The World of Yesterday Insight

The World of Yesterday

In the first eight chapters of The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig describes living in an age vastly different from the world we live in today. As he describes in the first chapter, Stefan lived in an age of security, the polar opposite of the world of modern day. I find the book interesting simply because the world he describes seems so unbelievable and incredible. Few similarities exist between Stefan's world and the world of today, and several things he discusses in the book are sometimes difficult to fathom. To readers such as myself, living in a world where time is money and terrorism runs rampant, The World of Yesterday reads almost like fiction. While the world Zweig describe seems almost entirely foreign, I did pick up on a small connection between our time periods.

The only similarity I notice between Zweig's world and the world of today comes in the form of information and learning. We live in the age of information, where society has to know everything about everything. Although this information was much harder to access in Zweig's day, the hunger for knowledge is apparent in both time periods. I especially felt similar to Zweig as he describes his disdain with the Gymnasium education. I honestly don't feel that today's school systems are all that different. Little choice is offered to students until college, and even then, we are still forced to take classes that do not remotely pertain to what we wish to do with our lives. Not unlike The World of Yesterday, if you plan on being successful today, you must take your education into your own hands. I don't believe many people attain success by simply going through the motions of college without serious learning on their own time. In almost every major, there are the people who simply do the coursework, and those who actively participate in their field of study before they receive their diploma.