Shocking Survey - The Dumbing Down of Youth?

[Mananimal Profile]

Hi Everyone. I've been lurking for a couple years and figured I might as well start chiming in on some things. No time like the present so...

As far as the whole education issue goes, I think its pretty complex.
The fact is that society around the world is changing at a pretty quick pace, so it's only natural that some of the institutions that worked pretty well in the past will start to crumble, or at least show that they don't work as well.

I think that school these days for a large part is just somewhere for us to stick our kids because we don't know what else to do with them.

Does it prepare you for the real world? No not really.
Still, I still hold on to a lot of what I learned in school, as far as math, history and language arts are concerned.
Its hard to argue how valuable any given piece of knowledge is until the time comes when it becomes useful to you.

I dunno, the amount of information in the world has been accelerating exponentially since we've been recording it. Back in the renaissance, a scholar could conceivably master all the known arts and sciences if he was of exceptional genius. Nowadays, there is such depth of knowledge to any domain thats absolutely impossible.

I think the role of school (high school for instance) is getting slightly lost right now. Maybe as a result, that's why the quality is suffering. A bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma and a master's is the new bachelor's. Does this kind of inflation come from the fact that there's so much to learn nowadays, or the fact that the quality of schools is going down?

Regardless of the ultimate reasons, I was talking about this exact same thing with a friend just a couple of days ago and we were agreeing that there might be a bit of a polarization happening with humans these days. It seems that a lot of young people generally seem to be getting dumber, yet at the same time, there seems to be a small amount of young people who are absolutely brilliant. I'm not talking about some weird indigo child stuff either, just really smart kids.
I was thinking that it might have to do with the fact that there is so much information available to people nowadays and pretty much instantly as well. At the same time, it seems that the mainstream of our society is gently pushing us to be a little dumber. It's easier than ever to just sit on your ass at home and watch TV, which has DEFINITELY gotten dumber over the years.

So yeah, its pretty sad how little some people know or care about the world around them. Hope it gets better at some point and not worse

Anyway, that's enough of a rant for my first post I guess, hehe.

[Drextin Profile]

Excellent first post mananimal! Actually it would have been a great post no matter the number.