Are We On The Verge Of The Dumbest Generation?

[Longstreet]

I read this today and it had some interesting insite to the cost of allowing children to be so 'tech' savy. Yeah they can multitask like never before, but at what cost? Have a read and see what you think.

Macleans Magazine November 7, 2008

Dumbed Down
The troubling science of how technology is rewiring kids’ brains

For almost three decades, the Arrowsmith School, a small Toronto private school housed in a converted mansion on the edge of Forest Hill, has been treating kids with learning disabilities. When its founder, Barbara Arrowsmith Young, developed the school’s patented program in the late ’70s, it was with a first-hand knowledge of the frustration and stigma of living with cognitive deficits. Growing up, Young struggled with dyslexia. She had difficulties with problem-solving and visual and auditory memory. Finding connections between things and ideas was a challenge, and telling time was impossible—she couldn’t grasp the relationship between the big hand and the little hand. Traditional learning programs taught her tricks to compensate for her deficits, but they never improved her ability to think. “I walked around in a fog,” she says. But as a young psychology graduate, Young came across the brain maps created by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who studied soldiers who had suffered head wounds. Using these maps, she identified 19 unique learning dysfunctions and the brain regions that control them. Her theory was that a person can transform weak areas of the brain through repetitive and targeted cognitive exercises, and she was right. Today, this notion of brain plasticity—which she intuited three decades ago—is established wisdom in neuroscience.

Over the past decade, the Arrowsmith program has been proven so effective that schools throughout Canada and the U.S. have adopted it. In 2003, a report commissioned by the Toronto Catholic District School Board found that students’ rate of learning on specific tasks like math and reading comprehension increased by 1½ to three times.

These days, though, Young has noticed a new development: increasingly, she’s seeing a great many young people having difficulties with executive function, which involves thinking, problem-solving and task completion. “It looks like an attention deficit disorder,” she says. “The person has a job or a task and they start doing it but they can’t stay oriented to it. They get distracted and they can’t get reoriented. When I started using the programs, I really didn’t see a lot of this. I would say now, 50 per cent of students walking through the door have difficulty in that area.” The second thing she’s noticing is more frequent trouble with non-verbal thinking skills. These kids struggle to read facial expressions and body language—which can make dating and friendships, and indeed, most social situations, tricky.

Both of these skill sets relate to areas of the prefrontal cortex, or what Young calls “mental initiative.” It’s the area of the brain that drives us to go out and investigate the world, she says. When a person has deficits there, it’s hard to participate in the world. When they try, a wall comes up.

Young’s students face more extreme problems than the average teen, but her observations mirror what neurologists and educators are seeing in the general youth population—those in their 20s and younger, often called Digital Natives. The first to be born into and come of age in the digital age, they use their brains differently than any generation in history. At any given moment—or so the cliché goes—they’re wielding an iPod and a cellphone; they’re IMing a friend, downloading a Rihanna video from iTunes, and playing Resident Evil 4 with their thoughts. And that cartoonish caricature isn’t that far off: a study from the California-based Kaiser Family Foundation found that young people absorb an average of 8½ hours of digital and video sensory stimulation a day. By the age of 20, the average teen has probably spent more than 20,000 hours on the Web, and over 10,000 playing video games, according to Toronto-based business strategist Don Tapscott’s new book Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World.

The average youth brain is accustomed to a continuous bombardment of information bites. And in the process of navigating so much frenetic brain activity, kids are rewiring their brains, customizing them for speed and multi-tasking. But in reinforcing the neural pathways for these skills, some neuroscientists suspect they’ve been suppressing others—creating the very kinds of problems, albeit in a subtler form, teachers are seeing at the Arrowsmith School.

Every new technology—from books to television—has brought with it fears of a resulting mind-melt. The difference, in the case of digital technologies, says Dr. Gary Small, a renowned neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the unprecedented pace and rate of change. It is creating what he calls a “brain gap” between young and old, forged in a single generation. “Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool,” Small writes in his new book, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, “has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically.”

Earlier this year, Small and his colleagues devised an experiment to determine what the adult brain looks like on Google. Using fMRI imaging, they studied the brains of two types of computer users —“savvy” ones who’ve spent lots of time online, and “naive” ones who’ve spent virtually none—as they conducted simple Web searches. Among the savvy users, they observed plenty of activity in the dorsolateral area of the prefrontal cortex, a region associated with decision-making, integrating complex information and short-term memory. In the naive users this area of the brain was quiet. For five days, one hour a day, both groups repeated the simple exercise. On day five, the savvy group’s brain looked more or less the same. But in the naive group, something amazing had happened: as they searched, their circuitry sprang to life, flashing and thundering in exactly the same way it did in their tech-trained counterparts.

“Five hours on the Internet, and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” Small marvels. The experiment serves to highlight how quickly the brain can be trained. But while Digital Immigrants—those over 30, who came to the Web with brains fully formed—can acquire attributes of the New Brain, becoming quite proficient, the impact is limited because their early wiring was different.

Teenagers’ brains are much more vulnerable. There’s a reason we don’t let 14-year-olds vote or drive or drink vodka, and it goes beyond their apparent physical or emotional maturity. “Normal” adolescent cognitive development follows a certain arc. During the teen years, empathy skills (the amygdala region in the temporal lobe) and complex reasoning skills (the frontal lobe) are not yet fully developed. This is why, physiologically anyway, teens are predisposed to being self-centred, seeking instant gratification and not being able to always put themselves in others’ shoes—an attribute they develop over time, through social contact.

But brain scientists are speculating that too much technology may get in the way of normal frontal lobe development and stunt this maturation process—ultimately freezing them in teen brain mode. A controversial 2002 study out of Tokyo’s Nihon University found that the more time teens spend playing video games, the more they suppress key areas of the frontal lobe associated with learning, memory, emotion and impulse control. The study’s author, Dr. Akio Mori, a cranial nerve specialist, says chronic players—identified as those who play two to seven hours a day—can sometimes develop what he calls “video game brain,” a condition that essentially turns off the frontal lobes, even when kids aren’t gaming. In other words, because their brains are still maturing, an excessive amount of stimulation in one area can literally leave them lopsided.

