Now I will be among the first to recognize that there are plenty of smart kids out there. But as a generation, it is hard to deny that today's kids aren't very smart when you just consider this quote from Ken Burns as to what inspired him to develop his documentary series on World War II:
"The thing that really got me mad was finding out that a huge number of our high-school graduates think that we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the second world war. It's so unbelievable."If that doesn't prove that there is a lot of stupidity out there, I don't know what does. However, that doesn't necessarily prove that our kids are any dumber than older people. It may be that stupidity crosses age boundaries and persists across the generations. Who knows, maybe sixty years from now, people will graduate from high school thinking that back in the year 2003 Saddam Hussein actually had weapons of mass destruction.
3 comments:
And there was the infamous Miss South Carolina Teen USA contest thing, where she had a ridiculous answer as to why so many kids can't find the United States on a map... because we need more maps! And that goes for "the Iraq" too.
I just noticed your new blog; I'm going to keep up with this; I have asked in the past that you move on to topics beyond your spiritual search and it looks like you have; bravo! I always enjoy your particular clarity of writing; looking forward to what you come up with here.
Bobby, thanks for visiting this blog. This is a side project. I don't know how often I will write here.
Now, I'm not completly sure that our American generations are getting progressivly stupider. Our decline in educational funding and standards might also be to blame. Not to mention President Bush's solution for the entire problem. I'd to think that these kids were told where the United States was on the map, but it's always possible that they weren't.
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