Our kids are harder working than we ever were…and dumber. This paradoxical observation courtesy of Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post:
Without question, Americans, whether wealthy or just upwardly mobile, are nowadays obsessed with preparing their children for a super-competitive, globalized job market. They will therefore go a long way — switching neighborhoods, borrowing money, creating color-coded spreadsheets — to get their children into high schools that force them to study and that test them regularly.
Those who play the game most intensively are often rewarded: The child who takes 15 Advance Placement courses, plays the clarinet in three orchestras, runs a Cambodian refugee camp in the summer and eschews lunch all winter really does have a better chance of getting into college than the child who plays kickball after school in the empty lot next door.
Yet, at the same time, Applebaum notes, many parents retain “a kind of nostalgia for a pre-industrial America, one in which childhood involved breaking horses and building rafts….Today’s children always seem to be working harder than yesterday’s children, having less fun and taking more tests, at least according to everyone I know.”
More strangely, our nostalgia also clashes with the other important American education narrative, the one that focuses on the 46 percent of high school seniors who test below the “basic” level in science (only 2 percent qualify as ” advanced“), the ” Dumbest Generation” of semiliterates glued to their cellphones, and the number of teenagers, a stunning one-third of the total, who drop out of high school. Since 38 percent of these teenagers recently told one survey that they dropped out because “I had too much freedom and not enough rules in my life,” it’s no surprise that solutions to the dropout crisis often involve imposing stricter school regimens, with more organized hours of teaching, more pressure and, yes, more testing.
Thus, Applebaum concludes, our kids are both stupider than we were and harder working.
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