Continued Below

[Longstreet]

And so the so-called brain gap is not just about intergenerational name-calling (although there is some of that going on, too). Instead, it’s about what the human brain of the future will look like—and whether or not we’re making good cognitive trades. “Are we developing a generation with underdeveloped frontal lobes—unable to learn, remember, feel, control impulses,” asks Small, “or will they develop new advanced skills that poise them for extraordinary experiences?”

In Grown Up Digital, one of several new books that explore this question, Tapscott takes the optimistic view. He sees young people using technology to develop ingenious and hyper-efficient new ways of finding, synthesizing and communicating information. New technologies present Digital Natives with “a giant opportunity,” Tapscott writes, “an opportunity to fulfill their intellectual potential and be the smartest generation ever.”

And if we understand intelligence as the ability to react quickly to visual stimuli, sift through large amounts of information, and decide, quickly, what’s useful and what isn’t, then he’s right; Digital Natives are miles ahead. Studies have shown that regular use of the Internet, video games and other digital technologies can even improve these cognitive abilities in adults. Groups from the military to laproscopic surgeons have turned to video game training to improve their peripheral vision and reaction time, and reduce error. Some brain scientists believe technological facility has contributed to the Flynn effect—the phenomenon that has seen young people’s IQ test scores climb steadily every decade since the Second World War.

But the important question we have to ask ourselves, according to Dr. Michael Merzenich, an international expert in brain plasticity and co-founder of San Francisco-based brain fitness company Posit Science, is this: if I’m spending lots of time doing these sorts of online activities, what am I not doing? Am I not reading a book (engaging the hippocampus, involved in learning and remembering)? Am I having fewer face-to-face interactions (engaging the area linked to empathy skills, the amygdala region)? “What are the cognitive tasks we’re ignoring?” he asks. “And what are the consequences of not doing those things?”

As techno-skeptics are quick to point out, among the great paradoxes of modern life is that people have more information at their fingertips than at any other time in history, and yet we’ve never known less. Examples of just how little the average person knows abound. Last year, Ipsos Reid and the Dominion Institute conducted a survey comparing what Canadians know now to what we knew in 1997. The results were dismal: 10 years ago, 72 per cent of us could name all four political parties then represented in Parliament. Last year, only 38 per cent could.

In The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein has compiled a host of such studies and reports to build his case that “kids today” are the dumbest ones ever despite a wealth of external resources. Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, says that compared to previous generations of students, “they don’t know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events. They read less on their own, both books and newspapers, and you would have to canvass a lot of college English instructors and employers before you found one who said that they compose better paragraphs.”

Does this matter? Or is it Old Brain thinking? In Grown Up Digital, Tapscott writes: “It’s not what you know that counts anymore; it’s what you can learn.” Until now, he says, “the educational model was to cram as much knowledge into your head as possible to build up your inventory of knowledge before you entered the world of work where you could retrieve that information when needed.” Now, information becomes obsolete quickly—and because it’s always retrievable at the click of a mouse, a well-educated person is not necessarily one who stores great amounts of knowledge, but rather one who knows where to find what he needs when he needs it.

Continued Below

[Longstreet]

The problem, Merzenich says, is that memory is a crucial part of learning. “It’s only when your memory is engaged in the learning process that your brain is really challenged,” he says. “It’s when I’m dealing with the details and really struggling with it that I learn it.” In other words, the more we depend on machines to do our thinking for us, the less we’re able to rely on our own mental resources. While we’ve always engaged in some forms of mental outsourcing—jotting down a grocery list so you don’t forget to buy milk, say—the extent to which we now depend on computers and other digital devices to find, store, analyze and communicate information for us is unprecedented.

The mental shortcuts the Web lets us take, in other words, aren’t always a good thing. A study of how we read online, conducted by Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting firm headquartered in California, found that only 16 per cent of subjects read text linearly online, word by word, sentence by sentence. Tracking their eye movement, Neilson found that users scan pages quickly, jump around, fixate on key words and phrases that interest them, and pass over the rest. In this sense, the Web promotes cut-and-paste learning. “It allows us on some level to be intellectually lazy,” Young says, “because that’s what’s out there on the Internet—other people’s information, pre-thought, pre-digested.”

All of this is why Bauerlein insists his English classes memorize poems. “The students groan,” he says, “but acquiring information means you store it in your mind. You think it through and you remember it. That’s a slow reading pattern, a slow analysis process.”

It’s a very different process from the one involved in mental multi-tasking—having five applications open on your computer, with a cellphone standing by. By necessity, our attention in this mode is shallow and diffuse. Small and others call it “continuous partial attention,” and it turns out to have costs of its own. “When paying partial continuous attention, people may place their brains in a heightened state of stress,” Small says. “They no longer have time to reflect, contemplate or make thoughtful decisions. They exist in a sense of constant crisis—on alert for a new contact or bit of exciting news or information at any moment.”

The brain isn’t built for this sort of protracted strain and eventually, over the course of hours, a condition sets in which Small calls “brain fog.” “Over time,” he says, “[it can] actually impair cognition, lead to depression, and alter the neural circuitry in the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex—regions in the brain that control mood and thought. Chronic and prolonged techno-brain burnout, which we are all good candidates for, can even reshape the underlying brain structure.” Without the continual mental rewards that accompany interactivity, it becomes hard to hold the attention of someone with perpetual, low-grade brain strain.

