# Are kids today worse-educated than in times past? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 27, 2010, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600 "2010-02-27T02:47:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Zsofia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/7bcc69/32.png) [@Zsofia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zsofia)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2010, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/81 "2010-03-02T18:50:58Z")
> [@Curtis LeMay](#): > > Learning Latin privately would cost prohibitively so can’t do that. Also I keep these opinions to myself in school. Oh, if only there were some place… a building, maybe downtown… and they had books you could look at for free! Gosh, somebody ought to start one of those. We could call them the universities of the poor! Oh, wait. Let’s call them the universities of the _motivated_, instead. ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2010, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/82 "2010-03-02T20:54:01Z")
> [@rhubarbarin](#): > > most people are kinda dumb. I don’t think this is a new phenomenon. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2010, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/83 "2010-03-02T21:05:56Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > It’s a meme I often see repeated as established fact – it came up in [this CS thread on a coming John Carter of Mars movie,](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=553727) of all things – that the quality of primary and secondary education in the United States has declined since the Good Old Days – which seems to mean, up until the 1930s or perhaps the 1940s, before newfangled theories from colleges of education were implemented in the school systems, or perhaps before schools were racially integrated (the cause to which the decline is attributed, or even whether any particular cause is implied, is not always clear). Supposedly, kids of any given age back then had much broader vocabularies than kids of the same age today, better grammar, better math skills theoretical and practical, etc., and a high-school graduate then had an education nearly comparable to a college graduate’s today. Is there any truth to this? Have any actual, rigorous studies been done? **Could** any be done? Yes, yes, and yes. I recently finished reading [The Dumbest Generation](http://books.google.com/books?id=lpq3ryL1c6sC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Dumbest+Generation&hl=En&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false), by Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand our education system. While it touches on many topics, it contains a great deal of hard data about the kids these days. For example, most high school students today spend less than an hour per week on homework and school reading. This is much less than in previous generations. (From the [High School Survey of Student Engagement](http://ceep.indiana.edu/hssse/index.htm)) This laziness is bearing fruit in the form of dumber students. On the NAEP’s 2001 history exam, 57% of high school seniors scored “below basic”, due to such things as believing that America and Germany were allied in WWII. (NAEP is the [National Assessment of Education Progress](http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/), for those who don’t know.) Results are similarly bad in civics, English, math, science, and the arts. And there is real evidence that we’ve gotten dumber over time. For instance, the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that only 31% of college graduates were “proficient”, down 9% in just ten years. In the 2005 Pew Survey “What Americans Know”, 56% of those age 18-29 had low knowledge levels, compared to 22% for those age 50-64. That’s just as small part of the evidence in the book. I highly recommend reading it to get the full story. So to summarize, we’re getting dumber, and it’s happening across many categories and by many measures. To say that it’s only a difference in rote memorization, or that today’s children have skills in other areas, or so forth, is simply wrong. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2010, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/84 "2010-03-02T21:21:21Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > It’s a meme I often see repeated as established fact – it came up in [this CS thread on a coming John Carter of Mars movie,](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=553727) of all things – that the quality of primary and secondary education in the United States has declined since the Good Old Days – which seems to mean, up until the 1930s or perhaps the 1940s > [@ITR\_champion](#): > > On the NAEP’s 2001 history exam, 57% of high school seniors scored “below basic”, due to such things as believing that America and Germany were allied in WWII. Yeah! You sure as hell wouldn’t find kids from the 30s or 40s making that mistake! ---
**Author:** ![Dangerosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2010, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/85 "2010-03-02T21:42:19Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > For example, most high school students today spend less than an hour per week on homework and school reading. This is much less than in previous generations. (From the [High School Survey of Student Engagement](http://ceep.indiana.edu/hssse/index.htm)) But now, what percentage of our high school aged population is enrolled in high school compared to previous generations. An eighth grade education and done was common previously. Unless you are talking about recent previous generations (i.e. in the last 40 years). Also, according to table 2 of the HSSE, 43% of students spent less than one hour per week on written homework, and 55% reported spending less than one hour reading for class - reported as separate time categories. I’m not sure how you get most from that. I browsed it, but could you point me to data that predates 2007? Two points of data do not make a trend. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2010, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/86 "2010-03-02T22:05:56Z")
> [@shiftless](#): > > And yet you would be so very wrong. I’ve read two biographies, a few of his translated works and countless fictional treatments of republican Rome. Got the Penguin _Selected Politcial Speeches_ right here on my desk. I think I’ve done enough leg work to be allowed an opinion about Cicero and it’s my opinion that there are a lot better things a high school student could be learning than a 2000 year old text in a 2000 year old language. So what have I missed? What are the great secrets that the classics reveal only to those willing to learn the orignal language? How is a 16 year old student who can quote Cicero in the original Latin better equiped to deal with the modern world than one who studies … well, anything else really? Why have you apparently wasted so much of your time studying something that isn’t a “real subject”? I find your attitude towards your own expertise somewhat perplexing. This is the equivalent of saying that reading some science fiction and a book or two by Brian Greene gives me enough information to evaluate the utility of studying physics. Why do you think that actual expertise doesn’t matter? This is both ignorant and arrogant. Whose biographies have you read, by the way? Bailey? Everitt? I am not even sure I understand your supposed goal of education, becoming “equipped to deal with the modern world”. This concept is both unrigorous and ahistorical. Surely people were able to gather the tools they needed to survive in their worlds before the advent of high school. Living in the modern world equips one to live in it, not high school. I and my other dead languages-quoting colleagues are quite equipped and do very well, thank you. I’ve known many classicists over the years: perhaps this is survivorship bias, but I can say that all of them have done extremely well in a variety of endeavors, including law, business, and scholarship. I am more or less of the opinion that within constraints, it hardly matters _what_ you study in high school as long as you study _something_ and try to do it well. Whether you develop your brainpower deciphering languages or understanding the movement of the planets probably won’t matter all that much in the entire course of your life. Vocational training for life is learning to build and maintain relationships, balance your checkbook, and disciplining yourself enough to follow through on your goals. This is obviously unrelated to what you happen to study. ---
**Author:** ![FoieGrasIsEvil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foiegrasisevil/32/16638_2.png) [@FoieGrasIsEvil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FoieGrasIsEvil)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2010, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/87 "2010-03-03T01:22:01Z")
Isn’t learning Latin somewhat useful for those entering the medical/biology world? Names of just about everything seem to be Latin. Anatomical parts, genus names, etc. Maybe it just doesn’t matter as long as you can simply memorize and pronounce the Latin-named item. ---
**Author:** ![saoirse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/5daacb/32.png) [@saoirse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/saoirse)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2010, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/88 "2010-03-03T01:33:43Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > It’s a matter of competition. Good companies want the best and brightest candidates. If you are hiring entry level 22 year olds, how do you determine that at that age? You look at what they acomplished so far - degrees, GPA, interships, participation in extraciriculars, etc. Is it fair? I don’t know. But for some reason, companies think there is a correlation between success at their companies and havning those credentials. I am not really concerned with fair, actually. I just think it’s dumb. I graduated from college under considerably more difficult circumstances than my fellow students, and it’s really not that hard. I remember the debate about whether a college education should be about education for its own sake or teaching useful skills, and the answer is neither. It’s about class identification. Whatever fairness issues that raises are irrelevant. It’s just a bad way to find the best person for the job. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2010, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/89 "2010-03-03T02:45:36Z")
> [@FoieGrasIsEvil](#): > > Isn’t learning Latin somewhat useful for those entering the medical/biology world? Names of just about everything seem to be Latin. Anatomical parts, genus names, etc. Maybe it just doesn’t matter as long as you can simply memorize and pronounce the Latin-named item. Every field has its jargon. But I can’t imagine that learning Latin as a whole (as opposed to picking up the bits of it used as jargon along the way) is particularly useful to being a doctor, any more than learning Italian is particularly useful to being a violinist. ---
**Author:** ![PBear42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@PBear42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PBear42)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2010, 9:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/90 "2010-03-03T09:47:23Z")
The plural of anecdote isn’t data and all that, yet what I notice is this. I was the first in my family on either side to go to college. I did well, as did subsequently many of my siblings and cousins. Still, I observe that the older generations were as smart as us or better in the skills of arithmetic and grammar. What I infer is that a basic education in the “good old days” was stronger than what my generation received. That said, we had better opportunities for advanced education. As others have suggested, it’s a mixed bag. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2010, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/91 "2010-03-03T12:50:07Z")
