The dumbest generation: The kids are alright, but their parents ... (WaPo)

[struggle4progress]

By Neil Howe
Sunday, December 7, 2008; Page B01

... If the data are objectively assessed, which age-slice of today's working-age adults really does deserve to be called the dumbest generation?

The answer may surprise you. No, it's not today's college-age kids, nor even today's family-starting 30-somethings. And no, it's not the 60-year-olds who once grooved at Woodstock. Instead, it's Americans in their 40s, especially their late 40s -- those born from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s ...

Obviously, we're talking averages. No one would apply the word "dumb" to Barack Obama (born in 1961) or Timothy F. Geithner, his nominee for secretary of the Treasury (born in the same month). Yet the president-elect himself has written eloquently about how hard it was for him and his peers to obtain a serious education during their dazed-and-confused teen years. Like it or not, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (born in 1964), who stumbled over basic civics facts during her vice presidential run, is more representative of this group. Early Xers are the least bookish CEOs and legislators the United States has seen in a long while. They prefer sound bites over seminars, video clips over articles, street smarts over lofty diplomas. They are impatient with syntax and punctuation and citations -- and all the other brainy stuff they were never taught.

Want proof? Let's start with the long-term results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is housed within the U.S. Department of Education. Considered the gold standard in assessing K-12 students, the NAEP has been in continuous operation for decades. Here's the bottom line: On both the reading and the math tests, and at all three tested ages (9, 13 and 17), the lowest-ever scores in the history of the NAEP were recorded by children born between 1961 and 1965 ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/05/AR2008120502601.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Nyah nyah! Ya chust mist me! I're to old too bee inn thet grupe

[Dennis Donovan]

1. This article is written by a man whose name is a question one would ask in a Catholic Church...

..and he's calling ME dumb? ;)(I was born in '65)

[acmavm]

20. Golly, I hate to say this but I think you just proved his point. Something

you would do in a Catholic Church? I mean, just throw out any reference to any church and a comparison of the guy's name to anything lame just screams 'validation'.

His name has nothing to do with the article.

[Dennis Donovan]

22. Your irony bone is broken...

:eyes:

[Rhiannon12866]

28. But it is ironic, relevant or not.

If you'd ever been in a Catholic Church, you'd know that you get more exercise there than you would at a session at the gym...:eyes:

[rockymountaindem]

2. Ha HA! Vindication for the Millenials!

See? See??? Growing up on the internet does not make you stupid!

[Writer]

3. I guess I'm a product of the upswing.

Born in '75.

My sisters ('63 and '66) are part of the dumbest generation. HA!

Actually the explanation Howe provides is extremely sad and sobering. Food for thought.

And see? Obama is an "early X'er" according to Howe. HA!

[Hugin]

4. I could take this guy's 'thesis' apart bit by bit, but, why bother?

He runs a marketing company and is selling a self-aggrandizing pseudo-intellectual book.

If he wants to use 'Academic Achievement Tests' (Which have been proven and acknowledged to be at their most culturally
and economically biased during the time frame he is knocking) as proof, there is no hope for him.

[struggle4progress]

5. I confess that I posted primarily because I find the article amusing:

perhaps that is merely an artefact of his long association with the late Bill Strauss

After searching the web for more info on Howe's ideas, I'll agree that his generational hypotheses seem to be fluff. I'll agree with you about the general usefulness of 'Academic Achievement Tests,' which have always contained strong cultural biases guaranteeing that children's performances typically reflect their parents' socio-economic position

Nevertheless, I suspect that there really was a major change in educational quality after the late 60s. But the reason is probably not a consequence of some mythical cyclic generational change. American ruling elites were upset by increasing student activism in the 1960s and made a concerted effort to roll back the post-Sputnik enthusiasm for better-educated students. This seems clear to me when I compare common textbooks from (say) 1964 with their successors a decade later

[Hugin]

9. On that point, I will agree with you, the cohort in question had their professional/academic coming

of age at the very peak of Reagan I.

Right-wing Reaganomics and Thatcherism took a tremendous toll on anything related to education and social promotion. A time,
I will add, where the group being flogged held an absolute minimum of influence. Instead of being encouraged, they were
shuffled off to service jobs with futures put firmly on hold by the 'Authorities' using metrics very much like those cited
in the article.

Some examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beanfield

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics

If I were to write a book about the generation in question (disclaimer: I am one.) Instead of panning them and blaming
it on a situation they had no control over (smacking of eugenics), I would say most of them made themselves out of
necessity.

Now our group has a voice... President-elect Obama.

[juno jones]

14. A-men.

I call us the 'Blank Generation' (thanks R. Hell). We graduated to closed factories and dwindling towns. We've never seemed to be famous for anything. But we gave DIY to the world. Music, art, movies, culture, and now politics.