Not surprisingly, one-third of Digital Natives, according to Small, use other media—particularly the Internet—to stave off boredom while they’re watching TV. Reading a book is even harder. “Why spend time staring at a dull and stagnant string of words,” he writes, “when they could be entertained and informed with fast-paced visual and auditory computer images instead?” In fact, Bauerlein believes it’s partly students’ discomfort with single-focus learning that’s created a generation of bibliophobes. In 2004, as director of research and analysis with the National Endowment of the Arts, he was involved in the report that found that leisure reading across all age groups had dropped significantly over 20 years in the U.S.; the biggest drop was among young people ages 18 to 24. In 2002, only 43 per cent voluntarily read anything outside of school, down from 60 per cent in 1982.

“They are entirely averse to books,” he says. “The percentage of them that read more than four books in a year on their own time—and this includes Harry Potter, romance novels, sports books, anything—it’s only 25 per cent. And 25 per cent of them don’t read any books. And these are the best kids, not the ones who don’t go to college or who drop out.”

Of course, this implies that previous generations were reading Dostoevsky in their free time and not watching Happy Days. But the point is not that Digital Immigrants necessarily read more Dostoevsky, it may be that more of them had the mental capacity to get through it if they so chose. Reading is something you need to practise doing, and Bauerlein says Digital Natives simply don’t get enough practise slogging their way through difficult texts, particularly as more technology is integrated into classroom learning. “It’s a big modern problem,” says Merzenich. “Getting through an actual book requires a certain level of persistence. It’s a long-term attention to something in which the rewards are maybe not coming every two seconds.”

This is true of writing, too. James Côté, a professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario and co-author of Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, argues that the university essay is barely worth assigning anymore—even though the investigative skills and in-depth critical thinking skills it teaches are as relevant as ever. Students just can’t do it, he says—their language skills are depleted, they are indiscriminate with source information, they have a hard time focusing on things for too long, and they don’t particularly care to improve. As a teacher, it’s demoralizing. “In the old technique of assigning the essay, the student would pick the topic, they would go to the library to research it to determine if it’s a topic you can actually write something about,” he says. “Now most students can’t pick a topic. If you tell them what to do—okay, here’s a selection of three topics, pick one—they can do it, but on their own, most cannot come up with a topic that they can write meaningfully about.”

Technophiles say what we’re losing in memory we’re gaining in productivity. Every time we don’t have to memorize a phone number or take a trip to the library to research, we’re freeing up our brains for other tasks. But what other tasks? And are we even doing them? Studies tell us multi-tasking itself is a myth. We expend valuable time and energy transitioning from one interface to another. A recent study of Microsoft employees found that each time they responded to an email or instant message, it took them 15 minutes to return to the work they were doing.

All of the things that technology was supposed to make us better at—communicating, understanding, doing many things at once—we’re doing worse. Even though Google will always be there to provide us with answers in a pinch, Merzenich says, “I still have to believe that the invention, the creativity, these fabulous human assets, are absolutely dependent upon having rich resources and content in our very own brains.” The alternative would be to argue that we don’t need to be intelligent anymore because we’ve got machines. “Is that what we want?” he asks. “Is our goal to create a brainless society?”

[Richard]

"The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation."
- Pearl S. Buck

And so it goes. ;)

Richard's $.02 :munchin

[modgod]

"The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation."
- Pearl S. Buck

And so it goes. ;)

Richard's $.02 :munchin

"Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds." Pearl S. Buck

[Ret10Echo]

I'm sure those who stood by and watched the first person hunt with a bow-and-arrow thought they were going soft. :lifter

We do joke around at home about the idea that we would also be doing advanced math in High School if we could use a programmable, graphing calculator to take tests. :D

I don't think this is specific to the younger kids. Try holding the attention of a 50-year-old whose Blackberry starts to vibrate.....:rolleyes:

[Go Devil]

I believe there is a direct link between Short Attention Span/ADD and Sesame Street.

The amount of research and money poured into the development of the show is staggering.
The progress of the program is based on a child brain functions and tailored to shift with their Short Attention Spans.

Granted, knowledge is instilled, but by taking advantage of quickly shifting brain functions; a development of focus is never achieved.
Essentially the Short Attention Span is cajoled and the ability for long mental processes is shoved aside.

These early studies have progressed and are used to develop adult television as well.

No, I'm not wearing my tinfoil hat.:p

[Dozer523]

My darling daughter is a Sophmore in High School. She is taking Algebra II and Chemestry. I didn't take those until my Senior year.
She took Algebra I in 8th grade (me -- Sophmore).
She took Geometry as a Freshman (me -- Junior).
Junior Year she is scheduled for Calculus and Physics (I took neither -- In "College Prep Track". God help me! I'm trying to learn them now on-line) .
I teased her that in her Senior year she'll have to choose betwen String Theory and Chaos Theory . She knew what both of them were.
No this is NOT the dumbest generation. And they are movin' FAST!

[Richard]

No this is NOT the dumbest generation. And they are movin' FAST!

Based on my personal experiences, I agree with Dozer here. Learning does come faster and often at earlier stages of life...which sometimes presents problems developmentally...but different doesn't necessarily mean wrong, bad, or destructive. I think the fact that they don't have to remember everything...but know where and how to retrieve it...yet must know how to learn is an important point to remember in a high-tech world. IMO, there's not too much difference between that and having to maintain all those TMs/FMs with pertinent sections you've tabbed for quick reference when you needed the info.

I've watched my own youngest son who is in college work on papers while back home. He usually lies or sits on the floor with his laptop so he can have more room to lay out all his high-lighted notes, reference books, etc. He will have the Word program open for the paper he's working on, several web browsers with info he's looking to include or for further research if he finds something he's failed to fully explore, and 2-5 IM windows where he's monitoring/corresponding with several friends/groups at the same time. He always asks me to read and proof his papers, and they are very well done and correctly cited.