> [@FoieGrasIsEvil](#): > > Isn’t learning Latin somewhat useful for those entering the medical/biology world? Names of just about everything seem to be Latin. Anatomical parts, genus names, etc. Maybe it just doesn’t matter as long as you can simply memorize and pronounce the Latin-named item. I don’t get the impression that this is really all that useful unless you want to try to impress people at cocktail parties. The names for things in both law and medicine seem to me to be in really painful Latin & Greek as well. Memorizing the terms and sticking to that works just fine. ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2010, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/92 "2010-03-03T13:54:35Z")
> [@Indistinguishable](#): > > Yeah! You sure as hell wouldn’t find kids from the 30s or 40s making that mistake! But just TRY teaching them to use a simple TiVo, or computer program… ETA: My parents are kids from the 40’s. I love them, but modern technology is not exactly their forte. ---
**Author:** ![rhubarbarin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/eb9ed0/32.png) [@rhubarbarin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rhubarbarin)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2010, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/93 "2010-03-03T14:49:49Z")
> [@Anne\_Neville](#): > > I don’t think this is a new phenomenon. Me neither. People have been having ‘kids today’ conversations for thousands of years, and they will be having them as long as we are around. Also: compared to adults, most teenagers are entitled, immature, lack respect for authority, and relate to the world (which is a different place from the one their parents grew up in) differently. Plato was complaining about it too. ---
**Author:** ![Deeg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/deeg/32/2955_2.png) [@Deeg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Deeg)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2010, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/94 "2010-03-03T16:33:16Z")
The authors of _Superfreakonomics_ put out an interesting theory. Prior to Women’s Lib one of the few jobs available to intelligent women was teaching (along with nursing). As such schools attracted the best and brightest (and motivated) women to teach. Now, however, the best and brightest women are spreading out to multiple fields (especially as doctors). The overall quality of the workforce is the same but it is no longer concentrated in teaching. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2010, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/95 "2010-03-03T16:49:29Z")
> [@Deeg](#): > > The authors of _Superfreakonomics_ put out an interesting theory. Prior to Women’s Lib one of the few jobs available to intelligent women was teaching (along with nursing). As such schools attracted the best and brightest (and motivated) women to teach. Now, however, the best and brightest women are spreading out to multiple fields (especially as doctors). The overall quality of the workforce is the same but it is no longer concentrated in teaching. I doubt it. My teachers were children of the Depression, and they grew up in a time when teaching was one of the few professions where people didn’t get laid off. It also paid fairly well. I’m sorry to say that when I was in college the Ed schools for some local colleges were not considered the best, and this was at just the beginning of Women’s Lib. I’m sure that there is some validity to their point (and it should show up in nursing even more - I’m not sure it does) but I doubt it is that significant. ---
**Author:** ![vivalostwages](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/d07c76/32.png) [@vivalostwages](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/vivalostwages)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2010, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/96 "2010-03-03T20:02:29Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > Yes, yes, and yes. I recently finished reading [The Dumbest Generation](http://books.google.com/books?id=lpq3ryL1c6sC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Dumbest+Generation&hl=En&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false), by Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand our education system. While it touches on many topics, it contains a great deal of hard data about the kids these days. > > For example, most high school students today spend less than an hour per week on homework and school reading. This is much less than in previous generations. (From the [High School Survey of Student Engagement](http://ceep.indiana.edu/hssse/index.htm)) > > This laziness is bearing fruit in the form of dumber students. On the NAEP’s 2001 history exam, 57% of high school seniors scored “below basic”, due to such things as believing that America and Germany were allied in WWII. (NAEP is the [National Assessment of Education Progress](http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/), for those who don’t know.) Results are similarly bad in civics, English, math, science, and the arts. > > And there is real evidence that we’ve gotten dumber over time. For instance, the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that only 31% of college graduates were “proficient”, down 9% in just ten years. In the 2005 Pew Survey “What Americans Know”, 56% of those age 18-29 had low knowledge levels, compared to 22% for those age 50-64. That’s just as small part of the evidence in the book. I highly recommend reading it to get the full story. > > So to summarize, we’re getting dumber, and it’s happening across many categories and by many measures. To say that it’s only a