Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history

[DaemonSeid]

American kids, dumber than dirt



By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, October 24, 2007

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.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...otes102407.DTL **

**is that better??


if there are any teachers here...please comment.

[KSig RC]

Nice rant - it would be nice if he were to, y'know, support his views with actual facts instead of anecdotes . . . nah, that would be too intelligent and scientific and would completely lack irony.

This kind of article is written, in one form or another, every generation - OH NO ELVIS'S CROTCH WILL CAUSE ABORTIONS AND POPULATION WILL SHRINK.

It's mindless and lacks journalistic integrity. Prove your points, you ignorant douche columnist.

[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by KSig RC

Nice rant - it would be nice if he were to, y'know, support his views with actual facts instead of anecdotes . . . nah, that would be too intelligent and scientific and would completely lack irony.

Exactly. This kind of stuff is basically only good for lining the birdcage.

BTW, Daemon, the link doesn't work. But you might want to note the GC policy on quoting copyrighted material as found in the Welcome to the News and Politics Forum thread.

[AlethiaSi]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...&sn=002&sc=577

thats the link, i had to search for it, but easy to find

[AGDee]

I can give plenty of anecdotes that contradict the statements that this man makes based on my own observations of my middle school aged kids and their friends. I see quite the opposite. When I was in kindergarten, we played, we learned our colors, learned our alphabet and pretty much just learned how to share and be away from home. When my kids hit kindergarten, the teacher was teaching reading skills. They have started everything earlier than we did, from handwriting to multiplication tables. There are some basic things that they didn't have to do, like memorize state capitals, but then I thought to myself "It's so easy for them to look that up, why memorize it?" And, they definitely learned how to use a ruler, compass and protractor. The honors math classes are starting earlier also. It used to be that the highest math track started algebra in 8th grade, now they are starting in 7th grade. With technology, the amount of information to be learned has increased exponentially. Do you know how much more they know about DNA and Genetics than in 1981 when I had Biology II?

This generation has access to so much more information than we did. We would open an encyclopedia to get information for an essay paper. They surf the web and find more in depth information than any encyclopedia would give them.

I'm not worried at all. I observe some of these kids and find them to be engaging and ambitious with a good social conscience as well. I trust them with my future.

[DSTCHAOS]

Yikes. Cliff Notes.

[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by AGDee

I can give plenty of anecdotes that contradict the statements that this man makes based on my own observations of my middle school aged kids and their friends. I see quite the opposite.

I agree. I'd bet my 10-year-old understands the Theory of Relativity better than this columnist. (He understands it better than I do -- he decided he wanted to know about it, did the research and left me behind.)

[UGAalum94]

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.

[AKA_Monet]

AGDee and MysticCat--that's because you all are good parents...

But I understand what both parties mean.

This past summer I had a young teenage "girl" to me that I was mentoring, showing her how to determine blood pressure on mice and surgeries on rats. She took copious notes, followed ever direction I gave her, was able to make her own chemical solutions and present her work to the "public" intelligently. Her mother was just so happy her daughter could have this chance. But, what I think it was that this young lady had gone to private school and several members of her family sacrificed her going to that school.

Meanwhile, I have had students, that would take the stipend money and sleep with their new found little boy- or girlfriends in the dorm. There would not show up for work or show up late, they would talk back to me, fall asleep at work, put there iPODs on and tune out.

Then some of these same kids became 1st quarter freshmen, let's just say that the retention rate is extremely low for the 2nd quarter...

These kids had gone to a public school system school. I am not mocking the parents or schools. But we all must make a difference in every child's life. Maybe make a tax credit for tutoring young people for work and employers get extra bonuses if more of their employees spend time with school aged children? I don't know?

I do know about some my teaching skills, and I can motivate college-age kids and middle school kids into science interests.

[DeltAlum]

Originally Posted by KSig RC

This kind of article is written, in one form or another, every generation.

Exactly.

The sky is falling, film at eleven...

[AGDee]

I think there has always been a significant difference between the AP/College Prep level kids and the "remedial" kids though. I remember being completed astounded when I had to take 12th grade Civics. It was pretty much the only class through all of high school that all levels took together and I hated it. I couldn't believe how unmotivated and "stupid" some of the students in there were.

