Because I Can

I thought it was just sportswriters, but now apparently anyone that writes for newspapers can be stupid (HT: Tim).

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.

Cell phones? What have cell phones done to destroy the intellectual makeup of young people? Because they can't sneak away from their parents as easily? Oh, I get it, they use abbreviations instead of write out entire words in text messages. MaB if U tried 2 txt real fast u wood 2. At least they're efficient. Sometimes.

As for TV exposure, that's arguable, because you can find some links, but merely watching TV doesn't make one that much dumber. But the iPod thing, that's clearly the sign of an old man ranting. "Those dang kids listening to their music all the time! Back in my day, you listened to the same songs everyone else did on your transistor radio, and that's if you were lucky."

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.

So kids don't do scouts anymore? That seems to be your complaint. But what about this stuff, identify basic plants? How basic do you mean? Poison Ivy (that sounds more like a cry for us to all be boy scouts)? Handle a tool? Yeah, why don't those kids take shop class? And they can't build anything. These are the children of today, look at that crap! But here it gets good, on why the system is broken.

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.

Amazing how people believe their own hyperbole. Fast food loses its appeal as tastes mature and kids appreciate better food, particularly after college life. As for ruling a stupid class of subjects, that actually is harder, because there is the difficulty on their part of actually executing your commands. The War in Iraq could have turned out differently if the occupation was better planned before the start of the war - the invasion itself was brilliant, but while we've gotten better at military conflict, we haven't gotten that much better at occupation and establishing new governments. As for passing laws telling them that sex is bad, that was done centuries ago, actually, and striking down anti-sodomy laws is really a rather recent phenomenon. And I can't remember any laws suggesting that TV is good, or for that matter that God knows all. Again, secularization is a recent phenomenon, as religious education was actually a significant motivation for the first public schools. But enough about facts. Let's look at a Jayson Stark style argument.

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.

Let's just take his word for it, despite the fact that you may actually have evidence to suggest that the future isn't completely full of idiots, or at least that it's not more full of idiots than before. I mean, it's not like you could actually do research and determine whether a random sample of young successful people had a public school education, etc. You're a newspaper columnist, your job is to give the people what they want. And what they want is for you to bash the kids, because the kids have better things to do than waste time reading a newspaper. What a load of garbage.

Labels: FJM Style rip, Losers