Has school destroyed your creativity and self-confidence? I'm working on a book called Recovering From School, to help you heal the damage caused. Join the Patreon or Newsletter to be notified about updates. Paid Patreon members will get early draft previews, as well as a free digital copy when it's done.
American kids, dumber than dirt
Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history
I 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.
Posted by: Soul
Riser
Source Article
Where to next? Pick one!
- Check out the Alternatives to School section
- Join our Patreon
- Sign up for our newsletter
Posted in: News on May 11, 2008 @ 12:00 AM
Tags: School
If you like what we're doing here, you can become a Patron and sign up for our newsletter!
This article exaggerates quite a bit...I don't believe that 99% of today's youth are idiots. There are some imbeciles, of course, but there are also many intelligent youth- it's just that the idiots stand out more. The young generation aren't dumb for the most part, just ignorant and misled. And yes, this ignorance is largely the school system's fault.
i agree completely. i have to say, however, that it is fuckin hilarious that kids dont know how to use a ruler. lol.
seriously though, yes, the idiots DO tend to stand out more. the majority usually does. the intelligent ones, who want to go off and do something, well, intelligent, are usually punished because they arent doing what they are told. they are used as an example of "inappropriate behavior."
I agree this article is exaggerating quite a bit. I also see a couple of other problems with it.
The first one is, that the article is very fatalistic. Basically, it's saying that if you watched TV before age 6 and if you're stuck in a public school-tough luck, nothing you can do, you're doomed to be stupid forever. I disagree with that, with enough will and courage you can further yourself through self-education and grow independently of factors such as schooling or parents.
Another thing is, it says there is a problem, but basically puts the fault on the student. To an extent I agree with that (I'd never trust school with my education), but on the other hand I think it should take a deeper thought about how the schools and their employees (teachers) are fulfilling the goal of education. The fact that 8th graders don't know how to use a ruler is pitiful, so fix it! If you do nothing but brainwash for eight years, what do you expect? Some kids will survive and learn outside of school, but a lot won't. So take a ruler and show them. The article doesn't show kids are stupid, it shows schools aren't fulfilling their goal. And that's just another reason to shut them down.
Finally, the article uses the words "stupid", "dumb", and "uneducated" synonymously. That is not the case. "Stupid" and "dumb" indicate potential. "Uneducated" marks the progress already made.
it took them this long to figure this out? sheesh, what are they? blind and deaf?
Another thought-the teacher teaches at one school. You can't make a conclusion about the whole nation based on one school.
:O can i post this on my blog?
Sure, go ahead. As long as you link to the original or something :)
This is crap.
I watched Tv before I was 4 and my brain hasn't haywired.
I'm used a computer alot and my brain hasn't haywired.
If someone wants to be dumb, it's their choice. Not a cell phone's or a TV's.
I guess I'm screwed.
no they arnt only most of them are. and those are the bullies and other people. but the intelligent ones are the ones who get yelled at for improvising or doing something a better way instead of following the teacher like mindless robots(the dumb ones are mindless)