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

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.
________
yep..I agree with this...

I agree that the problem is the solution that a secular mentality has engendered upon itself. Running from America is what public servants are inherently want to do. Welcome the pension and a hollow dollar to your selfish desire to hide from being productive in a world that eats the fearful and unbelieving... you've tried to re-program my children without my consent and have failed in your incredibly ignorant disregard for God's leadership of free will!!! I must concur that American Business has assimilated your lascivious greed and cootoned to your principles of elitist indifference, so much so that carpenters no longer exist under 40 and the lazy lead the parade of low wages and contempt of the tadesman's talent, skill, will and ingenuity. Homes today are built by incompetent buck passers extrodinaire and applaud one anothers elitist entitlement to have arrived. To compensate for this misdirection of values, your socialist elite public servants have legislated further oversight of the construction industry to further insult the intelligent and propogate further decay of intelligent taxonomy. Speaking of which, none of your public servitude dumbing down my childrens' peers has ever included application of Bloom's observations about the inquistive youthful mind. And yet you find the energy to further insult the well read and spoken with eloquent diatribe. Small wonder the product of your renumeration is self- fulfilling. Why, you can't even teach the Pythagorean Theorum without overcomplicating its simple observations of cosequence, let alone even understand the mathematical perfection of a spiral or share coherently the value s of 3 and 5 as perfect numbers. Even a carpenter worth his salt understands how to plane together a 10/12 roof with a 6/12 roof. Tell me this wise guy...{[a/2]2 +2}/2 = what????? are you intelligent or learned enough to decipher this equation? I use it all the time in building the beaytiful homes you feel so entitled to covet, and yet I'm unworthy of you to enter through the front door as an honored guest in your home. You much rather pursue the attentions of other similarly disaffected hoarders of the public good. Fearful to ply your wares in the open competitive market, you teach by example that honest hard work is the realm of the ignorant and unintelligent fringe of society. I'm not impressed. I am bold enough to be judgementally pre-disposed to offending your spurious sensibilities, if cannot fathom the insult quietly enough and shoot back within one minute with who Bloom is and what his work is titled.

and here you have it folks!!! 20 minutes have passed aand the original author hasn't found a response to my inquisition. This is what I'm hot about. People spouting about how dumb the kids are and realizing that we get what we give.

wouldee,

To be fair, davinci1952 isn't online. He must be busy, it seems like he always gets back when someone posts a reply.

I actually agree with him, but disagree with the wording of the article. I don't believe that American kids are "dumber than dirt", I think they are victims of a terrible school system and the belief by many parents that the TV should raise their children or sometimes even the kids raising themselves.

spider with this i wholeheartedly agree, and besides since the friend is a teacher then grades of students could very well b affecting his judgements, grades have consistently proven to b an inaccurate representation of students progress, i can debate philosophy and politics yet im a highschool dropout, im living proof of the failure of our educational system
no child left behind MY ASS!

and really the only reason im smart is the providing of books and the reading wars of the 90s in schools actually working on me unlike my peers which it gave complexes to

my son is highly intelligent but the school setting is hard for him.If american kids are dumb then something is wrong with the teachers and parents who don't emphasise the importance of a good education.

Your not the only one lizardking, I dropped out, went and took my GED, went to college. The public schools are horrible, it is pathetic when the student is smarter than the teacher and the teacher fails them for it. And what's worse is what they are allowing in schools these days, it's totally disgusting what parents let their kids wear and do now.

there used to be a little cartoon strip in the dailies ... I forget the name of the cartoon strip at the moment....POGO....but one of the characters had a famous one liner that fits this discussion. " I have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us" We are all equally responsible for the consequences of our lives and our society is on us!! It's our watch!! We weren't responsible for the inheritance, just presently responsible for the investment of our public inheritance. Please forgive my anger and frustration. I face the consequences of our plundering of the public good each and every day. I feel it quite vociferously as I watch the inept invade our workforce and inherit the reigns of power, steering the social fabric into an abyss for the sake of a lazy man's pocket of silver. The message of Judas Iscariot has not been buried with him in infamy. Some things do not change. Most things in history deteriorate, as nature displays, but I tire of the weathermen that ply their trade with the obvious. We can tell which way the wind blows without being reminded in aloof and detached terms. Peace, out!!

endoctrination, that is the problem with the school system.
they are educating robots, to support government non-senses without asking why?

