We're not the dumbest generation!

Are you dumb? Are we actually the dumbest generation? Most recently, Mark Bauerlein, an English professor has written a book which clearly states today’s young under 30 is the dumbest generation due to the progress of new technologies. He also asserts that about 35% of the students can’t make it to 12th grade, kids can’t spell properly or they have been spending too much time online chatting with friends, reading gossip news, etc instead of reading books or studying.

Blaming technology for a generation’s ignorance makes no sense and it will not be the solution of this problem. Technology is not by itself inherently good or evil. It all depends on the intention of the person using it. Someone could go online, chat with their friends 24/7, surf only celebrity gossip news, cyberbully their classmates, look at their own or other people’s photos on Facebook and then call it a day. In comparison, another person could go online, read interesting opinions from leaders all over the world, research for educational purposes, engage in lively politic debates or simply or learn something new.

Mr Bauerlein mentions that young people depend too much on the Internet, they can’t store information; they just retrieve material and pass it a long. This is not true. The Internet is a miraculous source of knowledge. Whenever we research for a project, we don’t just copy-and-paste; we read through it, pick out main details and re-write it again in our own words. Through this process we actually memorise the information. It’s hard to imagine how life would be without Google or Yahoo!

However the Internet isn’t a replacement for our memory. The fact that one can look up Colombia’s position on a 3D globe doesn’t excuse not knowing where it is in the first place. Access to information is not the same as knowledge. We young generation turns the torrent of information we find into something we and everyone else can actually learn from. And using search engine is quicker and saves more time than scanning for something through an encyclopedia. In fact, our young generation has access to more online educational resources than any previous generation and precisely, it is not the technology that has stupefied our young generation. Take Japan as an example: Japanese students consistently rank among the top in the world, and their country is a techno-utopia.

Nevertheless Mr Bauerlein comments that we read fewer books. The more time young people spend sitting in front of the screen, the less they want to read books. But while we’re online, we read news or download books to read, which saves more money. He even criticises that kids can’t spell properly through the use of slang or shorthand speech while communicating or by texting. That’s not convincing enough. There are more than 540 000 words in English right now, which is 5 times more compared to Shakespearian time. Using these words are convenient and save more time; for example: “U”, “r”, “cya”, “2morrow”, “idk”, etc. Although these are not informal, we only use them while texting or chatting, not for writing essays or an editorial report.

It’s the prerogative of every elder generation to look at the young and accuse today’s generation of sloth, and stupidity. We hear daily jeremiads from elderly people who wonder how kids who’d rather listen to rock n’ roll music and play online games than reading books or solving equations can possibly grow up to become the next successful generation.

Like it or not, parenting has a tremendous influence on every child’s behaviour and future. Many parents are too overbearing and put too much pressure on their kids and this is feeding into their illusion. Adults should understand that we grow and make our choices, we don’t need them to do that for us but we need their support. If we expect too much from our children, the kids may perform well for a while, but they’ll eventually become overloaded and their progress might fall downwards. Wouldn’t it be better for the adults to support their kids and hold them to standards, rather than moaning that their kids are dumb just because they don’t know things they never heard of or were never taught?

Surely we are not the dumbest generation. We’re not ignorant, jawed slackers. We read books, we communicate and we have access to more knowledge. The point isn’t that we may be dumber than any previous generations; it’s that we have the opportunity to be smarter than any of them, and yet we’re not taking it.