He also draws and paints, spending hours with no e-stimuli when working on such a project, and is a voracious reader of classical literature and history. He also has an amazing memory...unlike his father. :p

I am a bit surprised that the MacLean's article failed to mention some of the corrective brain-functioning programs such as Rutger University's Fast-Forward program which uses specially developed software programs to stimulate specific brain language functioning processes and correct developmentally delayed language skills. :confused:

FWIW, I'm of the crowd which remains generally skeptical of both the "sky is falling" and the "panacea" approaches to life and the 'new'...especially from the academic, scientific, and political worlds. Guess I'm becoming a FOG after all. :p

Richard's $.02 :munchin

[Slantwire]

My darling daughter is a Sophmore in High School. She is taking Algebra II and Chemestry. I didn't take those until my Senior year.
She took Algebra I in 8th grade (me -- Sophmore).
She took Geometry as a Freshman (me -- Junior).
Junior Year she is scheduled for Calculus and Physics (I took neither -- In "College Prep Track". God help me! I'm trying to learn them now on-line) .
I teased her that in her Senior year she'll have to choose betwen String Theory and Chaos Theory . She knew what both of them were.
No this is NOT the dumbest generation. And they are movin' FAST!

There is a penalty in that, also. In the haste to move to more advanced topics, schools often compress the fundamentals. Foundation work is touched on, providing name recognition but not mastery.

Your daughter's schedule is pretty similar to what mine was, in the late 90s. I paid a price for it in college. I simply couldn't grasp linear algebra and vector calculus because I didn't truly understand basic calculus. I could "plug and chug" the standard derivative and integral forms, but that was about it. Signal processing was worse still. While in high school, I knew "what" chaos theory was, but I couldn't begin to articulate the "how" because I lacked the underlying knowledge of statistics.

I am currently finishing a semester of electromagnetic field theory. My professor frequently comments that it should be a two semester course: one to properly "get" the material and lay the groundwork for future classes, preceded by a semester reinforcing the basics that are glossed over in freshman calculus and physics.

I see that issue as a parallel to the original article's position. American students are developing their "pools of knowledge" to be miles wide and an inch deep.

[Sigaba]

The issue I have with the article provided by Longstreet is the editorial bias of the piece. The article privileges an interpretation of what it means to be educated that is situated in a set of cultural values. These values, as useful as many have proven to be, are constructs.

If we define intelligence as the ability to learn, if we define education as a domain of knowledge that allows people to make informed decisions, and if we define a meaningful life as a life in which a person develops a sense of self-efficacy, the question is not "Are today's youths learning what we think they should know?"

Instead, the question is "Are today's youths learning what they need to know to live the lives they want to live?"

The first question is about indoctrination. The second question is about education.

In my view, the two challenges are:


finding an appropriate balance where students accept the assumption that learning what we think they should know will prove at least as helpful to them as their learning what they want to know. And,
understanding that today's learning environment offers a slightly different set of opportunities and challenges than the learning environment we experienced (or even prefer).

[The Reaper]

Instead, the question is "Are today's youths learning what they need to know to live the lives they want to live?"

Well put, but I take slight exception to your question.

Kids would "want" a diet of candy and to have no school, if they could have it. Similarly, most adults want complete and immediate fulfillment of every desire, with little or no effort expended in obtaining it.

Wants are not the same as needs.

Self-discipline is a part of life, despite our recent departure from the concept. Delayed gratification may be better than immediate gratification.

The real question is, ""Are today's youths learning what they need to know to live the lives they NEED to live?"

TR

[Sigaba]

Well put, but I take slight exception to your question.

Kids would "want" a diet of candy and to have no school, if they could have it. Similarly, most adults want complete and immediate fulfillment of every desire, with little or no effort expended in obtaining it.

Wants are not the same as needs.

Self-discipline is a part of life, despite our recent departure from the concept. Delayed gratification may be better than immediate gratification.

The real question is, ""Are today's youths learning what they need to know to live the lives they NEED to live?"

TR

Sir--

I agree that the "want to know" issue is problematic. The first time I encountered the concept was in a graduate class at USC's School of Education. I found the implications troubling. What if a person wants to know things that are potentially self destructive? What if a student seeks knowledge that, when practiced, may be harmful to the broader interests of his or her community?

As the professor was a psychologist, he was ethically correct to respond repeatedly to my questions and scenarios (some of which were very provocative) that the objective remained individual self efficacy. If a domain of knowledge stopped working for a person, that person could decide to learn a new set of skills.

For me, the 'need to know' is a part of the acculturation/indoctrination process. In my view, an issue here is that within our lifetimes, the learning environment had a much higher degree of overlap between the 'need to know' and the 'want to know.' I believe that in this environment, there was an unarticulated understanding of the concept that anything worth having required hard work to earn.

I think we need a national conversation on how such an overlap could be re-established. To use the ugly parlance of the private sector, we need to re-establish stakeholder buy in.

[The Reaper]

Exactly.

When I was 13, I wanted chemistry books and classes, because unbeknownst to my parents, I wanted to make nitroglycerine in my bathroom lab.

While this might have fulfilled a personal WANT, it was hardly a need, and represented a significant hazard to myself and others.

TR

[Kyobanim]

When I was 13, I wanted chemistry books and classes, because unbeknownst to my parents, I wanted to make nitroglycerine in my bathroom lab.


Why doesn't this surprise me?

:p

[GratefulCitizen]

I see that issue as a parallel to the original article's position. American students are developing their "pools of knowledge" to be miles wide and an inch deep.

I observed this during a year as a math teacher in a rural high-school.

The kids actually seemed to be in pain if study required continued concentration on a subject with which they had becomed bored.


The internet feeds something which is addictive among all humans: novelty.
As soon as something becomes boring, the kids just jump onto another subject.

While the internet is and excellent tool, it is also a path of least resistance and can foster undisciplined thinking.

This trend started to manifest itself in my kids, so the internet and cable TV have been booted from the household for 6 months.
They can watch DVDs and get on the internet down at the library or here at the internet cafe.
A little "resistance" added to the path has worked wonders.


Success in the real world requires that you be able to continue tasks long after they have become boring.
Success in the real world also requires abundance of mundane, time-consuming tasks.

I would argue that the "problem" with the upcoming generation is one of balance.

