, and then by sheer coincidence experienced another few decades of economic dominance thanks to the destruction of WW2 and the rise of communism in eastern Europe and Asia. The 'glory days' were quite real, at least economically. As for other claims, it's easy to feel optimistic when a rising tide is floating all boats.

The USA was blessed with some great geography too. Two giant mountain ranges capture enormous amount of snowfall and the snowmelt drains into the interior of the country, rendering massive areas amenable to agriculture. In turn this created a large population suitable for industrialisation.

I find that that statement personifies the difference between conservatism and liberalism at its core: contrasting the glory of better days through more idealist eyes to the glorified potential utopia of the future.

Although more about social values than education, the book "The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap" just came up in conversation recently, and it deals specifically with the way we view the past through rose colored glasses.

http://www.amazon.com/Way-We-Never-Were-Nostalgia/dp/0465090...

Thanks, I'll add it to my reading list.

...actually, do you have anything older to recommend? Books these days just don't seem to measure up.

...actually, do you have anything older to recommend? Books these days just don't seem to measure up.

I was about to argue with you, and then... touché. :)

Until you hear liberals saying the same things, of course. Listen to them talk about the salad days of FDR or Jack Kennedy. Watch them go on about how every undictated social change is a Problem to be Addressed - or slurp up material like Idiocracy.

There's no overall difference between the two groups when it comes to forward-looking or nostalgic, just how old or cynical the individuals are.

While liberals do often hark back to idealized good old days of big manufacturing, high taxes, unionization and everyone having health insurance, I think it's a little unfair to portray conservatives as idealists looking toward some future utopia. For the most part (libertarian fringe excluded), they seem to simply lack vision of any sort, forward or backward.

I've read that studies suggest that the golden age is typically located 10 years before you were born.

I am pretty sure that the 1970s sucked.

I was going to post the same thing, but then I thought: what would it have been like to actually attend the Homebrew Computer Club and witness the birth of the PC industry?

It'd be cool, no doubt; but if I was born in Australia (as I was), it'd have sucked.

Other than the Moon landings?

I think the angst is not so much because of a perceived temporal decline; rather because of an unstated expectation that the U.S. should be first.

This is possibly aggravated by the fact that nobody knows for sure why the test scores are low, but everyone can have a theory.

Unstated? Maybe you don't watch the news enough to see how much time politicians devote to proclaiming America the greatest nation on earth in every possible respect...

Unstated by the people saying it in this context.

I think most of the myth is about the 1950s Eisenhower era, when Germany, Japan, China, and S. America weren't competing at all with our own economy. It was significantly less competitive then and for a brief period of time we were a powerhouse, but over time that has faded.

This was a period when you could support a family and live a comfortable middle-class existence while working on an assembly line. It wasn't a question of the education, just much less global competition.

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