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I agree that the column was lame, but this is an issue near my heart.
I think it's certainly possible that as teachers age, we lose the pop cultural connections that make us able to appreciate how nonintellectual kids are still smart.
When I was 25, say, I would have understood the intelligence that it took for a kid to connect and make a somewhat witty comment about a TV show or band that teenagers watched or listened too because I still knew the bands or shows; whereas today, maybe I'm more likely to just think he's just dumb because my interests have changed and I don't know his bands or shows. So some of the intergenerational condemnation stuff may just be a reflection of the distance in non-academic matters as teachers age. We teachers may be predisposed to think the kids we're teaching at the end of our careers are dumb.
But, even with that possibility, here's what I see and I believe it could be objectively measured: I think there's a bigger gap between the top kids and what they learn, reflected by AGDee and MysticCat's personal experience and what I see my gifted or AP students know*, and what all the other kids, who probably make up the vast majority of kids in public schools, know, which often seems to be dangerously close to absolutely nothing or nothing academic anyway.
I think even the lowest achievers know how to play complicated computer games and how to use every gadget on their cell phones, so they do know some stuff and have some skills. What they know just isn't usually stuff that I think it's important to know in terms of being an educated voter, citizen, or employee.
They don't know much and they can't think critically or logically about most issues. (I know we all have logical lapses, but they can't even be lead through ideas presented in a syllogistic or proof form and then apply what they've learned. God forbid that you show them more than one way to do something and expect them to recognize the best method for what they are doing on future occasions.)
And it seems to me that the kids I taught 10 year ago or really even five years ago were better off. They could do tasks that my present students cannot or require much more assistance in doing. And you can also see the same kind of dumbing it down if you look at the textbook published for the same course over a span of ten or fifteen years. The reading level is lower and the expectations for what they kids will master are lower.
*the top kids are three years ahead in math and seem to at least have been introduced to much more complex material in science, history and English. Sometimes, I'm a little disappointed in the accuracy of what they've been taught, but that's not a reflection on the kids.
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