As bricks.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger      6 comments      link this post     


Are American kids dumb?

American kids, dumber than dirt.

Dan Edelen points out, with a little less ferocity, that there's a parent issue involved. I agree. I also note that the writer of the original article, Mark Morford, has forgotten a couple of things, namely that not all kids are from the same area of the country and that his take on private-schooled, privileged kids doesn't necessarily apply as the main reason kids that succeed actually do succeed.

Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?

My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America — and many more who aren't — now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?

The description of kids that do well, and what it takes for success (wealth, privilege, private schooling) according to Morford, are rare in rural parts of the country and so for the kids that do well here to have being "lucky" as the only reason they have succeeded is a bit of a stretch.

Morford has some good points, although he writes with his usual "style" that almost hides it. I think he's missed the boat in trying to clarify why some kids in this country do well and others don't by forgetting that not all kids are:
There are no doubt examples of dumb, rural kids who went to public schools. But there are more that do extremely well in college and don't have the problems described in Morford's article. Very few kids in rural areas have access to the factors for success that Morford outlines, so there must be other reasons for the educational decline in some regions and success in others. I'm not going to be so simplistic to assert that everything about a small, rural school is automatically better because it isn't always so. I'm just going to say: Morford wrote this from a very narrow viewpoint.

UPDATE: Read a follow-up to this post here.


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Copyright (c) Julie R. Neidlinger  11/07/2007 10:05:00 PM   (6) comments   Links to this post    

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6 Comments:

This doesn't help his argument:

…if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

I'm no fundamentalist, but the ones I've known have been very bright, certainly not mindless.

I myself think parenting has pretty much disappeared.

By Anonymous deniro, at 7/11/07 10:46  

Agreed, Deniro. I had chosen to let that little bit of self-important "I've never set foot in fly-over country" narrow-minded paragraph slide because it was too obvious.

I also did not mention that many of Morford's other articles would suffer from the inanity of subject matter and lack of intellectual relevance similar to those things he says are dumbing down the minds of a younger generation. In those cases, he comes off as just another "alas, the younger generation" kind of person who think the ridiculous of their generation are not ridiculous but to be venerated as "classic" and "back when it was good" instead of just a generational gap in taste.

I am sure the adults thought his generation was stupid.

By Blogger Julie R. Neidlinger, at 7/11/07 11:00  

Julie,

Thanks for your link to my post at Cerulean Sanctum on education.

I wish I could be more sympathetic to the case that rural kids are just as smart as their "sophisticated" West Coast and suburban counterparts, but in my rural area that's definitely not the case. (And yes, I lived in the Bay Area a few years, so I can honestly compare.)

Just yesterday we went to the polls to vote on funding the libraries in our county (since the state of Ohio has cut their funding so drastically most can barely even buy books). The modest levy, which would've cost most families about $30 a year, was defeated 56% to 44%. What stunned me as an enormous supporter of our libraries is that in the course of the run-up to the vote, I'd not talked with a single person who opposed that levy.

Only after the levy failed did I realize my perspective was off. I didn't talk to levy opponents because I don't run with the numbskull crowd in our county. Most of the people I talked with were erudite, intelligent people who understand the value of education and the great need for public libraries. I didn't talk with Cletus Sixpack who would much rather the government ensure free satellite access to every NFL game than toss a month's worth of cigarette money to a library. And guess what? Our county is full of Cletus Sixpacks.

While I don't run in Cletus's social circle, I do bump into Cletus a lot. The Sixpack household tends to be fertile, so I run into all his kids, too. Once you meet the kids, you realize Morford may be more aware than we know.

By Blogger DLE, at 7/11/07 19:20  

I'd hesitate to say that I was trying to make any case regarding regional intelligence, but instead was saying that Morford's simplistic cause/effect limitation on what makes a non-dumb kid with all exceptions just being "lucky" was a very poor theory.

There's no need to look very far to find "dumb" kids in rural areas or in urban areas. Dumb and smart are not limited to the categorizable things such as urban amenities, greater funding, etc. but is something far more complex.

I think throwing in a reference to Cletus Sixpack is a kind of lazy way to discount that Cletus has his counterpart in urban areas, though the counterpart is often better dressed and has more electronic gadgets.

However, I am working on an update post for later this evening, and I'll probably repeat all of this and add a few other points. I hope you stick around for it and add your thoughts.

By Blogger Julie R. Neidlinger, at 7/11/07 19:32  

Speaking of dumb kids and public education, I put my blog through this "readability" test.

My blog's reading level is Junior High. Ouch! I think the highest is Genius, and I have no idea how many levels removed my blog is.

So I decided to put yours through and it keeps thinking without returning a result. Your must be off the chart.

By Blogger David Cho, at 8/11/07 12:14  

Yes, David, but which end of the chart?

I tried that readability test, too. I couldn't get it to work. It's probably nothing more than my blog having messy HTML or CSS code.

By Blogger Julie R. Neidlinger, at 8/11/07 12:35  

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