2ukenkerl wrote:
Irulan,
Yeah, I had much the same problem as your parents, and I guess most on this board, including you. I wasn't able to really get the exposure to what I wanted. I lamented over that even when I was 6-7.
That may ESPECIALLY be bad in some poorer areas where they may not even know that such knowledge exists. It is like a movie here (the beverly hillbillies) where the "boy"(jehtro) was said to have graduated from OXFORD! It turns out it was like IN OXFORD *****ARKANSAS*****! They didn't know there was a REAL university that wouldn't even consider him to be worth their time. And THEY are based on a type of people that apparently really exist in the US!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HillbillyThey are isolated and see no point in learning new things, etc...
My mother having lived with such simple people for years, adopted their narrow minded way of perceiving the world and bad habits (lack of tolerance - even though she herself claims something else, bad hygiene and not too high intellectual ambitions). I like reading forums for parents and their way of bringing up their children is quite different, they realize that exposing them to new knowledge and so on has a great importance for their intellectual development. My mother bought me books, here I can't complain, but it's everything, I'd say. She never reads anything more than love stories and "The bold and the beautiful" belongs to her favourite series. When talking to her friends from the village she comes from, she uses that terrible dialect because as she claims herself, they'd think she looks down on them, despising them. When I was 6 we moved, settling in a town when I had an occasion to find out that people normally don't use dialect and I could say I was a lucky one having read so many books from which I learned how to speak correctly - this way nobody laughed at me.
In my country people so uneducated and stupid are mostly those very old people without education or Gypsies whose daughters usually give birth to their first child at the age of 12-15 and who in many cases are able to speak only their own language.