Hot Topic (7/19): Does technology make our kids dumber?

[Cafe GroupAdmin]

Is technology making kids dumber?

by Kelly Heyboer/ The Star-Ledger July 15, 2009 5:54AM

At least, that's what Mark Bauerlein argues in his provocative book "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future."

A Q&A with author Mark Bauerlein:

 

Q. With the internet and technology, today's young people have almost immediate access to nearly all of human knowledge. How can that make them dumber?

A: Yes, that's the disappointing thing. All the knowledge in the universe at their fingertips, and yet on the existing measures of knowledge and skills they keep producing such disappointing scores. Why?

Because the web means to them not a window onto the world of history, civics, geography, philosophy, literature and art. It's a window onto what they really care about-- one another.

A 15-year-old doesn't worry about what a 40-year-old thinks. He worries about what other 15-year-olds think. She doesn't ponder what happened at Omaha Beach in 1945. She ponders what happened at the party last Friday.

Social life eclipsing all other things. That's just the nature of adolescence in America, and now it has a whole new arsenal to amplify it.

Q: Cell phones, iPods and the internet are not going away. So, what's the solution?

A: There is no solution. We are heading down into the least scenes of "Fahrenheit 451," when those few lovers of books wander the woods memorizing their favorite tome while the rest of the society sits at home watching interactive soap operas on huge screens in their bedrooms.

Q: Other authors argue today's children and teens-- the Millennial Generation-- are actually getting smarter. They cite higher I.Q. levels and long-term academic studies. Why do you say the opposite?

A: Well, it looks like the IQ gains have slowed considerably and when we look at certain areas, such as verbal intelligence, things are pretty flat. And I'm not sure what academic studies you mean, but it's certainly true that more kids are taking AP courses and going to college than ever before. But consider these numbers: Reading scores for 17-year-olds are flat since the 1970s and down since the early 90s; Remediation rates for college students are now at 43 percent for two-year schools and 29 percent for four-year schools; and literacy rates for college grads are down since the early 90s.

When the Chronicle of Higher Education polled college professors on the writing skills of students, only 6 percent of them rates the kids "very well prepared," in spite of the fact that young people are writing more words now than ever before. And let's put those results in the context noted above. Today there are more public libraries, colleges and universities, museums, historic sites and after-school programs than ever before. And we have more educational programming on TV, plus, of course, the web. In other words, young people have more access to knowledge than at any time in history. And yet, that great outflux of intelligence that techno-philes promised back in the 1990s hasn't happened

Q: Did you write this book because of what you were seeing in your own classroom?

A: A little bit, but the ideas formed mainly while I was out of academic, working in the research office of the National Endowment for the Arts. There, we conducted national population surveys of young people's arts and culture habits, and in 2002 we reached a troubling finding: The percentage of 18-24-year-olds who read any work of literature of any kind or quality or length or genre for their own pleasure or edification fell 17 points from 1982 to 2002 (60 percent to 43 percent).

For more of the Q&A click here

What are your thoughts?

 

[forsythia_18]

Anything is excess is unhealthy.  And kids nowadays are using technology in excess.  Technology is not a bad thing but it's good for kids to pick up a book once and awhile.

[Godgaveme4]

Have you noticed how teens and some young adults do not know how to make change or count back money to you without a computer register?

I definitely think that some technology is definitely dumbing down our society.

[iluvmommyhood58]

I agree with this man and it's not that technology is bad, it's that people excessively use and misuse it so that it REPLACES things rather than ENHANCES things. I might pick up this book, it sounds very interesting.

[PestPatti]

 

 

Quote:

Have you noticed how teens and some young adults do not know how to make change or count back money to you without a computer register

   Now a days they dont TEACH the fine art, of counting back change.   I can tell what my CHANGE should be before they do 

[IhartU]

Cell phones/Texting are making children dumber. They are hooked to that device 24/7 and I dare say they are on it during school and when they are supposed to be doing homework- in essence, every waking moment they feel the need to text to their friends. It's ridiculous... most of them can't even spell properly any more.

[Lizardannie1966]

Technologically? They're far smarter than us and simply because of all the gadgets and gizmos available TODAY that so many of us didn't have.

But book smart? World smart? I wouldn't call them "dumber," but I would say that we've..as parents..allowed our kids to be taken over by the computer, by their cell phones (texting, etc) and by video games. Kids are move naive today in some ways because of this.

[sappharie]

Quoting iluvmommyhood58:

I agree with this man and it's not that technology is bad, it's that people excessively use and misuse it so that it REPLACES things rather than ENHANCES things. I might pick up this book, it sounds very interesting.

[EireLass]

I don't think it makes them dumber. I think it eliminates social behaviour necessity. I think it eliminates immagination. I think it prohibits learning patience. Mostly I think it's creating monsters.

[Newbieonthblock]

I don't think it makes them dumber as long as it isn't used in place of thinking for themselves.  I allow my kids to use their calculators for their math lessons but I don't allow them to use them when they take a test.  I give them a piece of scratch paper and expect them to show the steps they used in solving problems.  That way, if they get a wrong answer, I can go back over the steps they took to see what mistakes they made.  Technology definitely has its place.

[luv4my3boys]

It depends on what technology is used and what programs. There are some very educational TV shows for kids, as well as some educational computer games. There are also some video games that make the kids "work out" in order to play, and presently, with more than half our children over weight, it might be considered a "good" technology.

Everything in moderation is key!