One day, sometime close to the ungodly time of 5:50 a.m., I turned on the television machine and put on the local news, hoping to find some ridiculous story that would help me get my bearings. My prayers were shortly answered: Middle school children were, in an effort to get high, choking each other to the point of unconsciousness, which I found to be the stupidest thing I had heard in a long time.
I should say now, before I continue, that I am not asserting that I am some kind of genius—I solve Rubik’s cubes with a hammer, and I’ve watched the movie “Pet Sematary” about a thousand times. I also feel kind of bad for making such broad, generalized statements on the intelligence of a group as a whole, but there is no other way for my brain to quantify this. It’s breathing! Not breathing makes you die! No one should have to remind you to breathe, or tell you that not breathing is a bad idea. Are kids getting progressively stupider?
To quote Reverend Lovejoy from “The Simpsons,” “Short answer ‘yes’ with an ‘if,’ long answer ‘no’ with a ‘but’.” No, kids’ actions don’t seem to indicate that they are any more stupid than they have ever been. They run headlong into traffic. They sniff glue. They make homemade bombs. I still do some of these things, and it’s in no way evidence of the decline of western civilization. Even choking each other to get high is still in the realm of feasible child/adolescent behavior, as the drive to explore the world often leads to really, really moronic ends. It seems absurd in retrospect, as I feel that the knowledge I have amassed over my limited lifetime would be enough for me to decide that certain actions are potentially too perilous to engage in.
However, if you were to make an assessment on the lacking brain power of the youth of today from an educational standpoint, you may find a more tangible argument. The US’s rankings in math, science and reading are, compared to the rest of the world, mediocre, with the Program on International Student Assessment (PISA) ranking American fifteen year olds 35 out of 57 in competing countries in its 2006 study.
Declining test scores could be blamed on a number of factors, but western society’s need for instantaneous information surely has played a role in the dimming of minds. People seem to be relying more and more on the internet as a source of quick, cursory information gathering. While this is definitely a good thing in that it allows people access to tons of information, it also seems like it simultaneously contributes to a lack of knowledge. Knowing something versus looking it up and instantly receiving the answer are two different things, and I think that as more and more people grow up using the internet as a crutch, it will continue to adversely affect learning potential.
Kids aren’t stupid. They’re just idiots. How much knowledge the next generation retains seems to be more of a commentary on how they fare against the shiny, colorful hurdles society has set up for them, rather than the deadness of their brains.
