The Dumbest Generation

It surprises me how little some people know about the history of the US, the fact that some students didn’t know what a COLORED ENTRANCE sign meant scares me. I agree with Bauerlein, that the digital age is causing the younger generations to know a considerably smaller amount of information about the world, but I disagree that the digital age is stupefying kids. The point that Begley and Interlandi make is a valid one, that, while the younger generations don’t know a ton about the world they know plenty about other subjects. They talk about how many of these video games help kids learn about various subjects. I know that I learn a lot vocabulary from some of the games that I play. What is also important though is that kids don’t spend all their time trying to learn from videogames, and the authors of this article make that clear. The kids that learn from these videogames need to be able to take the skills that they picked up from them and transfer them into a job or the next super-car. I agree that reading a book can be far more productive in increases my vocabulary, and they do, but as the world moves farther and farther away from paper, not many kids are going to be reading a whole lot, and people need to take that into consideration. The older generations can’t expect things to happen exactly the way they did when they were younger, there’s new technology, new fashions and new ways of learning; and, while they may be different, that does not mean that they are worse.