How America is Dumbing Down the Next Generation (2012)
thefiscaltimes.com
thefiscaltimes.com
If anything, based on what I have seen, the next generation will be shockingly smarter, more adept at fact-checking, much better at focusing and multi-tasking, much more disillusioned about institutionalized education and much more interested in self-directed learning (with much more options to do so)
But, will there be more smarter people? No. The reality is that all my friends and I could program the blinking VCR clock when our parents were few and far between in the 80s. Today it's the middle schoolers who have Arduino, Raspberry Pi and are writing apps they're running on VPS and IaaS. The game has shifted, but the average consumer is no "smarter".
I had a conversation with a neuro Dr. once and he told me to think of your brain like an iceberg, one that melts as you get older or mess with it via externalities. Your mental capacity is reflected in the number of penguins that fit on that iceberg, and when you consume and learn other penguins get pushed off. We're not "smarter" but we no longer require the penguins that help us hunt our food. This is why over consumption of data you don't want or need is counter productive to your "smarts".
Well, at the time they merely replaced those skills with learning how to drive a car.
But, in a future where you won't have to replace previous skills with anything (e.g self driving cars, calculator vs having to know basic math in your head etc) it can be argued that it can lead into a general dumbness.
Some people will say that it will "free resources for higher level learning" etc, but in all probabillity it will just infantilize most people, a la "Brave New World". We already have huge resources for higher level learning and most people just spend their time watching 3 hours TV and day and learning celebrity gossip on the internet.
>If anything, based on what I have seen, the next generation will be shockingly smarter, more adept at fact-checking, much better at focusing and multi-tasking, much more disillusioned about institutionalized education and much more interested in self-directed learning
A few perhaps. For the majority it will be the same ever increasing dumbness that has been going on for decades.
Do you have evidence that it's increasing? Maybe there have just always been dumb people. Of course you can point to amazing discoveries or great literature from the past, but that only represents a tiny slice of the population. And we're still doing science, still writing books, etc.
For those kind of things they is no hard evidence. One either sees that happening through historical changes, or does not. But there are lot of secondary indications.
For example the books we're writing don't compare at all favorably to past works.
Including the most cherished books of our era. Whereas literature, poerty, etc was constantly replenishing it's stock for centuries, there has been nothing like what we had even 50 years ago.
Same for the fine arts -- there have been no great new art movements since pop art (which even that was a lame immitation of older ideas). Same (and worse) for philosophy.
As for science, after the low hanging fruit (which demanded huge breakthroughs, like Newton's, Darwin's, Maxwell's, Einstein's, Cantor's, Turing's etc) have been picked, there's mostly boring incremental work -- we might as well have had stopped doing science. It's mostly engineering these days.
Science is an interesting one. Perhaps we have already made most of the big leaps in understanding the natural world. But that doesn't imply that scientists now are less intelligent than scientists 'back then'. I'd argue that it takes more knowledge and work to make even seemingly 'minor' discoveries. Besides anything else, we have to understand all that past work before we can build on it.
You can objectively see that the requirements to get an A are lower in terms of knowledge of facts and methods than they were, say, 30 years ago.
I'm somewhat playing Devil's advocate here - I don't like the idea that exams are getting less rigorous either. But it's important not to overstate the problem.
The thing is when it's possible for tons of people to put in perfect papers you aren't really testing the depth of knowledge out there. You're measuring things like mistakes and compliance. You need to have more challenge in papers to really learn what people know or don't know. When it becomes almost pass/fail easy then more As doesn't really suggest people are getting smarter, just they are fitting the process of the exam better. I remember when 65% was the A mark. This was because they were hard. Nobody was expected to get a perfect score or near perfect score.
The thing is people attack each leg of the stool in isolation: don't overstate grade inflation; exams are just as hard they test different things; anecdotal evidence from hiring managers of the lack of skills of those entering the workforce; comparative league tables of international school age people (where we're backsliding); and just the general interaction with people over years and seeing less and less knowledge in graduating classes (anecdotal)... sure you can attack each for different reasons. But at some point the weight of evidence becomes compelling to reasonable people. The education system and other things in society that contribute to kids' pre-adulthood learning (family, tv, etc.) are clearly showing a decline in their ability to deliver young adults with solid education and skills in large numbers, over the decades.
Sure there are outliers and this board is full of them. But the complacency on this topic we all show by throwing out invalid arguments like "people have always complained about declining standards" is disturbing because once you pass a certain threshold it's damn hard to fix the problem.
The issue, as I see it, is that there are ever more jobs requiring intelligence, and ever fewer that don't. Employers complain about the shortage of people with technical skills because they need more of them, not because there are fewer than there were in the past.
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In the United Kingdom, a study by Flynn (2009) found that tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period. For the upper half of the results the performance was even worse. Average IQ scores declined by six points.
This one is wrong. According to current research, the more practice we have at multi-tasking, the better we think we are at at, and the worse our actual performance is on the task we're supposed to be doing. Therefore we're raising a generation that will do worse, but will be unaware of it.
The next generation will be just fine.
Writing DID have a negative impact on the directness and vividness of memory of pre-writing civilizations, and the role that memory played there.
To use a somewhat crude analogue, Plato was speaking of a phenomenon akin to what we have today, where any idiot with an internet connection can play the know-it-all in conversation, not by having studied a subject and absorbed it, but by just looking it up on Wikipedia to get a shallow quote.
This, which we have all witnessed on online forums, also holds for written books. Yes, they can help solidify memory and pass it over to the next generations. But they also served as an easy shortcut to information, compared to memory (which takes years and experience to create). While everybody can aknowledge what was gained, few (like Plato) could see what was lost in the process.
Sounds reasonable, but then again, the work of philosophy (or thought in general) is to question what sounds reasonable.
For example, why should we have to be that proud of the "trajectory of human civilization since then"?
Sure, we since had computers and brain surgery.
We also had nazi concentration camps, 2 wolrd wars, colonialism, Stalinism, the nuclear arms race, and global warming. Oh, and Justin Bieber.
If a WW III thing was to happen in the next 50 years, taking most of the population with it, I'm sure more than a few people will think "Damn, we were better off before all that technological shit -- perhaps even writing enabled us for more that we were good to handle".
People one hundred years ago also took every convenience available. Maybe your average turn of the century citizen could use a radio, but few could build or repair one.
Information access and understanding is WAY higher in general than ever before. Anyone who can use a google map can use a regular map, they'll just be frustrated by the lack of information that was never there. People rely on these new sources of information that augment the old, limited information. It's not replacing anything.
Let's say tomorrow the stable life you have collapses. A war, a meteor strikes, riots -- whatever. You have no electricity anymore, no super-markets, no gas, and everybody is trying to survive.
What exactly survival skills do you have in a situation like this? If you are a fat, lazy-ass programmer, are you any worth at all top people trying to survive there?
Your ancestor from 5-6 generations ago, living in some log cabin, could probably be ten times as useful and knowledgable about what had to be done.
Something was lost in the process from man surviving using several skills to couch potato programmer that has everything served to him on a silver platter.
Now, you might find those kind of things unlikely to ever be needed again, but you can see how it makes sense at ONE level at least.
(What I described, btw, is a quite common theme in literature and movies).
I wonder if a lot of folks live in too much of a bubble of people like them to really understand this. I don't know what other explanation there can be because I see this around me all the time.