I was in the bookstore today and I was skimming a book called “The Dumbest Generation”. It presented evidence that American children are sadly lacking in basic knowledge and naturally blamed it on the Internet (well, it seemed to - as I said, I just skimmed it). While I don’t doubt that most kids that I meet are total chowderheads, I don’t believe that this is a recent phenomenon. Tellingly, the author quoted some abysmal test score from a couple of years ago followed by the results of a previous test from 1994 with similar results. Am I right about this? Is it just Why Johnny Can’t Read redux?
It is not a new phenomenon. It is, in fact, not a phenomenon at all, since kids are not dumber than before.
“Kids today are stupid” has been repeated, over and over again, for as long as you have been alive, and for quite some time before that. It’s a complaint that old people have been mumbling for as long as there have been kids. People on this board have made the same complaint and never produce any objective evidence to back it up.
For this assertion to mean anything, it has to be measurable. By that criteria, this assertion is complete crap. The Flynn Effect shows that IQ’s are rising steadily and have been for a long time. That isn’t all. Colleges are becoming more competitive over time. There is absolutely zero evidence that kids have gotten dumber and all evidence that they are the brightest bunch that ever lived. Public schools today try to identify special needs kids at a young age so that they can help educate them according to their needs. The grandparents of many of today’s students would be channeled into special needs classes based on their objective test scores.
Dammit RickJay. We just gave the exact same link. It is like we both memorized the entire web or something. I wonder if my grandparents could have done that?
No, but… the Internet! (/television/movies/radio/comic books/the latest variety of popular music/the cotton gin/whatever)
(Anyone who thinks a world with Google and Wikipedia is a world with forces conspiring to make people dumber is pulling some seriously tortured reasoning.)
I read an article on Salon.com or Slate.com (it may take me a while to find it) that argued that we are actually smarter, in terms of the things we watch–TV was used as an example. A TV viewer nowadays has to keep a lot of storylines going all at once (for shows like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Big Love,” “Six Feet Under,” etc.).
Talk to any old-timer (and I ain’t that far off). Back in the good old days all kids knew everything - they all got A’s and went on to be the Greatest Generation. Then, in the 1950s, the earth passed through the “Ingratitude Belt”, showering our young with harmful Ingratitude rays - caused by Sputnik probably. The result - well you’ve seen it, rock and roll for example. You hear this stuff all the time on every subject.
One old relative told me that when he was in high school everyone graduated, not like today with all your dropouts - that’s right, in the 1930’s every single teenager in the US got a high school diploma. And good grades too.
The truth is that we have come a long way forward in finding ways to educate all kids effectively and keep them in school to the end. Just comparing some test scores doesn’t prove a thing.
Yeah! Sit a 3 year old down at a computer next to an 80 year old. Who’s smarter now!
Mostly it boils down to knowledge sets. Kids these days have a different set of knowledge than those of past generations. That doesn’t make them stupid.
A city kid isn’t stupid because he goes to a farm, walks into the bull pasture and gets gored.
A farm kid isn’t stupid because he walks across the street, not knowing its a one way, and getting smeared by a car coming the opposite way he looked.
A modern kid isn’t stupid because he doesn’t know how to saddle a horse.
A old timer kid isn’t stupid because he doesn’t know how to use a touch tone phone.
“The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of
today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for
parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as
if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is
foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest
and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress.”
That quote is attributed to Peter the Hermit, in the 10th century.
I would wager a guess that every generation thinks the one coming after them is the dumbest.
I’m inclined to **Rickjay ** and Shagnasty. I frequently go to college alumni functions here in NYC. I know I’m getting older as when I meet people who graduated in the 00’s, they constantly tell me how lame things are now and how badass partiers my generation (class of '95) must have been (we were). Anyhow, one thing we noticed was that many of the kids coming out of school today have resumes that are off the charts. Now I’m talking to these alumni who are a bit younger than me but who are working in major investment banks and I was a manager in a management consulting firm. And all of us are like “I’m not sure but I think I might be interviewing these kids to be MY boss!” I mean they are coming out of school having interned at Goldman Sachs at age 20! Shit, one of my interns who’s an Ivy League grad invited me to his 21st birthday party in Manhattan (I was 34 or so at the time). When I was his age, we celebrated my 21st by going to the local dive bar and doing shots with my fraternity brothers. I don’t think I even knew anyone in their 30s.
Anyhow, for ambitious, career minded kids there is so much more information out there than I ever had. I wish I had Vault.com or even SDMB when I was a college student. I would have stayed with my college choice, but probably a different major.
It’s certainly the case that kids are getting work experience younger. I’m 36, and I worked every summer from 14 years old on, and that was a bit unusual; a lot of kids didn’t. My mother didn’t work during the summer, and a lot of people older than me have said they didn’t. Many kids did not work at all during college.
Nowadays, my sense is that kids who don’t work summers are very unusual, and career-minded kids are busting their humps even when in college.
FWIW, this may reflect nothing more than the fact that now that the common man can go to University they have to raise the bar yet again. Now prestigious internships (things only people who can do unpaid work and have the connections to get in) are expected and that keeps the riff-raff out when hiring time comes around.
This seems correct. But the next logical question for me is whether their knowledge set is useful in the workplace or not. A video game junkie who knows how to get to the final level of various games…how does that translate to job qualifications? A small percentage might become video game designers, but the rest? Probably sign up for a university study on carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive motion injuries :smack:
I read an article a long time ago about sharpening pencils. It was an old article (1850s or something) that stated kids needed to know how to use their pocket knives, not these new- fangled pencil sharpeners. What if the pencil sharpener broke? Learning will come to a halt.
In our time, one example is the calculator. When the batteries go dead, then what? A math teacher said one day, “Kids don’t know whether answers are reasonable or not. If the problem is 10+10 and they get 100, they just write that down because the calculator says so. Obviously they pressed x instead of + but they don’t give it a second thought. The final calculation in a long problem has a preposterous answer but they move on.” He concluded that skipping the grunt work of math left them without a feel for it.
There’s more to learn than there used to be…in this generation, computers and the internet have expanded what you could be expected to learn. That means leapfrogging over some things, like pencil sharpening, to get on with learning what’s more important. Other things, like the math example (or being able to write a coherent paragrah) maybe we can’t gloss over.
I think when other countries have a lot of success, it’s because they’ve slotted the kids into the future very early. If you know at age 5 that the kid is going to be an engineer, you hammer the math and science with that kid. In our system, we leave the decision to the kid and he’s likely to put off the decision for a long time. So he’s pushed into subjects he’ll never need because we don’t know what he’ll need. “You better take chemistry in case you decide to be a doctor,” etc. and the kid ends up picking something totally different. But if we skipped chemistry and the kid decides to become a doctor, then what?
