Sunday, September 25, 2011
Dumbest Generation?
I believe there are many people today that believe we our generation is lazy, uneventful, and ignorant. Along with these characteristics most certainly comes the fact that other generations note us as DUMB or STUPID. I feel that they feel this way because most of our society is brought up around technology, and that younger kids only care about their social lives and the next facebook feed. Even though some of this may be true, I feel like it is a major generalization. There are many young people out their today that work their butts off, and barely have time in their day to get all of their school work done because of extra-curricular activities or jobs. Therefore, when it comes to being lazy and ignorant, some kids are, but many work extremely hard day in and day out to make themselves better. When it comes to be the dumbest generation, as Bauerlein suggests, it makes me really pissed. I don't think its right to blame the kids in our generation on our technology and the way we were brought up. I feel as though today kids are learning to build the future and not complete the past. Many classes today, (and I speak from a college student prespective), lack the history of what our country has accomplished in the past. Many kids don't know the answers to who was our 22nd president, or who was our ally in world war two, because some of us were never really taught any of these things in earlier years. We are taught today how to be productive with computers and other new technology and how to advance the future. I think because we choose to learn differently than past generations, we are considered "stupid or dumb," because we can't answer questions of the past. Let me ask you this Bauerlein, how many people over the age of 40 today can sit down at a computer and know the majority of the controls? They must be really dumb!
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I agree, it is a matter of keeping up with the times, as kids when we had a question no one ever said go look it up in an encyclopedia they would tell us to Google it, leading to us always having Google in our back pocket as a fall back. The question at hand is does this make us dumb or resourceful?
ReplyDeleteI completely agree, our generation thrives on individualism to a level that has never been experienced before. That's the way the world goes round now, where would we get if every single person was a history major? Three steps back from where we are today.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with this comment we are just taught different and that doesn't necessarily mean we are stupid.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you when you say that we are taught more about technology than history and such. I know that in high school I ended up having more computer classes than history classes. Like you said it just depends on how we are taught. We are learning what is relevant to us and most of us retain some of the information that he believes we should. But we can't possibly know everything. That's the purpose of the internet. When we forget something that we have learned we now have the power to look it up on the internet. Just because it took them longer to look it up in a book doesn't mean they should punish us for having a more efficient system. His generations methods of looking up information in a book is the same as our method of looking it up online except we can look it up quicker. It just makes me so mad that he believes that we are stupid for this reason. Not all of us are high school drop outs. Maybe he should remember that many years ago most people didn't even go to school and only knew about cooking and cleaning and the trade that they we working in. We are definitely more intelligent now just for being able to go to school and pass all these grades.
ReplyDeleteI agree with everything you said. We are just keeping up with technology and there is nothing wrong with that. I don't think any of us think that we shouldn't need to know common knowledge but that isn't what all are classes focus on. Just because we don't know specific historical facts, doesn't make us stupid, especially becasue everyone has their own strenghts adn subjects they know alot about.
ReplyDeleteI'm not really sure that Bauerlein would say that our generation is "dumb" because we have access to and know how to use the internet/ various technologies. I think he does say that we state we are using the internet to look things up so that we are able to learn; however, in reality we use it to Facebook, Twitter, etc.--to connect to other's (NOT to expand our knowledge). Something to think about: How often do you use the internet/ other technology to learn and expand your knowledge (other than when you are forced to)?
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