Subject:  American kids, dumber than dirt
Date:  Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:28:03 -0700 (PDT)
American kids, dumber than dirt
Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest
pile of idiots in U.S. history

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/10/24/notes102407.DTL

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.



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