The elderly are seen as out of touch, old fashioned in their values
and a burden to society.
The reason : some of this is true but their wisdom and contributions are conveniently ignored.

You start off in diapers. (:-)
The only thing you inherit from your
children is your gray hair, and then
your right back in diapers again.
As they are in your society. }:-{(

Youngsters please come forward. Next turn.

Unfortunately for Lion Sack, culture defines our perspective and, to a large extent, how we treat one another. It’s nice to talk about universal moralities and the eternal spirit, but that makes very little difference to the here and now, especially when it comes to how others relate to you.

The elderly have always had a place in society, although I believe that role has shifted significantly other the years. The elderly used to retain a crucial role as the keepers and collectors of wisdom and knowledge. The older you get, the more life experience you have. The more life experience you have, the more you, in theory, know and understand. Thus, we have turned to our elders for centuries as leaders of insight and stability.

However, as the years have progressed, mankind has become more and more intrigued by developments of the future and less interested with things of the past. The moralities and ethics of 60 years ago seem to have no place in a modern world zooming forward into an unknowable future. Why burden ourselves with information that we could easily look up on wikipedia? As a society, we’ve become certain that the past has nothing left for us, so we have invested all our energies into making sure the future comes about a little faster.
But, at the same time, people are living longer than ever before. To sum it up, I believe that the role of the elderly as retainers of wisdom and knowledge has been somewhat dismissed as trivial and unimportant. However, we still see the value in old age because even those who are young today understand that someday they will be old, and they would like to live for as long as possible - even if it means becoming obsolete.

I hope I answered your question!

Try being elderly some time.
Your mind improves; your body degrades.
You’re fastened to a dying animal.
Your mind cannot die, it’s beyond life and death.

Yeah, yeah, japanese respect their elders, blah blah, american’s
don’t and so on. Culture as an idea is a shallow and silly notion.