COLUMN: Kids ain’t learning nothing these days
A 16-year-old driver hit my parked truck at 10:30 in the morning on a day with clear skies and dry pavement. And no, this young man was not talking on a cell phone. If he had been he might have run into my parked house.
At this point, I should go off on a rant about the diminishing intelligence of kids these days. Legally it was his fault, but really it’s partially our fault. Automobiles are vectors for stupidity. They come with plush seats, cup holders, elaborate music systems and ashtrays. Some even have DVD players and video game consoles. Cars are just begging you to not pay attention while driving. In a sane world, cars would come with wooden benches and little devices that periodically give you a mild shock or stick thumbtacks in your butt.
The truth is everything about kids these days is our fault. I’m a baby boomer and every fiber of me wants to dislike the younger generation, but I can’t.
My fellow baby boomer generation is getting mean and spiteful. This generation of craven hedonists ’60s survivors is trying to prop itself up by diminishing everyone else. Apparently kids aren’t doing anything in school other than eating too much and fondling their cell phones. In the last year, I’ve heard reputable radio reports about how physical education is no longer part of school, the arts are lacking, kids think Vietnam bombed Pearl Harbor, eggs are a dairy product, Ohio is on the East Coast, reading and writing R, like, rilly bad and that we have math and science skills barely above that of chimpanzees. Additionally, kids today don’t know anything about money and can’t cook anything that doesn’t go in a microwave oven.
The trouble is these are all anecdotal dumb things that, while they may be true, they may not be representative. You see, a lot of the people who write these books don’t seem to know much about statistics themselves. It’s pretty easy to measure that young people are fatter than ever, but hard to say if they are measurably dumber. Baby boomers may just be setting themselves up to look older and wiser than they are. There may be more dumb people simply because there are more people. Global communications has also made it more likely that you will be able to see more dumb people than ever before. I give you YouTube as a case in point. YouTube actually creates dumb people from average people because we so value celebrity no matter how fleeting it is.
If the national policy is to leave no child behind, it begs the question; who is ahead? I think it was Jimmy Buffet who said “We are the people our parents warned us about.”
Dennis Hinkamp believes it takes a whole village to raise a dumb child. Dennis works for USU Extension Communications. Comments and questions can be sent to him at dennish@ext.usu.edu.