Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Kids today...

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Kids today...

    Are they really this stupid, or is this an anomaly? My friend, who is over sixty years old (which will be pertinent to the story in a second), was giving a lift somewhere to a 17-year old kids she knows. The conversation went something like this:

    Kid: Are you going to see the Pope?

    Ellen: (somewhat nonplussed) Why would I? (she's Jewish)

    Kid: Well, he's the head of a major religion and Judaism is a major religion...

    ~silence~

    Ellen: Do you know where you want to go to college?

    Kid: Not yet, but I've been doing some research on a couple. What website did you use to find the one you went to?

    Ellen: (too dumbfounded to speak)

    #2
    Kids today...

    I wish I had a good anecdote to support it, but I think 'kids today' suffer from a lack of general knowledge. They're good students and all, but I'm amazed at how many of them have no clue about stuff that I just figured you picked up and knew, FFS. Like when WWII was fought, or what the world's population is.
    When I was teaching college a few years back, one girl said something about "... a billion Americans", and I threw it open to the class to give me a rough idea of the population of the US. Then I asked about the population of Canada. Then I asked a bunch of general stuff like "When was Woodstock?" and "When was WWII?" and "How long has the Queen been the Queen?". I think I went off on a bit of a tangent, but I was amazed at how many 21 year-old kids didn't know jack about, you know, stuff. I dunno. I can't help thinking that my dad would have slapped me in the neck for not knowing when WWII was.

    Comment


      #3
      Kids today...

      'kids today' suffer from a lack of general knowledge.

      If true, why?

      Poor general education? Over-specialised learning? Overly narrow recreational interests? Lack of incidental/accidental learning opportunities? Something else...? Lack of family discussion and interaction perhaps?

      Comment


        #4
        Kids today...

        My biggest shocker was seeing a class of 12-year olds in Spain not able to locate Asia on a map of the world ...

        Comment


          #5
          Kids today...

          I suspect there has been a shift of weight about what kids think is important. They might not know when WW2 was (well, the PS2 game came out in 1998, so...), but they might give you a detailed timeline of Britney Spears' marriages and stints in rehab.

          There are simply so many diversions, and there is so little value in acquiring knowledge which you cannot share with your contemporaries, especially in a time when media are largely driven by the value of entertainment over information and analysis. Not that this can serve as an excuse for rank ignorance.

          I'm so happy that my 13-year-old son studies things like WW2 of his own bat (inspired by family history and a PS2 game). Yesterday he searched the Internet for art, collecting images by the likes of Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Munch and Michelangelo. I then joined him and pointed him to a few other essentials. He particularly liked Rembrandt, Goya and Matisse. These names have now entered his consciousness. No way will he turn out to be so cheerfully ignorant as that doubtlessly lovely 17-year-old in FF's story.

          Which brings me to the central question: how much are the parents to blame for this apparent tide of ignorance.

          Comment


            #6
            Kids today...

            I don't think that all kids are less intelligent than they used to be. The quotes metioned in the topic opener seem to show the self-centred nature that all young people have always exhibited (This is what I've done, this is more important than anything other people have done)

            I've found that children in higher ability groups can be just as interested in academic subjects outside the classroom, for example plenty seem to know about historical topics we haven't covered in much death.

            The lower ability classes don't seem as interested is such independent learning but that's probably as it's always been. However when they're in the class most seem happy to learn new things, they also seem to be full of questions.

            Also a lot of children will have other, non-academic interests outside school, they seem to know an awful lot about those subjects.

            The main problem I have with some kids is the arrogant attitude they display. Some of the little darlings have the audacity to actually look down as if you're a piece of crap. (For example one said to me the other day "I don't like the way you speak to me, I'm going", then she left the class), Luckily it's not that many.

            Comment


              #7
              Kids today...

              For about 3 months last year I worked with a pregnant 16 year old who asked if John Lennon was a singer (it came up as there was a John Lennon working in the office), had heard of Hitler, but not of Churchill.
              She also came from a wealthy family, and spent £200 on a Louis Vitton nappy bag. When one of her colleagues asked why she had spent so much, she replied "it's a Louis Vitton"
              Young people, eh? They know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

              Comment


                #8
                Kids today...

                "I don't like the way you speak to me, I'm going"
                That sounds like the sort of thing I would have said to a teacher when I was a lad.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Kids today...

                  In In the Vineyard of the Text Ivan Illich describes learning without books as it was carried out by teaching clergy in Europe seven hundred years ago. Education by association: imagine a stream of numbers, or words, and assign a piece of information to the first, and another to the second and so on. By adulthood an enormous "ark of the mind" has been constructed where information is stored and can be cross-referenced at will.

