Sometimes it helps to look outside of the Norwalk universe to see what other issues are being chatted about. I picked up this story in the “dumbed down” generation, because it seemed somewhat fitting, after a few days of the BOE debate swirling in my head, that I needed to get a refresher, a reason to to keep writing about the BOE and why its important to vote for reform, vote for change and vote for anything but the status quo. I found it.

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

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

…

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.”

There was a beginning to the article, which you just have to click the link because its worth getting the set up. But I pause here, because everything that has come from the Corda administration reeks of the weighing the calf twice, but never feeding 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.

I’ve taught techie courses at the college level. I can attest to this. A student once argued with me over the necessity of writing essay questions in a network class because no one has to write anything any more. And this was 7 years ago.

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.

We have to stop accepting a failed education system. It starts with not accepting a failed BOE.

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.

We can do better. Read the whole thing.

source: SFGate.com, American kids, dumber than dirt
Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history, By Mark Morford, October 24, 2007