[Richard]

I would argue that the "problem" with the upcoming generation is one of balance.

Or being susceptible to hyperbole? ;)

Richard's $.02

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson120108.html

The Hysterical Style
by Victor Davis Hanson
December 1, 2008

Politicians now predict the implosion of the U.S. auto industry. Headlines warn that the entire banking system is on the verge of utter collapse. The all-day/all-night cable news shows and op-ed columnists talk of another Dark Age on the horizon, as each day another corporation lines up for its me-too bailout.

News magazines depict President-elect Obama as the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, facing a crisis akin to the Great Depression. Columnists for The New York Times even dreamed that George Bush might just resign now to allow the savior Obama a two-month head start on his presidency.

We are witnessing a new hysterical style, in which the Baby Boomer "me generation" that now runs America jettisons knowledge of the past and daily proclaims that each new development requires both a radical solution and another bogeyman to blame for being mean or unfair to them.

We haven't seen such frenzy since the Y2K sham, when we were warned to stock up on flashlights and bottled water as our nation's computers would simply shut down on Jan. 1, 2000 — and with them the country itself.

Get a grip. Much of our current panic is psychological, and hyped by instantaneous electronic communications and second-by-second 24-hour news blasts. There has not been a nationwide plague that felled our workers. No earthquake has destroyed American infrastructure. The material United States before the September 2008 financial panic is largely the same as the one after. Once we tighten our belts and pay off the debts run up by Wall Street speculators and millions of borrowers who walked away from what they owed others — and we can do this in a $13 trillion annual economy — sanity will return.

Gas, now below $2 a gallon, is still falling, saving Americans hundreds of billions of dollars. As housing prices settle, millions of young Americans will buy homes that just recently were said to be out of reach of a new generation.

If it was once considered a sign of economic robustness that homes doubled in value in just a few years, why is it seen as a disaster that they now sell on the way down for what they did recently on the way up? If we were recently terrified that gas would reach $5 a gallon, why do we now just shrug that it might fall to $1.50?

Unemployment is still below 7 percent; it was around 25 percent when Franklin Roosevelt became president. Less than 20 banks have failed, not the 4,000 that went under in the first part of 1933.

We all wish Barack Obama to succeed as president. But there is no more reason to panic and circumvent the Constitution for his early assumption of office than there was for Bill Clinton to prematurely step aside in November 2000 in favor of then President-elect George Bush.

We have now forgotten that by year-end 2000, the American economy was sliding into recession. Lame-duck President Clinton had been impeached. Vice President Al Gore had ostracized him from his presidential election campaign. In the presidential transition, Clinton was considering pardons for Puerto Rican terrorists and most-wanted fugitive Mark Rich.

George Bush is neither the source of all our ills nor the "worst" president in our history. He will leave office with about the same dismal approval rating as the once-despised Harry Truman. By 1953, the country loathed the departing Truman as much as they were ecstatic about newly elected national hero Dwight Eisenhower — who had previously never been elected to anything.

As for Bush's legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven years, the now increasingly likely victory in Iraq, AIDS relief abroad, new expansions for Medicare and federal support for schools versus the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the error-plagued 2004-7 occupation of Iraq, and out-of-control federal spending. As in the case of the once-unpopular Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman, Bush's supposedly "worst" presidency could one day not look so bad in comparison with the various administrations that followed.

But these days even that modest assessment that things aren't that bad — or all that different from the past — may well elicit a hysterical reaction from an increasingly hysterical generation.

[Paslode]

I observed this during a year as a math teacher in a rural high-school.

The kids actually seemed to be in pain if study required continued concentration on a subject with which they had becomed bored.


The internet feeds something which is addictive among all humans: novelty.
As soon as something becomes boring, the kids just jump onto another subject.

While the internet is and excellent tool, it is also a path of least resistance and can foster undisciplined thinking.

This trend started to manifest itself in my kids, so the internet and cable TV have been booted from the household for 6 months.
They can watch DVDs and get on the internet down at the library or here at the internet cafe.
A little "resistance" added to the path has worked wonders.


Success in the real world requires that you be able to continue tasks long after they have become boring.
Success in the real world also requires abundance of mundane, time-consuming tasks.

I would argue that the "problem" with the upcoming generation is one of balance.


My kids as well, the Xbox is gone, their computer disconnected and cable TV has been limited. Now they spend more time playing games, toys and school work is less of a fight.

[jasonglh]

I think my brain is wired differently. I can speed read and retain 90% of what I read just like my mother. My mother and I can both read web pages so fast it makes other people sick. I have ADD but I can multitask to a nauseating degree. I do take strattera for the ADD and it does help me stay more focused and less easily bored with things. I don't think everyone needs to learn the same way or think the same way. Schools spend too much time trying to use a cookie cutter with students.

I struggled throughout my school years but RN school that obliterated half those that started was easy for me. I think most of that is due to the way nursing school is structured. 1 hour lecture, computer sim lab time, another lecture, and hands on skills labs.

Now I work in critical care with 2 patients watching their monitors, vents and sometimes as many as 16 IV pumps between the 2 and fielding phone calls from the MD. It doesn't stress me at all but I rather enjoy the chaos.

I have read many articles about children being hardwired due to the fast paced childrens shows they watched. Thats why my 2 year old only watches Noggin which is more calm for preschoolers.

[ZonieDiver]

Or being susceptible to hyperbole? ;)

Richard's $.02

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson120108.html


Excellent find! Several of us were discussing this at a staff meeting the other day, instead of doing the PLC work we were supposed to be doing, and came to the conclusion that IF we just disconnected all TV's, computers, radios, and banned newspapers for two weeks, much of our current troubles would go away.

[ZonieDiver]

I observed this during a year as a math teacher in a rural high-school.

The kids actually seemed to be in pain if study required continued concentration on a subject with which they had becomed bored.


The internet feeds something which is addictive among all humans: novelty.
As soon as something becomes boring, the kids just jump onto another subject.

