American kids, dumber than dirt
Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who's seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career.
And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be.
His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying.
My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.
Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.
No, my friend takes it all a full step - or rather, leap - further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.
We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.
It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking - and nearly hopeless - dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.
Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn't really hit home.
He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."
But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.
It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.
It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault. They're merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.
Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.
Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don't arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.
This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they've ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems.
I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are.
Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?
My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America - and many more who aren't - now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?
As for the rest, well, the dystopian evidence seems overwhelming indeed, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better.
What, too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/10/24/notes102407.DTL&feed=rss.mmorford
And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be.
His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying.
My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.
Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.
No, my friend takes it all a full step - or rather, leap - further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.
We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.
It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking - and nearly hopeless - dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.
Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn't really hit home.
He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."
But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.
It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.
It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault. They're merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.
Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.
Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don't arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.
This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they've ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems.
I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are.
Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?
My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America - and many more who aren't - now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?
As for the rest, well, the dystopian evidence seems overwhelming indeed, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better.
What, too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/10/24/notes102407.DTL&feed=rss.mmorford
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quote:Originally posted by dan55362
Whats funny is that young people are raised and taught mainly by the generation before them. You would think that the older smarter generation would have been better teachers. So this only leads me to believe we live in world where all generations are dumbazzes.
This, (and Mr. Nunn's post about parenting), is the heart of the matter.
As our generation of intellectual giants has blossomed, we have become so egocentric that we waived the responsibility of raising our own children. We were gone. Off doing what we wanted to do rather than supporting and teaching our children.
There are way more wonderfully bright kids out there than the numbskulls, they just think differently than do you. Thier world is nothing close to yours.
Take some of your preciious time and get to know a teenager. Chances are if you don't like your teenager or young person, it's more to do with you than them.0 -
I agree the parents are the primary teacher. The instill the learning habits at an early age.
Now what about the home schooled? The religious don't support the theory of evolution but rather some fairy tale creation myth. This destroys logic, refutation of dogma, and scientific method all in one fatal swoop.
Home schooling ensures your kids will never be any smarter than the parent. The lemmings are heading toward the cliff and don't even realize it.0 -
In order to be able to teach you have to have students who want to learn and some level of respect from those students. There is very little of either in todays society. Its gotten so bad even kindergardeners have no fear or respect for their teachers (or parents for that matter). How do you teach that? 0 -
this is stupid. i've argued this case before. kids are getting smarter! they are bigger wusses, but much smarter with all the technology and historical discoveries.... you guys are just learning to wine right along side them! [:0] 0 -
The last few high-school and college aged kids we hired here at the radio station have turned out to be WAY above average in terms of smarts, common sense and manners. All is not lost. 0 -
You guys cant forget the No Child Left Behind Act, which basically tells schools if all the kids dont graduate, they lose funding...how the hell does that help!? For God's sake, my US History class I had in fall 2003, my teacher pulled down a map on the wall and it actually read USSR! How can they be expected to maintain funding, and pump out well educated students when they have 15 year old maps! My history book then didnt even get to the Gulf War! 0 -
every student should be crammed with AMERICAN history ...why & how democracy is so important & be required upon graduation to serve some length of time in military.... 0 -
Want to know the REAL dirty secret of American education? America spends EIGHT times as much money educating the mentally retarded as it does educating the gifted. You read that right.
My school is a good example. The special education department has fourteen people in it, seven teachers and seven instructional assistants. Two of those teachers have only four kids on their caseload, and each of those teachers has a full-time assistant. That's two educators for four children. Of these eight kids, perhaps two or three are going to be able to grown up and hold some sort of a job in a sheltered working situation. The remainder are going to be live out the rest of their days at home or in a county facility. One of these eight kids has a personal assistant at a cost to the county of about $40,000 a year. This child has massive brain damage and sleeps half the day. The other half of the day she drools and blinks. There's no evidence that she's at all cognizant of her surroundings.
Oh, and our school has one, just one teacher for the gifted. The very smartest kids, the kids who are the best and the brightest, get 45 minutes with a specialist once a week.
That is the real dirty little secret of the American educational system. Think of it in any other terms, and the absurdity only grows: imagine the school's football coaches carefully culling out the 60 most talented, fastest, strongest students, and the 20 most utterly inept, clumsy, feeble students. And then the coaches spend 90% of their time working with clumsy students to get them to even recognize a football and to tie their cleats. The 60 most talented get a few minutes of the coaches' time a week, and then are sent out on Friday night to actually play the game. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it?0 -
I don't know much about todays kids other than my grandkids. Oldest grandaughter is 14, she has more common sense than her parents. However, she can't read and spell very well and will tell you so. But she is very observant and has been since she was about 2. We don't worry about her, because we know she will succeed on her common sense and wits. The two youngest grandkids (3 and 7) could count to 100 and spell simple words soon after they could talk. This is because their mother (middle daughter) has bi-polar disorder and can't work. She works with them daily and it shows.
I guess my point is that, like a lot of us older folks, children who begin learning as soon as pracital at home get a jump start. With both parents working, young ones seem to get behind and never catch up. Many my age never walked through a school door until we were 6 or 7. Now they start with pre-school, head start and kindergarten.
Another thing; at 18, I was probably like many of the mall rats that people throw off on. I couldn't poor pee out of a boot. In fact, I sincerely believe that my dad went to his grave thinking that I wouldn't amout to a hill of beans. Somewere in my late twenties, I came around and have been quite successful. Was it because my mom didn't work and started teaching me at home? Or maybe I was just lucky.
Any hoo, I can learn anything I need to know right here on GB-GD forum.[8D]0 -
quote:this is stupid. i've argued this case before. kids are getting smarter! they are bigger wusses, but much smarter with all the technology and historical discoveries.... you guys are just learning to wine right along side them!
Yes and no. They are very knowledgeble of technology buyttake that technology away and most seem dunb as a box of rocks.0 -
alot of these kids can't even read a tape measure leaving public schools. 0 -
I turned out reasonably well, and I see a lot of kids today that are smarter, more involved and more focused than I was coming out of high school. People have been pissing about the "younger generation" since the cave days.
In truth, it is hard to imagine anyone or anything dumber than W.
Maybe a rock.0 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
here is a good video for you about this subject0 -
Great video...I agree with most everything said in there...im in my fourth year of college, hoping to graduate this spring. I changed my major half way through... 0
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