Spoon-feeding

Has modern man become a slave to machines and technology?Will machines make man incompetent in future?Read on to find out.....

Every year we invent machines to do something new for us.Handwriting used to be an art ,and a pretty one.Now an increasing no.of people rely on entirely on the typewriter.

Education ,except where the pupils are encouraged to make things with their own hands,is mainly spoon-feeding.Fifty years ago the editions were so bad that the student had to puzzle out difficulties for himself.Now he sits luxuriously before a crib,two commentaries and a book of lecture notes which have been slowly dictated in the class.He need not use his brains at all.

Every where we find the same demand to make life easy ,safe,and fool-proof.The fine trees in our public parks are periodically mangled and reduced to the condition of clothes props by our urban and country councils ,because boughs have been known to be blown down in ahigh wind ,or even,in the case of elm-trees,to fall suddenly,and once in 200years some fool might be standing under the tree at the moment.Every work man must be insured against a variety of accidents,even when it is caused by his own negligence .If a traveller slips on a piece of a banana peel,which he ought to have seen in a railway station ,or allows his coat to be stolen under his eyes in a carriage,he brings an action against railway department,and wins it.We now demand to be personally conducted through life,all risks to be taken by someone else.

All this might be right,or it may only be inevitable.bot do not let us deceive ourselves.Nature will make us pay for it.Nature takes away any faculty that is not used.She is taking our natural defences ,and has probably added nothing,since the beginning of the historical period,to our mental powers.The power of grappling with difficulties and finding our way out of labyrinths,will soon be lost if we no longer need it.And after any derangement of our social order we might come to need it very badly.Besides can we look with satisfaction at the completed product of civilization,a creature unable to masticate ,to write,or to walk,a mere parasite on the machines that enable him to live?Many would prefer to be savages if they could have the magnificent physique of the zulus or some South Sea Islanders.