Once in the sixth grade my teacher handed back some reading test that the class did poorly on and told us that if we would spend even half as much time reading a book than we do using a computer, then our performance in the class would greatly improve. A few days later our teacher got a new projector to replace the old one that was broken and he spent a good twenty minutes trying to set it up before he gave up and asked our class if anyone knew how to set it up. One girl stepped forward and in about ten minutes she got the projector working and we were on our way with our lesson. The same adult who indirectly told our class that we weren’t smart because we didn’t read took twice as long trying to set up a projector as a sixth grader did. This is the type of relationship that today’s youth has with their elders. Older people tell younger people that they aren’t smart enough then struggle to use today’s technological advances. Although today’s youth may not be as knowledgeable in some areas as their elders are, this doesn't mean that they are “the dumbest generation”. Declaring someone smart or dumb is all about perspective because it all depends on how you define smart.
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In Mark Bauerlein’s 2008 book The Dumbest Generation he makes the argument that those under the age of thirty are dumb. Since Bauerlein bases the claim off of “the 2007 Pew survey on “What Americans Know: 1989-2007” (Source 1) we can assume that Bauerlein’s definition of smart is what and how much a person knows, based off the title of the survey. That is truly a poor and incomplete definition of what smart is. If this new generation were truly dumb then it wouldn’t make sense that “IQ scores in every country that measures them, including the United States, have been rising since the 1930s’ (Source 2). To be smart not only means to be knowledgeable about certain things, it’s also about how you use that knowledge that makes you smart. Someone can memorize all the facts that they want but that knowledge isn’t going to help them solve a problem that requires critical thinking. I’m certain that many would agree that it would be more helpful to know how to be able to think critically about real life problems than it would be to know the location of “the principal rivers” that were discussed in source 5. Some say that the main reason that today’s youth is not as smart as those before them can be attributed to the internet. Today many people commonly accuse the internet as poisoning and rotting the minds of young people but most of these people lived and learned through a time when the internet didn’t exist. Most of these people are accustomed to learning from a book rather than a screen so they aren’t aware of the benefits of this new form of learning. It’s true that “young Americans have much more access and education than their parents did” (Source 1), the reason this fact isn’t showing up in surveys like the one Bauerlein discussed that measure how much a person knows is because young people are choosing to learn about how and why things work rather than memorizing the answers to trivia questions. Thanks to the internet, today’s youth is able to acquire
In Mark Bauerlein’s 2008 book The Dumbest Generation he makes the argument that those under the age of thirty are dumb. Since Bauerlein bases the claim off of “the 2007 Pew survey on “What Americans Know: 1989-2007” (Source 1) we can assume that Bauerlein’s definition of smart is what and how much a person knows, based off the title of the survey. That is truly a poor and incomplete definition of what smart is. If this new generation were truly dumb then it wouldn’t make sense that “IQ scores in every country that measures them, including the United States, have been rising since the 1930s’ (Source 2). To be smart not only means to be knowledgeable about certain things, it’s also about how you use that knowledge that makes you smart. Someone can memorize all the facts that they want but that knowledge isn’t going to help them solve a problem that requires critical thinking. I’m certain that many would agree that it would be more helpful to know how to be able to think critically about real life problems than it would be to know the location of “the principal rivers” that were discussed in source 5. Some say that the main reason that today’s youth is not as smart as those before them can be attributed to the internet. Today many people commonly accuse the internet as poisoning and rotting the minds of young people but most of these people lived and learned through a time when the internet didn’t exist. Most of these people are accustomed to learning from a book rather than a screen so they aren’t aware of the benefits of this new form of learning. It’s true that “young Americans have much more access and education than their parents did” (Source 1), the reason this fact isn’t showing up in surveys like the one Bauerlein discussed that measure how much a person knows is because young people are choosing to learn about how and why things work rather than memorizing the answers to trivia questions. Thanks to the internet, today’s youth is able to acquire