                  Then there were books. Analogical documents originally, where retrieving specific information was difficult if not impossible. Eventually punctuation began to appear, followed by page numbers, chapters and indices. Relatively quickly, within a couple of hundred years, text changed from a paradigm of orality to an efficient system of data retrieval. The Ark still existed but it was a much smaller boat and, apparently, not required as frequently.

                  Now we have computers. Where the book's index has been moved to the front page. If a student knows what he/she wants to know it's an ideal tool. It will tell him when WW2 took place in an instant, but he has to ask the question first, it's less likely to come incidentally than used to be the case. Students undoubtedly have more information at their fingertips than ever but there's no reason to believe that their capacity to think, and turn that information into knowledge is any better than it's ever been. I suppose I'm suggesting that a surfeit of easily available information may in fact detract from thinking and problem solving.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Kids today...

                    QUOTE:
                    "I don't like the way you speak to me, I'm going"

                    That sounds like the sort of thing I would have said to a teacher when I was a lad.The trouble was she didn't see a problem in speaking to me anyway she saw fit. The week before I had about 5 minutes of her trying to lecture me about respect. I was almost speechless.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Kids today...

                      I once had a conversation with a random girl from Utah who asked me how far London was from Manchester. When I replied that it was around 200 miles she was surprised to hear that we use imperial measurement in the UK...to rub salt in the wound she then informed me that she had been taught that the US invented this system so needless to say she was somewhat perplexed when I told her this simply wasn't true...she was also a college student.

                      Can somebody American please ease my fears and tell me this can't be true and she must have slipped through the net during the college application proccess?

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Kids today...

                        Students undoubtedly have more information at their fingertips than ever but there's no reason to believe that their capacity to think, and turn that information into knowledge is any better than it's ever been. I suppose I'm suggesting that a surfeit of easily available information may in fact detract from thinking and problem solving.
                        I heard that only 2% of the world's "information" is available online. The worrying thing is that kids these days seem to think online is all there is

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Kids today...

                          Robbos Left Nut wrote:
                          Can somebody American please ease my fears and tell me this can't be true and she must have slipped through the net during the college application proccess?
                          I can only tell you that we're not all like that, but I'm afraid her kind are beginning to outnumber the rest of us. Sorry.

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Kids today...

                            Apology accepted and I'll now sleep soundly tonight.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Kids today...

                              I heard that only 2% of the world's "information" is available online. The worrying thing is that kids these days seem to think online is all there is
                              That's precisely why I take the view, about wikipedia, that the important thing is not to slag it off but to add to it. A decent amount of the stuff about golf and golfers on wikipedia has been added or revised by yours truly over the years. It horrified me when I first went on wikipedia that significant amounts of golfing history, and the players who contributed to it, prior to about 1997 weren't even mentioned.

                              I suppose that's always the problem with contemporary history, we're probably in the middle of a similar era of revoultion of recording facts as when the mass print media first came out. It's like that thing about the fact that no-one to this day can say for certain who the players were in the very first FA Cup Final - for a while, it was even disputed who the goalscorer was. No-one cared enough at the time to properly record it (the match, in its day, was accorded about as much attention as the Oxford-Cambridge "Varsity Match") and only about 50 years later did some people go back and think it would be nice to have a complete record of these things.

                              Comment


                                #16
                                Kids today...

                                "I heard that only 2% of the world's "information" is available online."

                                There's a statistic that someone has dragged all the way down their intestinal tract before pulling it out of their arse.

                                Comment


                                  #17
                                  Kids today...

                                  The worrying thing is that kids these days seem to think online is all there is

                                  The general obsession with being connected to a technological portal — computer, phone, iPod — of some kind is certainly powerful and something I admit to having a hard time understanding. I don't whether it has much to do with perceived stupidity though. There were "bookish" people before online-ish ones who had restricted intellectual vision as well.

                                  Given that there hasn't been a spike in new-borns with a genetic predisposition towards being stupid over the past twenty years— or at least I don't think there has. I'm still interested in hearing possible reasons for it prevalence, rather than anecdotes claiming its existence.

                                  Comment


                                    #18
                                    Kids today...

                                    Well, if you want the conservative educational position on this (E.D. Hirsch), it is that students have spent too much time "learning how to learn" and not actually learning anything.

                                    The theory goes something like this:

                                    Sometime in the 60s, educationalists started saying, "hey, you know what? There;s a lot of information out there, and the amount of information is growing all the time. We should stop being so obsessed with teaching specific facts to students and get the to learn how to learn, so that they can be their own teachers in a journey of lifelong learning".

