I don't recall being stupid when I was a teenager. At least not inherently so. To be sure I wasn't as educated as I am now, but I don't recall being just plain dumb. (Yeah, I believe that the smarter you become, only makes you all the more aware of that that you don't know - but that's another blog). To be sure I did do some stupid things but that wasn't because I didn't have a brain - more that I chose not use it at particularly inopportune times.
I suppose there were dumb kids in my class. I simply didn't notice them. Currently there seem to be an abounding number of dumb teenagers - and I'm talking of those that choose to make a few extra bucks in retail outlets such as hardware stores or fast food outlets.
I blame it on technology - the information age as it were.
When I was in school we were taught how to derive the square-root of a number on paper with nothing more than a pencil. I'm not trying to be supercilious; the fact that we used pencil and paper was merely of necessity. There were no calculators to speak of in that day.
I'm in serious doubt that the majority of fifteen-year-old's could divide 65 by 9 these days given only a piece of paper and a pencil and ultimately excogitate the correct answer to two decimal places.
Here's the dialogue of me getting lunch today with one fresh-faced nubile:
"[ffn]That'll be $10.04 sir." [Any use of the word 'sir' outside of PACOM just makes me feel old...]
[hand her a Jackson]
[rings it up]
Then I say (gulp), "Wait, I have four cents."
[ffn] Displays an initial look of incredulousness and then apprehension. Is this guy trying to cheat me?
That kid absolutely knows that I'm entitled to $9.96 in change and there's going to be no talking her out of it. But I give it the earnest but utterly futile attempt anyway, "Look miss, the computer says you owe me $9.96 right? Now if I give you an additional four cents, now how much might you owe me?!?"
Admittedly, when I was in school, the smallest particle know to man was the electron. Now we know or at least theorize of quarks of many flavors, fermions, leptons, hadrons, baryons, gluons and strings to name a few. The knowledge base of the world has grown and continues to grow exponentially. The expectations of young people to master all this knowledge is frankly impossible. I'm getting off the subject here but one can't help noticing of ever increasingly narrow bands of specialization in the professional workforce. But that subject is ripe for yet another blog sometime.
When a child enters the world of formal education, the primary cynosure of that education is the installation of basic knowledge. The "three R's": Readin' ritein' and rithmatic. But no matter the diligence or conviction of educational techniques, there simply isn't any way to force a child to learn. Maybe the fact that 75% of our nation's high school seniors are unable to write proficiently or even coherently shouldn't come as a surprise. So are kids really getting dumber? Who knows? But all I wanted back from my particular transaction was a Hamilton. I never got it.
8:14:49 AM 
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