TheLonelyWalker,

Two of my kids were forced to watch "An Inconvienent Truth", hardly the material a Republican would want shown to kids. The teachers unions support Democrats for election. We don't have prayer in school. They have suggested teaching sex-ed to kindergardeners. It doesn't seem like George Bush has much to do with the education system. The schools were screwed up before Bush was elected and they will be screwed up after he leaves office. Not every trouble in the world can be laid at his feet.

oh yes they were screwed up b4 bush, in the 90s they were really forcing reading down kids throats and 4 the majority of kids all it did was make them hate books (it worked on me somehow lol) during the bush admin theyve been pushing math instead nad the no child left behind act which really doesnt do crap besides throw money at the problem

sadly public education teaches kids how to play school and how to obey their superiors, neither of which is a skill that develops brain power

spider:
when did I mention the bushy guy?
I just said government non-senses, and I meant the government through out history.

TheLonelyWalker,

What government then? They aren't being taught to obey Bush, he's the head of the nation at this point. The truth is that they are indoctrinated to believe whatever they are told. Children are discouraged from thinking. This really helps the left, because many of their policy positions require that you not think.

Agreed, they are no endoctrinated not to think.
But that helps whomever is in the power, why do u think that we have too many kids coming out of high school rushing to enlist, so they can go to Iraq because they have been endoctrinated with a false patriotism, and they don't even stop to think if that damn war is justified at all.

TheLonelyWalker,

Patriotism is not taught in our schools. Even when I was a kid, I was force fed bullcrap about so much. It took me years to realize that so much of our history is simply lies to make the US look bad. Look at the origins of Thanksgiving as it is taught in school and then look at the true story. They are completely different. We have the diaries and first hand accounts of the pilgrims to go by, but we teach a made up story that is nothing like the truth. There are some fake storys that put the US or certain people into a better light than they would be otherwise. For instance, take the Alamo. The survivors surrendered and were murdered by the Mexican army. But in school, we teach that they fought to the death.

http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/liesmyteachertoldme.php

Read it and hated it. He's a sociology professor with a strong leftward slant. He has a fairly obvious disdain for patriotism, western culture and America.

or a passion for the truth.

Amen to that brother Walker!

Since going back to school a little over a year ago I have had an inside view of the current Education system.

First like the author of the OP, I thought the kids today were not as educated as in the past. As I have been there awhile I can honestly say this is wrong!

The education system today teaches at a rapid pace and covers more material than ever before. Cramming more into a semester than seems possible to complete or retain for long. They are pressured beyond belief!

The kids are smart, very smart, but discipline is lacking. In my opinion and observations this is a home grown problem. Parents coddle their children, and then fight the school system if they try to correct the problem.

Another cause, IMO, is Networking! There are two kids in my curriculum, (Electronic Engineering Technology's), both have Uncles that work for the local Power Co. and are already working with them Part-time.

You think great, but these kids act like they dont need to study and put forth "0" effort to learn the material. Why?, they tell me, we already have a good job that pays good! Both have went through 2 semesters with me and have failed, or just passed with a C, yet they continue to work with the job security made possible by family!

At the same time I see kids who come from families whose parents do not have the connection to offer a "career" with such a good future! Even though these students strive to do well, and their GPA's show it, they have no chance of going to work with such a Co. These jobs are filled with undisciplined poor students merely by the fortune of family!

It is for this reason that I believe Networking is a weakening of society, and another reason for poor results from students in the education system!

Why try, Daddy, momma, or another family member has already secured their future. No matter how stupid they are!