Are kids becoming dumber?

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Kids aren't dumber but schools and families are worse.

I don't remember learning to read but I could by the age of five.

Two hundred years ago the population was 99% literate. Difficult books like "The Deerslayer" and "Moby Dick" were best sellers.
When "The Deerslayer" came out it sold four million copies when the entire population of America was only twenty million.

In 19th century England there were newspapers for the elite and newspapers for "the common man". Even the "low class" newspapers used a greater vocabulary than in mainstream newspapers these days. The Sherlock Holmes stories were serials in the Strand magazine.

For decades there there was an English publication called "The Boy's own Paper"
Most of the stories were written by one man. In the 1960's they told him to "dumb it down" because kids couldn't understand the words he was using. He refused and retired.

When I was nine or ten years old I could easily read books like "Kidnapped", or "Robinson Caruso" or "Alice in Wonderland".

So what is different now? I was the first generation with television. My parents were readers.

Now we have several generations of people who were brought up on TV and hardly ever read a real book in their life.

[quote="number5"

I'm unsure of your source, but I think it was only wealthy white males who could read 200 years ago.[/quote]

In the United States (historically) literacy among the white population was over 90 percent? Why? In order to read Scripture one must know how to read. Parents taught their children to read. Among the black slaves, illiteracy was imposed by the owners to keep the slaves subservient and pacified. Even so some slaves were taught to read by white folks and they taught others.

ruveyn

If you haven't already, I would suggest watching the movie "Idiocracy". It is a comedy but it makes a very very valid point. The intelligent people are busy working and creating and eventually get around to procreating while the "Idiots" are popping out babies at 15. I know mathematically that even if 2 intelligent people procreate the odds of having an intelligent is still only in the 70% range leaving a 30% chance of popping out an idiot. However, when 2 idiots breed, there is only a 30% chance of them having a reasonably intelligent offspring.

Moral of this story, smart people need to get laid more!

As DW has already pointed out, the data points used to judge the "nincompoopiness" of kids is certainly cherry-picked. "Oh, my child can't tie his shoes (because most kids' shoes these days come with velcro straps) or use a can opener (since so many cans come with pull-tops)!"

I'll bet your kid can't use a slide rule, either, or rebuild a carburetor. Odds are fair that unless you grew up on a farm you can't saddle a horse, slaughter a pig, or tan animal hide - all of which were once needed and valued skills. Your grandparents probably couldn't make a dugout canoe or chip arrowheads from flint. And the list goes on...

Dumber? Not really.

Less "educated"? Very likely.

Assume that the average person can hold the same capacity of knowledge from person to person...what we CHOOSE to fill that capacity with is what matters.

If everything went to Hell and you needed to build a community to survive, you'd want a few people skilled at building stuff, a few skilled in medicine, a few skilled in home making skills, etc. All because one person can't be an expert in everything you need to survive. I might know how to grow food, but I don't do it for a living. I'd make mistakes an experienced farmer would avoid.

Kids are being taught a bunch of rubbish and spend a lot of time on stuff that has ZERO life-sustaining value. Their world is fine so long as they can earn a paycheck and get everything they need from a corner store. Take that away and for all their intelligence, they won't know how to do anything to survive.

I don't think the kids of today are "stupid." I do feel they are having their heads filled with junk that will lead to their ultimate demise because nobody is telling them that the garbage they are learning really doesn't work that well in real life. They are encouraged to focus on things utterly trivial while ignoring weightier issues that will affect them and their progeny.

+1 on DW's opinion. I don't think the human brain is changing, just that priorities of knowledge priorities of given skill sets are.

It's called progress.

Why teach someone to use a typewriter when cheap laptops are readily available? It wouldn't make sense, right?

Well then, why teach the new generation of people how to do things in an outdated fashion?

As for independence and doing things on their own, they'll learn that themselves when they're in a situation when they need to be independent.

BTW, for the record, I haven't seen any evidence of my peers being stupid. They're immature, yeah, but not stupid.

Since I am absolutely certain that I've heard average IQ scores have been steadily increasing, I checked to see what the other poster might be referring to when he noted that test scores have been decreasing. That data seems to be the SAT scores, those apparently have been on a slow decline.

Not all students take the SAT, so what that means about the population as a whole is difficult to say. In addition, what is tested on the SAT is rather specific, so what that means about knowledge as a whole is difficult to say. Is it easier than ever to let your brain stagnate and not choose to fulfill one's intellectual potential? I would have to say yes, that is probably true. Does that mean that all kids are doing just that, as in choosing to stagnate? I'm not willing to say that. I see kids actively fighting those forces in their lives, and wanting to engage with the world in meaningful and stimulating ways.

Rather an interesting conumdrum, to have children with a greater capacity to learn than in generations past, and more ways to waste it than in generations past. But today's kids are not dumb ... that I've already attested to. What they need to know is very, very different than it has been before.

How many of us parents call our kids into the room when the computer acts up, or when we can't figure out the TV remote? I do both.

The young generation may be clever but are they skilled? How many young people could build a house today compared to young people in the 1950s?