Obama is channeling DIY politics. We are coming of age.

[Hugin]

31. Well put.

I can't tell you how happy it makes me to hear there are others out there who've come to realize this reality. :)

[Lydia Leftcoast]

24. I was teaching college in the mid 1980s, and yes,

students on one campus where I taught were complaining that there was "nothing to do" there. When I suggested attending or participating in the arts events on campus, reading for pleasure, volunteering, or discussing issues raised in their classes (all things that were common among my college generation), they looked at me as if I'd suggested Really Uncool things.

[Hugin]

27. I'm amazed also by the total silence in the media and elsewhere about the tremendous toll AIDS/HIV..

took on the generation being discussed.

Out of 30 or so people I interacted with in college there's only 3 or 4 left (counting me).

The Reagan denied AIDS epidemic claimed many of them.

[spiritual_gunfighter]

8. You are just mad that he called you stupid n/t

[Hugin]

10. No, I'm mad because he called a whole generation, 'stupid'.

Including President Elect Obama.

[spiritual_gunfighter]

11. Maybe so n/t

[Thor_MN]

6. The generation of the tail end of the baby boom

Victim to declining school enrollments, consolidation of schools, "New Math", experiments in how children should be educated by newly minted teachers of the early baby boom generation. Our education was in a coasting, "we made it over the hump" era.

I have often felt that my generation was moving in the shadow of the babyboomers ahead of us. We were the hand-me-down kids, surviving off of whatever was left over - the real attention was always on the self absorbed generation 5 years older.

We were educated in the vacuum starting with Nixon and ending with Reagan - had to find our first real jobs during Bush I to pay off our student loans. Our younger siblings got the benefits of action finally being taken to improve schools, our older siblings got the benefits of being the focus of the peak of the baby boom. Our tuition paid for the maintenance delayed to keep costs down for the peak boomers, the attention of colleges was on rebuilding infrastructure while we were trying to get an education.

Computers were not common for most of us. I wrote my first program in 1977 using a 4 line example of BASIC code in a Radio and Electronics magazine as a starter. We used a 10 character per second teletype machine to connect via modem to a mainframe, a long distance call to the nearest college. Storage was on paper tape - holes punched in a strip of paper to encode the 7 bit binary values. There were about three of us in my class of 180 who had the slightest clue about computers. The teachers knew nothing about them, we had to teach ourselves.

Now comes our generation's turn to clean up the messes of the baby boomers. Will we be adequate to the task?

[Warren Stupidity]

7. "New Math", experiments

started in the 60's: "Beginning in the early 1960s the new educational doctrine was installed, not only in the USA, but all over the developed world." and we boomers benefited from such horrors as set theory, boolean algebra, non-base 10 number systems and the general idiocy of actually providing children with the theoretical foundations of mathematics, rather than just forcing them to memorize the multiplication tables and a couple of trig formulas.

Perhaps you are referring to the 'new new math' which dates to around 1989 or so?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

[Demeter]

12. New Math Was Invaluable to Me

but then, I was a summa cum laude in engineering.

[juno jones]

15. Glad to hear it helped somebody

Really :).

I've been screwed in math since school began for me because my parents (who were professionals in early childhood education) taught me math before I entered school. Old math, so to speak. So I went from being able to add multiple columns of numbers, subtract, divide, etc at 6 to being confused out of my mind and still having problems years later.

[juno jones]

16. Damn I hadn't thought of that in a long time.

Multiple columns. Hallelujah! New math saved me from a life of chartered accountancy! Glory be!

:D

[pnwmom]

19. I thought it made perfect sense, though I did not go on in engineering.

Unfortunately, some parents were freaked out by it, because it included scary words like "associative principal" and "commutative principal." And because you had to write the zero's down when you did long division problems, and they were used to not doing that. The math that followed new math was a big step down, IMO. I'm familiar with that because I had to tutor my younger brother as he went through it.

[patriotvoice]

35. Ditto: Computer Science. EOM

[TrogL]

36. I loved the "new math", but it fit right in with my learning style

I joke that I didn't have a clear grasp of "2+2=4" until I mastered calculus.

I still think anything larger than 1+1 is in the realm of linear algebra, at which I suck.

[Hugin]

13. See how they pounce?

They need someone to feel superior to.

[pnwmom]

18. New math had been dropped by the time those students came along.

Too bad for them -- new math was a very good program, actually. It included plenty of basic math (drills, etc.) but also introduced elementary age students to concepts that they would need later on for algebra.

The math that followed new math, however, WAS dumbed down. I remember trying to tutor my brother when he had to take a standardized test in 8th grade, because he had never been taught long division.

The "fuzzy math" that many schools today also are skipping long division, much to the detriment of students when they get to Algebra.