While the internet is and excellent tool, it is also a path of least resistance and can foster undisciplined thinking.

This trend started to manifest itself in my kids, so the internet and cable TV have been booted from the household for 6 months.
They can watch DVDs and get on the internet down at the library or here at the internet cafe.
A little "resistance" added to the path has worked wonders.


Success in the real world requires that you be able to continue tasks long after they have become boring.
Success in the real world also requires abundance of mundane, time-consuming tasks.

I would argue that the "problem" with the upcoming generation is one of balance.

It is pretty much the same in the urban HS in which I toil. Every once in a while you come across a parent with your ability to mold, teach, and discipline (too many confuse discipline with punishment!) their children. Their offspring are like the son and daughter Richard and Dozer described in earlier posts. The rest... they want "make it easy" and "give me my D"! The path of least resistance is the only trail they see through the forest of life! :(

[AngelsSix]

I agree that folks are too "wired in" these days. Seems like you can't go anywhere today without seeing a person yapping on a damn cell phone a mile a minute. People sure do have a lot to talk about. I am tired of hearing other people's business everywhere I go. I am tired of folks constantly trying to live their lives like some version of a damn t.v. show they watch. We didn't have t.v. in our rooms as kids, no video games, no phone privileges. We had books, bikes and playing board games.

I agree with the comments about how things are compressed in the learning process today. I noticed that they are ripping through a pre med A&P pretty fast and some of the students are never grasping the basic concepts. The ones that do get it seem to quickly brain dump everything as soon as they take the test. Our lecture teacher acted like she was going to loose it when she asked a simple question about action potentials in class and all she got was blank stares. We had just covered it two weeks ago.

I have found that some college courses are not properly tailored to teach the student the basics, but try to make the subjects fit the curriculum instead of really trying to teach the students. And there is no consistency between teachers in the way the courses are taught. Three diffrent lab teachers teach three versions of the same material for the same class. While I realize the instructors have some discretion, I wonder what kind of dis-service this does to the students? Are they truly learning the material, or temporarily memorizing all of the necessary information to "put the check in the box"?

[Sigaba]

I Are they truly learning the material, or temporarily memorizing all of the necessary information to "put the check in the box"?

Sir--

It was my experience when working as a teaching assistant in the 1990s that undergraduates were doing just that. If they didn't like the grade they earned, as often as not the ensuing conversation would center around how they needed a good grade because they needed a good grade.

I found the sensibility especially unpleasant when I encountered undergraduates who took this approach to all of their classes. It is one thing to take this approach to a humanity like history--it isn't for everyone--but when one is trying to game one's own major on the road to a profession when peoples' lives are in your hands (such as civil engineering, the law, or medicine), you begin to ask questions about the values of the students you're trying to support.

Yes, there were students who understood that if they the course materials their best effort that the grade would take care of itself, but they were very few and far between.

[Dozer523]

I. And there is no consistency between teachers in the way the courses are taught. Three diffrent lab teachers teach three versions of the same material for the same class. While I realize the instructors have some discretion, I wonder what kind of dis-service this does to the students? Are they truly learning the material, or temporarily memorizing all of the necessary information to "put the check in the box"?
I don't know about the dis-service part but I will address the consistancy issue -- from a guy who taught Seventh Grade Social Studies my first year and then was needed for a Fourth Grade opening the next year. In Middle school, I was amazed and disappointed by how the same subject teachers NEVER got together to design lessons. But, every two weeks I had to sit with my "team" (the Math, and Science and Language Arts teachers) to discuss discipline. The endless B sessions about Johny and the antics of Kendra. What could I do about what happened in Math? With the Social Studies teachers I couldn't convince anyone that we ought to give the same test much less share the POI.

[Sigaba]

I don't know about the dis-service part but I will address the consistancy issue -- from a guy who taught Seventh Grade Social Studies my first year and then was needed for a Fourth Grade opening the next year. In Middle school, I was amazed and disappointed by how the same subject teachers NEVER got together to design lessons. But, every two weeks I had to sit with my "team" (the Math, and Science and Language Arts teachers) to discuss discipline. The endless B sessions about Johny and the antics of Kendra. What could I do about what happened in Math? With the Social Studies teachers I couldn't convince anyone that we ought to give the same test much less share the POI.

Dozer--

In reference to this post and a point you made months ago. I agree that a big part of the dynamic is that many teachers would not collaborate to synchronize objectives, to design lessons, or to harmonize messages. (I was guilty of all three.)

If students get mixed messages from their instructors, what conclusions can they be expected to reach?

[Dozer523]

Conclusion reached by students, Sig? The conclusion every student from the very first arrives at. Take the line of least resistance. What is the difference between laziness and efficency? It depends on if you are an observer or a doer.

[Longstreet]

Originally Posted by Dozer523
I don't know about the dis-service part but I will address the consistancy issue -- from a guy who taught Seventh Grade Social Studies my first year and then was needed for a Fourth Grade opening the next year. In Middle school, I was amazed and disappointed by how the same subject teachers NEVER got together to design lessons. But, every two weeks I had to sit with my "team" (the Math, and Science and Language Arts teachers) to discuss discipline. The endless B sessions about Johny and the antics of Kendra. What could I do about what happened in Math? With the Social Studies teachers I couldn't convince anyone that we ought to give the same test much less share the POI.

Dozer--

In reference to this post and a point you made months ago. I agree that a big part of the dynamic is that many teachers would not collaborate to synchronize objectives, to design lessons, or to harmonize messages. (I was guilty of all three.)

If students get mixed messages from their instructors, what conclusions can they be expected to reach?

As a Grade 7 LASS teacher I agree with the both of you. My board has accepted the concept that LA is the 'hub' of learning and that most other subjects (geography, history, science, health etc) all rely on the skills taught in LA. Simply put, concepts are taught in LA and should then be used in other subjects where students will be able to strengthen what they have learned.