One thing that does concern me is that, as we move away from being an agricultural and manufacturing society, there are fewer jobs for those who are less intellectually inclined. Yes, we still need carpenters, plumbers, etc., but we have automated a lot of things.

In Michigan, they have replaced the 11th grade statewide test (MEAP) with the ACT and some other subtests that they've made up to supplement it. I think it's ludicrous to have every student in every high school take the ACT. It is standardized for college bound kids. Not all kids are or should be, college bound.

I struggle when talking with a co-worker of mine whose daughter is academically challenged. She has some severe learning disabilities and her mother spends an inordinate amount of time assisting her so that she can keep her head above water. She talks constantly about getting her daughter to do well enough to be able to go to college and is convinced that they will provide a level of support equal to what she now provides for her daughter. I would like to believe that, if it were my daughter, I would focus on her strengths and encourage her to get training in a career that would utilize her strengths, even if it didn't involve college, rather than try to fight the way her brain is wired. I worry that she is setting her daughter up to fail.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that there have always been "tiers" of academic achievement. Some people simply aren't at the same level as others. Some can get close through very hard work, but for some, they can learn with very little effort. I don't think that has changed much. What may be changing is how successful one can be if they struggle in an academic setting because there aren't as many well paying jobs available these days for thsoe who aren't well educated.

[DeltAlum]

AGDee,

I think you're mostly correct -- except that I think there are a lot of opportunities left in our society for non-academically inclined people. Detroit/Michigan is probably not the best place to judge, given the sturggles of the auto industry, but there are many more service industry jobs -- ones that aren't being filled. The real problem, in my view, is the low pay for those positions.

As for your friend and her daughter, her mother is in for a rude shock, I fear, if she thinks all colleges and their professors will offer the support that she gets in public schools.

It does seem a cop out to make every student take what is a college entrance type test, however augmented. There are a lot of kids who have no interest and no business in college.

Our oldest and youngest graduated high school and college with high academic honors, but our middle had no interest in education at all and went to "hair school" and really loves being a colorist. She would certainly not have made it in college.

Parents need to realize that some kids just aren't meant for the university.

[AGDee]

Originally Posted by DeltAlum

AGDee,

I think you're mostly correct -- except that I think there are a lot of opportunities left in our society for non-academically inclined people. Detroit/Michigan is probably not the best place to judge, given the sturggles of the auto industry, but there are many more service industry jobs -- ones that aren't being filled. The real problem, in my view, is the low pay for those positions.

Parents need to realize that some kids just aren't meant for the university.

Yes, my concern is that people can't support themselves on the pay they receive for those service level jobs. And you're right, Detroit/Michigan are hurting badly these days because there was once the attitude "You don't need to go to college, just get a job on the line" and that used to work fine (and those people made more money than a lot of college grads too!).

[Taualumna]

And there are those parents who're proud of their kids even if the kids have flunked every single course they took the previous year. Mr. Tau works with a woman whose son AND daughter who failed every single course (with the exception of physical education) last year. This mom, however, is still convinced that both her kids will be star athletes, and will get a scholarship to a US school. The mom is doing nothing to get the kids' grades up. She isn't hiring tutors or sending them to academic camps in the summer. Nothing. According to Mr. Tau, she seems to be PROUD of her kids.

[nikki1920]

My parents instilled college in me from a young age, because they both went later in life. My mother and I were actually in undergrad at the same time. I was always in advanced classes because I ENJOYED school. I had great teachers.

My high school was the academic magnet for the county at the time, and it was assumed that most of us would be going to 4 year colleges or at least some trade school. For those of us who didnt, they were STILL given the basics and were encouraged to be strong in them.

I do think that No Child Left Behind has completely screwed up education--there is WAY too much emphasis on testing and scores and not enough on long term retention. My child is able to read above her grade level (4th, she's at 5th grade, second month), and knows that if she doesn't know something, she needs to LOOK IT UP, not expect her parents to give her the answers. She is always encouraged to give everything her best effort, ask questions if she needs to, and ask for help the second she needs it. Not everything can be found on the computer.

I am scared for this generation. How you leave high school without knowing how to write a term paper is beyond me, but I had to write a 20 page final in 11th grade. I took 3 AP classes my senior year. These kids don't know how to use an encyclopedia, how to look up books at the library, etc. It scares me. Yes, computers are EVERYWHERE, but you still need to know what to do when the computers go down.