P.S. Why is it that I can never use the word "also" anymore without thinking of Sarah Palin? When will it end?

:bounce:

[Alcibiades]

25. Folks in our generation did have one advantage

Which you cite obliquely: we were the last generation to be educated on slide rules, but the first generation to use personal computers. Though my own programming experience left off where you started out (writing little adventure programs in BASIC using lots of stuff cribbed from other sources), lots of folks I know my age have done quite well for themselves, partly because computer technology was growing and changing at the very time we were growing up. The fact that almost no one else was even nerdy enough to be interested made it geek chic before there was such a thing.

I've often had the thought you express about the industrial/education complex in our era, but I mainly saw it as positive. A lot of the boomers expressed their idealism in the 1970's by becoming involved with education, either as teachers, writers or producers of children's programming. I had the thought at that time that there really was some young, smart, liberal clique meeting in New York or Chicago or Boston to guide the progress of education back in those days. To the extent that that was true, i think it was a good thing.

The bad part was the idea that kids could somehow raise themselves. You saw it in the way kids were portrayed in the media. Tatum O'Neill was the iconic child star of her generation, and in some ways I think many of us with slightly pre-boom parents were raised in ways similar to upbringing--they left us by ourselves or under nominal supervision with an unlocked liquor cabinet and a half ounce of weed in the dresser drawer while they went out and found themselves.

[juno jones]

32. As I recall

the liquor cabinet only had a quarter bottle of Wild Turkey, the ubiquitous bottles of 'WTF?' like Rock and Rye (fascinating because of the rock sugar in it) and the bottle of Mateus that the M&P were saving for a very special occasion.:P

[Alcibiades]

33. We always had lots of randomness

Which was good, because we could drink it and no one would notice it was gone. But Sloe Gin? Ugh. I still have no idea what that crap is actually for. :puke:

[pipi_k]

17. So I'm wondering....

I didn't see it anywhere in that snippet, and I don't want to waste my time going to the original article...

does anyone know which generation that guy falls into?


Is this sort of like "studies" done by some white guys who claim that non-whites and women are fundamentally inferior to white guys?

[struggle4progress]

30. He was born in '51

<1991 BRIAN LAMB "Booknotes" interview with William Strauss and Neil Howe:> http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1048

[Iwillnevergiveup]

21. All I know is

the vast numbers of middle-schoolers I taught from 1990 until 2007 were abysmally lazy and incurious and really don't like to read because they don't read all that well.:shrug:

[PfcHammer]

23. I can haz kliff notez ?

[Alcibiades]

26. Some measures overstate this case

Back when I had an academic job, I had lots of kids harangue me for better grades, partly because of a pervasive grade inflation that they have come to expect. Additionally, many kids today have access to AP courses we did not have, and have inflated GPAs as a consequence. The SAT test has also been changed over time, rendering results incomparable.

Though I was born in 1968, I do see myself a bit in the portrait depicted by the author:

"The early Xers' location in history also plays a large role. Quite simply, they were children at a uniquely unfavorable moment -- a time when the divorce rate accelerated, when the media image of children turned demonic and when the "latch-key" lesson for kids stressed self-reliance rather than trust in others. By the time they entered middle and high school, classrooms were opened, standards were lowered, and supervision had disappeared. Compared with earlier- or later-born students at the same age, these kids were assigned less homework, watched more TV and took more drugs."

He neglects to mention that the 1970's, when we were growing up, was a profoundly anti-intellectual moment in American culture, or at least it seemed so to me at the time. In this regard, it has been superseded only by every subsequent decade. I really hope that we are finally entering an era wherein we can say to the kids that it's OK to be smart, that it's OK to get good grades, and that failing to even try to achieve is the very definition of a loser.

[Recursion]

29. There's lots of ways to define generations

I was born in 1976, which was the nadir of American fertility. People just didn't want kids then.

It was a few years later that "Baby On Board" placards started appearing and Spielberg started making kid-focused movies. That was when the Millenials started, by cultural criteria.

[treestar]

34. I fall right into that group

I can tell you that in the early 70s, teachers were being all modern and stuff. So we'd have bull sessions about politics and the like in social studies class or English class. Maybe we should have been learning something.

The dress code fell then, too. We girls could now wear slacks to school. Even halter tops (well, they did draw back and make a rule against that one).

They used to show us scare movies about drugs - they were worried about that, so their idea in those days was show a sort of horror movie and some kid who OD'd on drugs. Everyone would be buzzing about it for days.

The Cold War was still on and we had this concept of live now because we could all be blown up before we got to grow up. That could promote a lack of interest in academics. I remember one kid pointing out he could be sent to Vietnam at 19 and get killed so why was he wasting time in school? Of course it was over by then, but tt the time, Vietnam seemed like it was going to go on forever.