I accept this idea and have made motions to implement it in my history and geography lessons. Unfortunatly, many other teachers see this as extra work and want to keep teaching the lessons they have been teaching for the past 15 years. Others simply want only to teacher what they want when they want in the privacy of their own classrooms (this is especially true for those teachers who only teach one subject). Thus is the problem with teachers; They are professionals who work for an amature board.

There is hope though - at least in my board. We have been instructed that all lesson day plans must be written with the strand of provincial curriculum that is being covered. By doing this, teachers are having to rethink their lessons and are even coming together with other teachers to plan. To add to this, we even now have to create a cycle-at-a-glance which shows what we will be covering and the type of assessment that will be done for that cycle.

Of course this idea has been met with much criticism from teachers, but I think it is a step in the right direction. I now receive math, history and geography marks from the computer science teacher. With a little luck, the sequential paragraph concepts I have taught my students will soon be strengthened by the science teacher when he/she teaches my class to write lab reports (which will help me as I will be able to get a mark from outside my classroom and better understand how well a student has grasped the concept).

My only fear is the the board will step in before teachers 'come together' and start dictating what will be taught, when it will be taught, how it will be taught and when new concepts will be introduced. Teaching concepts as an assembly line is a step in the wrong direction.

[ZonieDiver]

My only fear is the the board will step in before teachers 'come together' and start dictating what will be taught, when it will be taught, how it will be taught and when new concepts will be introduced. Teaching concepts as an assembly line is a step in the wrong direction.

This is the direction in which I see the American educational monolith moving. Our district has instituted various policies - common assessments, "power concepts," a general "dumbing down" of the curriculum to its very basic components, and standardized, "bubbled" end of course tests. There is little time allowed for activities that actually require students to think, innovate, hypothesize, discussion, evaluate, and re-think concepts and arguments or theories. Teachers engage in these things at their peril, in regard to their evaluations. You cannot easily "quantify" those activities and assess them in a "standardized" test - for "data-driven" decisions, so they are "out"!

The "tin-foil hat" wearing part of me sees the great nebulous "them" gearing up to replace actual teachers (a dying breed, by the by) with "proctors" who can "administer" the district-mandated curriculum. Non-thinkers training a new generation of even more non-thinkers. Automatons who go to work, do as they are instructed, put on their headphones, and zone off into their little world unfettered by real concerns about the erosion of their liberties.

There are a lot of young people out there who still think and who like to engage in productive discussion. There are, however, fewer and fewer of them with each passing year. We pour billions into the students at the lower end of the spectrum - ELL, SPED, etc. We put lesser amounts into students classified as "gifted" - sometimes by very suspect evaluation - and then place them in programs with very unproven curriculum. We almost totally ignore the vast "middle" - those students with a "low B - high C" ability and attitude who will work hard to achieve - if guided, encouraged, and disciplined to do so. They will form the backbone of our nation, and they are being ignored and placed into environments where it is more difficult for them to achieve.

Special Education is a gigantic, terribly expensive failure. It is like a giant roach-motel! Students enter, but they never leave. A student is identified in K or 1st or earlier as having a specific learning disability. They are placed in programs for all their years of school, and by their senior year of HS, almost without exception, they are still in the "program" - having made no progress, and most having gotten worse. Most SPED teachers I encounter are "enablers" of the first degree. They know where their bread is buttered, and they are going to keep the "gravy train" chugging right along.

Sorry for the rant... I had a bad, IEP battle yesterday!

[GratefulCitizen]

I am of the opinion that middle-school and high-school are a little to late to address many educational deficiencies.

Even by k-6, you're playing catch-up.

Kids need to be exposed to learning activities from as young as possible.
The early focus should be on reading, with everything else being ancillary.
The focus should stay on reading, until it is mastered.

Once they can read, much of the future learning tends to itself.

My personal bias on the matter:
Pre-school, kindergarten, and elementaries are being turned into day-care centers so both parents can work (and be taxed).

[Richard]

FWIW - my school was an alternative school where all students had a supported DSM-lV diagnoses of ADD/ADHD, dyscalculia, dyslexia, etc with a TONI equivalent of average to superior intelligence. They were smart - they just learned differently.

All of our students had been 'beaten up' by both the standardized public and private school systems.

As a faculty, we abhorred the 'core curriculum' concept and fostered inter-grade level cross-curricular coordination, teacher generated non-standardized tests combined with norm-refrenced specialized testing, and learning how to think logically and creatively vice learning what to think.

Students did not take the PSAT until their junior year and then--after a semester length ACT/SAT prep course which taught standardized test mechanics to allow students to focus on the test versus focusing on the mechanics of the test--taking both the SAT and ACT at the end of their junior year during the 'full disclosure' window for the SAT.

Year after year our ACT/SAT averages far exceeded both the state and national averages...and our students attended colleges from the University of Kansas to Texas A&M Galveston, from Chaminode in Hawaii to NYU, and overseas in France, Israel, and Spain, to name a few.

Graduates now lead successful careers in law, business, education, the arts, military, sports, construction, medicine, etc.

My advice - beware of the tendency to generalize when discussing a topic as developmentally, regionally, and locally diverse as education in this country.

Richard's $.02 :munchin

PS - Most teachers, in my experience, tend to teach in the style by which the teacher learns best vice a multi-sensory approach in which the majority of the students learn best. ;)

[Noslack71]

I read this artcle in the Dec 8, 2008 copy of Investors Business Daily(IBD).
Thought it might add some food for thought to the discussion.

Noslack


Civics Might As Well Be Rocket Science
By WALTER E. WILLIAMS | Posted Friday, December 05, 2008 4:20 PM PT

How about a few civics questions? Name the three branches of government. If you answered the executive, legislative and judicial, you are more informed than 50% of Americans.

The Delaware-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) recently released the results of its national survey titled "Our Fading Heritage: Americans Fail a Basic Test on Their History and Institutions."

The survey questions were not rocket science.

