A serious question: Has Reality TV help to dumb down our society? I'm not saying it is all the

[patrice]

10. There's a difference between intelligence or aptitude and actual developed skills.

Last edited Sun Jun 10, 2012, 12:20 AM - Edit history (1)

My guess is that the potential is still there, so I wouldn't say "dumb". But of course it isn't hard to recognize that cognitive and other skills are often missing or under-developed.

I spent 8 years teaching high school and then in my master's research found data supporting wide & consistent "grade inflation".

I don't think tv can have the effect that you are referring to all by itself. Funny you should mention though, because I have more than a few times recalled how it felt, how proud I was, when I was able to follow the plot of a tv show all of the way through. We spent most of our time outside when I was very young, so this would have to have been when I was closer to 10 when I remember retelling myself the plot of something I had seen on tv and being pleased with myself that I could do that.

What's the difference between then and now? I know that more of us read more of the time, for pleasure, than you see now. Grammar, the logic of our language, was taught AS GRAMMAR, by itself, pretty early, grade 5 or 6?. We had to memorize not just grammar rules and such, but also multiplication tables and other content. Phonetics was systematically rational. We also had to diagram tons of sentences, logic again. The point being that, jut like how practice conditions your abilities to do things such as play piano or shoot-hoops, all of this rational patterning that we did with logic and memorization patterned our thinking processes.

We also worked alone mostly. I remember figuring out how to figure out something in a grammar exercise in my homework that I didn't know the answer for, by means of a step-wise process that included extremely careful reading and re-reading and re-reading again, and going back in the book, and comparing/noticing connections between things. People are not using text-books that way much now and there's a lot of co-operative "learning" and too much emphasis placed upon learning-style, as opposed to independent work that challenges you to develop more than just your preferred mode of information processing.

Just brainstorming. I suspect these are some possible factors, but not the sole cause.