                                    At about the same time, psychologists were coming up with analyses of different learning strategies, and observing that the best learners has a kind of meta-learning strategy: they could break down problems into constitutent parts figure out what they knew and what they didn't, and then strategized about how to fill the gaps and hence solve the problem.

                                    So, what became fashionable was to try to teach these "meta-strategies". If you could teach kids this stuff, then they'd learn on their own, and kids would have less "rote learning" (bad) and more "self-directed learning" (good).

                                    The problem with this theory (so it is said) is that there's not much evidence that meta-learning strategies are actually teachable. It's like saying a football coach saying "that Zidane fellow has good vision...if we could just teach kids vision, everything else would fall into place". Except, of course, that "vision" is somehting that comes through practical experience - the hard slog of learning. And that means actually teaching the old fashioned "facts" (like the dates of WWII), because those are the building blocks of learning without which you can't actually begin to probelm-solve. And, of course, there's also the loss of actual factual knowledge that occurs because teachers are off spending more time on the meta-strategies.

                                    So what you have is a curriculum which to a considerable degree less based on acquisition of certain "facts" (which is seen as elitist because it priviliges certain facts over others) and more based on "learning processes". This trend has become even more prevalent since the introduction of the web. Remember the old argument in math: as calculators became more prevalent, educationalists argued in favour of more emphasis on the contextual use of mathematics and less emphasis on actual computation, because "the calculator can do it for you". But what you lose is a sense of how the math actually works.

                                    I have no idea if Hirsch is right or not - and I suspect in any case that those particular "progressive" educational ideas never took hold as strongly outside the US and within it. But it is the most coherent explanation of the phenomenon we're talking about here that I have heard.

                                    Comment


                                      #19
                                      Kids today...

                                      OK so we can tinker with curriculum theory but is it likely you'll ever get anything approaching consensus — even on the goals of formal education let alone how to achieve them? It's hard to quantify but my sense is that schools, relative to other societal institutions, actually changed very little in structure or curriculum between the time I attended and my son did. What children do with the eighteen hours they're not in school, and how they do it is probably more germane to this discussion isn't it?

                                      Comment


                                        #20
                                        Kids today...

                                        In some ways, yes. I think schools are asked to do a lot more now than they used to - but with not a lot of extra resources, the result is they are doing more things poorly.

                                        As for the importance of the home, in respect to kids' overall attitudes, I would agree compltely. But with respect to "what they know", I think school and currriculum matter a lot. If Hirsch is right, what we have given up in the attempt to teach people "how to learn" is a common vocabulary of knowledge, particularly in history (e.g. when did world war II start, who were the main protagonists in the conflict, etc.).

                                        Comment


                                          #21
                                          Kids today...

                                          I think it's quite good that a kid has no sense of differences between some large scale cults.

                                          Comment


                                            #22
                                            Kids today...

                                            There's a statistic that someone has dragged all the way down their intestinal tract before pulling it out of their arse.
                                            It was my phd supervisor...

                                            Can you tell me a better statistic then?

                                            Comment


                                              #23
                                              Kids today...

                                              68% of all statistics are made up

                                              Comment


                                                #24
                                                Kids today...

                                                JtS wrote:
                                                I think it's quite good that a kid has no sense of differences between some large scale cults.
                                                Or that he has no idea that the internet didn't exist in 1958?

                                                Comment


                                                  #25
                                                  Kids today...

                                                  As for the importance of the home, in respect to kids' overall attitudes, I would agree compltely. But with respect to "what they know", I think school and currriculum matter a lot.

                                                  It's hard to nail this stuff down but I suspect home, peer group, and private relaxation time potentially contribute far more than school does to what kids know or believe. Some instances:

                                                  If a family takes a daily newspaper and eats meals together, national, local and world events tend to get discussed, this in turn generates questions which become knowledge. Today newspaper subscriptions are in decline and families rarely eat as a group. Has something similar replaced this type of interaction?

                                                  Kids learn when they occupy themselves with hobbies. I collected stamps and I'm convinced learned far more about geography, history, politics, economics and art than I did in school. My friends collected birds eggs (shock, horror!) or made kites, learning incidentally about biology, meteorology and engineering in the process. Do those type of recreational activities still take place?

                                                  This repeats something that came up on the Sports forum recently. Kids used to organise and play their own games. Not proper sports but street games like Kingy, Statues or Ball Tag. In doing so they learned, not so much general knowledge, but communication and management skills and, importantly, there wasn't an adult in sight. I think its fair to say that, after existing for thousands of years, these games at least in North America and Europe have vanished within two generations. Once again, have they been replaced with anything similar?

                                                  It's not so much that school doesn't matter but that it matters too much, because other learning possibilities appear to have disappeared, at least for the moment.

                                                  Comment

                                                  Working...
                                                  X