Only 21% of survey respondents knew that the phrase "government of the people, by the people, for the people." comes from President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Almost 40% incorrectly believe the Constitution gives the president the power to declare war.

Only 27% know the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States. Remarkably, close to 25% of Americans believe that Congress shares its foreign policy powers with the United Nations.

Among the total of 33 questions asked, others included:

"Who is the commander in chief of the U.S. military?" "Name two countries that were our enemies during World War II." "Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the federal government. What is one power of the federal government?"

Of the nationwide sample of 2,508 Americans taking ISI's test, 71% failed; the average score on the test was 49%.

ISI findings about cultural illiteracy and academic incompetence are nothing new. A 1990 Gallup survey for the National Endowment of the Humanities, given to a representative sample of 700 college seniors, found that 25% did not know that Columbus landed in the Western Hemisphere before the year 1500; 42% could not place the Civil War in the correct half-century; and 31% thought Reconstruction came after World War II.

In 1993, an Education Department survey found that among college graduates 50% of whites and more than 80% of blacks couldn't state in writing the argument made in a newspaper column; 56% could not calculate the right tip; 57% could not figure out how much change they should get back after putting down $3.00 to pay for a 60-cent bowl of soup and a $1.95 sandwich, and over 90% could not use a calculator to find the cost of carpeting a room.

But not to worry. A 1999 survey taken by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni of seniors at the nation's top 55 liberal-arts colleges and universities found that 98% could identify rap artist Snoop Dogg and Beavis and Butt-Head, but only 34% knew George Washington was the general at the battle of Yorktown.

With limited thinking abilities and knowledge of our heritage, we Americans set ourselves up as easy prey for charlatans, hustlers and quacks. If we don't know the constitutional limits placed on Congress and the White House, politicians can do just about anything they wish to control our lives, from deciding what kind of light bulbs we can use to whether the government can take over our health care system or bail out failing businesses. We just think Congress can do anything upon which they can get a majority vote.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has one finding that I find both a bit perplexing and encouraging. Roughly 70% of Americans, even those who failed the test, agreed that our history, culture and institutions are important and should be taught to our college students.

They might even agree with Thomas Jefferson, who warned, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate, Inc


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[BMT (RIP)]

NOPE!! They are already in DC.

BMT

[Defender968]

I think the movie Idiocracy with Luke Wilson is a perfect explanation of what's happening in society today, the basic premise is that stupid people are procreating at a much faster rate than the intelligent ones, and thus the entire population is getting progressively dumber, it's from the guy who created Office Space, I'd highly recommend it, not the greatest acting I mean it is Luke Wilson but funny none the less.

[GratefulCitizen]

I think the movie Idiocracy with Luke Wilson is a perfect explanation of what's happening in society today, the basic premise is that stupid people are procreating at a much faster rate than the intelligent ones, and thus the entire population is getting progressively dumber, it's from the guy who created Office Space, I'd highly recommend it, not the greatest acting I mean it is Luke Wilson but funny none the less.

This may hit on the root of the matter: human arrogance.

Simultaneously, it is argued that humans "evolved" into the high forms which now exist, and it is argued that humans are now becoming dumber (by whatever means).

The unspoken implication: right now is the pinnacle of history.
Me and my generation are/were the peak of civilization and genetics.:rolleyes:

Human arrogance knows no limits.

[Paslode]

Just an update....

The TV was offline for a couple months and the Xbox remains on the shelf with no return in the near future in sight.

And the kids.....

Now they would rather play board games, draw pictures and build Legos than watch the boob tube that I had reactivated this week.


I am absolutely amazed in the change.

[Richard]

...the basic premise is that stupid people are procreating at a much faster rate than the intelligent ones, and thus the entire population is getting progressively dumber...

I don't see how we can measure such a claim and so arrogantly pronounce it as being a fact. I think a movie such as "Idiocracy" might be exactly where such an idea belongs. ;)

Richard's $.02 :munchin

[Defender968]

I don't see how we can measure such a claim and so arrogantly pronounce it as being a fact. I think a movie such as "Idiocracy" might be exactly where such an idea belongs. ;)

Richard's $.02 :munchin

Measuring such a claim would be difficult I agree and I wasn't necessarily saying it was a fact, though I have seen some similarities in the world we live in to the movie during my time as an LEO. When I went to the low income neighborhoods there were many more kids running around than when I went to the nicer neighborhoods, typically by a factor of 2 or 3 at least. That may sound bad, but I can't tell you how many trailers I went too with 10+ kids in them being watched by 1 or maybe 2 of their 17 year old siblings, granted that was usually 2+ families but that was still a lot of kids, and I won't even get into all the baby momma drama I saw, every thug had a couple of baby mommas, often times drama between them was what brought me there in the first place, where as the more educated and higher social economic classes typically had fewer offspring for whatever reason.

May not be pretty or scientifically proven, it was just what I saw.

[Puertoland]

Man my generation has been taking some heat lately...

I think there really is no way to accurately categorize a generation's intelligence since people's strengths and weaknesses during learning vary so greatly.

I myself did not do well at school in regular classes, I couldn't concentrate, and couldn't grasp the concepts the teachers wove. And during parent teacher meetings they suggested that I be held back (this was elementary).

Later on it was found I had ADHD, and my biggest obstacle was concentration on something I was not interested in learning. I was taken out of the conventional classroom and placed into a smaller learning community, where the teacher would be more approachable and teaching in unconventional ways. He was able to bridge the gap between the way I learned and the subjects of the curriculum. I went from F's and D's to Principal's Honor Roll, my father was so happy he bought me a quad :D. In middle school after a few tests, had an IQ score of 127 and I got to go the 'gifted classes'.

Its my opinion (not just because I am of this generation) that people are learning differently, and methods of teaching should change as well. I wouldn't say this generation is dumb, it seems to be a recurring theme to hear an elder say something along those lines. I'm sure my grandfather said the same about my dad.