I know someone who is very pessimistic about today’s youth. He thinks them lazy, morally lax and criminally inclined. I am looking for evidence of the opposite. Please help me with some relevant statistics.
Are kids smarter or better educated? Are they less likely to have out-of-wedlock babies? Are they less criminal? More likely to volunteer? Etc.
If you have any ideas, please help me stand up for today’s youth.
Try googling for studies that show they’re less racist- I remember seeing a rash of them a few months back.
Violent crimes committed by everyone (including teens) are declining. (I have trouble finding specific trendlines for teens).
Teenagers are volunteering at a greater rate than adults, and a greater rate than they have at any point since 1974 (the earliest year I could find a stat for–this stat is 7 years old).
How’s that for starters?
Measuring education is difficult: along some axes, kids today are doing worse. However, I’ll put my third graders up against any 1970s third graders when it comes to accessing online research, using a spreadsheet, or using a simple computer language like LOGO. They’ve got skill sets unheard of among previous generations, and that’s only counting academic skill sets.
Keep in mind, though, that just as teens tend to be self-absorbed and poor at assessing their own competence, older people tend to be self-absorbed and poor at assessing teens. That’s part of the human condition. Your friend can’t help his dislike of today’s youth: it’s part of his biology to be a grumpy old man, just the life stage he’s in.
Yeah, him and Socrates both. “Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
I think the internet has given kids access to opportunities that were rare for past generations. Obviously many kinds don’t use the oppostunities that are available. But those who are using them are able to go farther than their peers could have fifty years ago.
For an accurate ,scientific lab test, you would need to somehow take a hundred thousand kids from today and from the past , and place them in the same situation and then compare their behavior.
Obviously not too practical…
But there is one “lab test” that might give a meaningful comparison: the army.
Take 100 thousand soldiers from Vietnam, and from Iraq/Afganistan.
Yeah, the kids are alright.
IQ scores keep going up and up over time. It is known as the Flynn Effect and it applies to almost any kind of broad standardized test. Your friend should be thankful that he hasn’t been teleported to today as his 13 year old self. He might find that his school bus today is a lot shorter than the one he remembered.
That’s not a real Socrates (well, Socrates-via-Plato) quote, is it? Or is it?
There was a thread on that exact quote here a while back, seems to have concluded it’s not.
I remember hearing a similar quote by Hitler, as related by Yoko Ono. I doubt the veracity of that, too.
My favourite author looked for quotes like this through the ages. To narrow it down, he looked for the year 83 in every century (the article was written in 1983). He found sources in every century claiming todays youth was more dumb, lazy and cynical then in the writer’s youth. Let me emphasize that: people have clamed this in 83 BC, 83 AD, the year 183, and so on untill 1983.
As an aside, he also found articles lamenting the rich getting richer and the poor getting poored. And that there were no more real summers or real winters like in the olden days.
Cite?
By the way, as president Lincoln famously said, a Snopes-style homepage just for keeping track of the thousands of fake quotes out there would be pretty neat.