It's Just You

          Let's first talk about the author's verbal abuse toward her child. I found it incredibly disturbing that Sandy Hingston, author of "Is It Just Us, Or Are Kids Getting Really Stupid?", used her son's apparent stupidity as a through line for her article, constantly putting him down. First of all, I believe it is a parent's job to be a child's first and focal teacher. She neglects the responsibility of teaching her son the simple order of the days of the week while he was growing up and then have the audacity to scoff at his lack of knowledge. She never makes an encouraging comment toward or about Jake and even acknowledges in the article that she has a bad relationship with her son, saying "we never seemed to have anything nice to say to each other." Perhaps Jake's "stupidity" is a result of bad parenting.
          That being said, it is true that today's generation of youth is techonoligcally driven and perhaps more concerned with facebook than with homework. Someone please tell me a time when kids were concerned with homework. Before the internet it was TV, before that, the radio, before that, playing with friends, etc., but whatever the rage was at any point in history, children have always been more concerned with something other than homework.
          I believe it is difficult to compare this age with any other in terms of intelligence because it is truly a very different knowledge that young people possess today than ever before. It is understandable that kids who know everything about computers and video games but little about history or English can be easily perceived as lazy or uneducated, but the truth is, many kids carry just as much information but about different things. Technology today is absolutely incredible and you can bet it is technologically driven minds who are producing new products all the time. Today's world doesn't necessarily need you to memorize facts when you can simply ask yahoo and find answers in seconds. I don't think it's wrong- just different.
          My writing teacher last semester talked about the possibility of educators today who don't have the same technological knowledge or mindset of today's youth to perhaps not know how to teach students in a way they can understand. A completely new world calls for a new kind of teaching and some educators have not caught onto the modern brain functions of today's generation of young people.
          There are many aspects in which one can point the blame at the 'stupidity' of today's youth, but in our opinion, kids are not getting stupid- our knowledge just isn't understood by our elders.