difference in rote memorization, or that today’s children have skills in other areas, or so forth, is simply wrong. Agreed. It isn’t just a matter of being an old coot complaining about the young’uns. I scored a bunch of placement test essays just the other day; they were written by high school students who took the test with the intention of being placed in our college classes. A good 85-90% of these essays were awful–awful enough that most of them ended up being placed in a remedial college class. (They are not just scored for grammar; there are many other factors considered.) I am hoping against hope that today’s batch is better. I have been teaching college students since 1990, and there is a real decline in skills that has taken place since that time. ---
**Author:** ![asterion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4da419/32.png) [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2010, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/97 "2010-03-03T22:41:57Z")
I consider myself to be a fairly good writer. I’m also young enough to almost be considered “kids these days” if you’re considering everyone under 30 in these discussions (I graduated from high school in 2001.) While I agree that it should be obvious that the abbreviations and conventions created to facilitate communication on the Internet and mobile text messaging have no place in any serious writing, other problems are not so obvious. Writing is not innate, it is not obvious from the verbal language, and it has to be learned. Quite a lot can be learned just by reading literature. But writing still has to be taught and I think it’s fair to say that I, for one, wasn’t really taught how to write. For instance, I had one semester of English grammar in freshman English. It was duller than dishwasher and not particularly useful. I learned more about English grammar by studying German than I ever did in English class. And just because you can write a grammatically-perfect paper doesn’t mean that you can actually write coherently about a subject. My father (with an English Ph.D and a job involving a lot of technical writing) was a great help as he would proofread all my papers before they ever got submitted, even as a draft submission. The only way to learn to write is to actually write and I don’t see how massive amounts of standardized testing is supposed to teach writing. Even when the teachers were trying to teach you how to write, what stands out in my memory wasn’t actually the skills of writing but the technical stuff such as grammar and punctuation. I remember one teacher who was stuck in the typewriter era and was insisting on a style guide that assumed all the limitations of a typewriter (not that I knew this the first time.) For instance, book titles had to be underlined and not italicized, despite the fact that perfectly capable word-processing software had been readily available for decades and italics are preferred when the typesetting can support it. I never got any useful feedback on my actual writing from that teacher but plenty of red ink for occasional typographical errors and the sin of using italics instead of underlining in my bibliography. ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2010, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/98 "2010-03-04T02:52:33Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > _But it is still there, whether you use it or not._ Why don’t you go look at the information contained in the book _and_ the cd-rom before you decide which edition provides more information? I haven’t even seen the CD-ROM nor was I ever even aware of it’s existence till now. I doubt most teachers use the CD-ROM anyways. As to classical education in the old days, most books from before the 1960s or so contain quotes in Greek and Latin without translation. And people who did not go to elite high schools but still relatively educated such as HP Lovecraft did know Latin. > [@Zsofia](#): > > Oh, if only there were some place… a building, maybe downtown… and they had books you could look at for free! Gosh, somebody ought to start one of those. We could call them the universities of the poor! > > Oh, wait. > > Let’s call them the universities of the _motivated_, instead. I may try to Latin on my own but it will be compared to learning Latin from a teacher rather more difficult. ---
**Author:** ![Martini\_Enfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/martini_enfield/32/11123_2.png) [@Martini\_Enfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martini_Enfield)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2010, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/99 "2010-03-04T02:59:39Z")
> [@Curtis LeMay](#): > > As to classical education in the old days, most books from before the 1960s or so contain quotes in Greek and Latin without translation. And people who did not go to elite high schools but still relatively educated such as HP Lovecraft did know Latin. Which books? In older (as in, Victorian-1940s) books you _occasionally_ see untranslated Latin or Greek _phrases_ (_Alea iacta est_, for example) that everyone knew because they’d _rote learned what that phrase meant_, not because everyone spoke Latin from learning it to fluency in high school. ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2010, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600/100 "2010-03-04T03:16:40Z")
> [@Martini\_Enfield](#): > > Which books? In older (as in, Victorian-1940s) books you _occasionally_ see untranslated Latin or Greek _phrases_ (_Alea iacta est_, for example) that everyone knew because they’d _rote learned what that phrase meant_, not because everyone spoke Latin from learning it to fluency in high school. But they don’t do that nowadays either. Also I did not mean learning to be fluent in Latin-many kids who take foreign language are not fluent either. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-today-worse-educated-than-in-times-past/530600.md?page=6)