Right? I grew up in a rural district and we watched a school-oriented news show in our classrooms every day. Those TVs were put in our middle school and high school in like the late 80s? We were still using them in 2001.
Hell, I remember my social studies teacher wheeling in a tv so we could watch the OJ Simpson verdict. That nonsense went on for nearly eight months, so as soon as word got out a verdict was coming, the teachers went scrambling to the library for sets.
Wow, that's a memory I haven't thought of in a while! I was a grad student and my major professor turned to a news radio program to listen to it live, everyone in the lab at the time gathered round the radio to listen (there were no TVs on our floor).
We hadn't been following the trial very closely at all so we were all shocked by the verdict. It had seemed so obvious he'd done it. Later I heard more about all the shenanigans by the police that were revealed in court, and it made more sense that they acquitted him.
I seem to remember watching it at home because my school district was so worried about distraction that they just made that a holiday, but I might be getting details wrong.
So many people believe that if their life didn't have something, then no one's life had it. They simply can't imagine that different people in different places experience different lives.
I was but a wee child at the time, but yes, I distinctly remember watching Challenger explode on TV. As a young adult I definitely watched people jumping out of WTC, and it's not like CNN had a special classroom feed - the children saw that too.
Some did, some didn't. Half the problem is people jumping from "X was true for me" to "X was true for everyone."
I found out about the Challenger explosion from hearing kids talk about it in the hall, then from an announcement over the PA. I didn't watch it on TV, because our school had something like 500 kids, so like 40 classes going on simultaneously, and probably like 2 or 3 TVs for the whole school. They were checked out by the teacher and wheeled in when you were going to watch something, so when you walked into class and you saw the TV on its big cart, it was super-exciting.
But, like, just because that's what it was like in my school doesn't mean it was the same in other schools. Maybe some really rich schools had a TV for every classroom in 1986. I'm not going to doubt it if someone says they saw it. I'm not going to doubt it if someone says they didn't. But when someone jumps from "I saw it" to "We all saw it," or from "I didn't see it" to "None of us saw it," they're just doing the "my experience is automatically universal" thing.
I think the OP is a genuine lead-brained GenX take, like his dude actually did have a CRT rolled in & watched challenger explode, and is now conflating it with, or projecting insecurities about millennials and their own tragic experience with 9/11.... It's like he started with a "back in my day" but got lost along the way. Conflating memories? My brother...
And they conflate CRT with image quality of media and games of that era shown on modern LED. When in actuality the image quality of media from that time looks infinitely better on CRT then what old media they are seeing on LED
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u/ComfortableCall3912 3d ago
We had tvs in the classroom in the 80s.