Now that summer is over, arbitrarily, it’s time to send your kids back to school! Or whatever, for all the good it’s doing. Kids are definitely getting less and less intelligent with each passing year.
Obviously, when I say “kids,” I’m talking about people my kids’ age. Obviously, my generation is smarter than our parents.
Or maybe not. For example, I am definitely dumber than my parents, as is evidenced, first of all, by the fact that I am struggling to feed less than half the number of kids that my parents were always struggling to feed. They must have had secrets, and they are not sharing them with me, “because I don’t call enough.” A small part of me thinks that my father’s No. 1 secret was to always make a huge deal when people leave lights on in rooms they’re not in or when people play with the thermostat. But there has to be more to it than that. The other way I know my parents are smarter than me is that my parents raised me, whereas I’m raising my kids. And if you’ve ever heard me write about my kids, I am not impressed.
Because our schools definitely seem to be less effective these days. And it’s the teachers’ fault.
And I say this as a teacher. Because I read my students’ essays, and I’m thinking, “These are horrible! I’m not getting through to these kids at all!”
On the other hand, I tell myself, that’s the job. As soon as they’re good writers, they’ll leave my class. That’s the whole idea. I am doomed to forever be reading bad writing. But maybe this is just something I’m telling myself to make me feel better. Maybe I’m a horrible teacher. I mean, the students do complain, if that’s any indication. And they complain every day: “Why don’t you come up with more interesting lessons? I don’t care that this knowledge might help me as an adult. Make it appeal to me as a kid.”
And I do. I come up with lessons that every adult I show them to says, “Wow! I wish I had this when I was in school! It’s informative, entertaining, and funny, all at the same time!” But my students are not interested in what’s actually in the lesson; they want to spend more time negotiating about whether I should be giving the lesson at all. I have to sell them on the concept of school every day. Like they’re not already here.
“Hey, I’m not the one who shows up every day and still doesn’t know why. Who’s less intelligent, again?”
Actually, I don’t know why I show up either. All we do is argue.
Maybe society is going down the drain, and like a drain, with every rotation, the circumference gets smaller and smaller and the pace faster and faster.
(Let’s give the younger generation a minute to look up which one is circumference.)
But it’s not just me saying this. All these studies keep coming out that say that the younger generation is less intelligent. The thing is, though, that it’s always the older generations conducting these studies. The younger generation does not conduct studies.
And some kids justify it. They say, “It’s not a big deal, because if the whole world gets dumber, no one loses. As long as everyone gets dumber at the same time.” After all, you can still win a rat race if all the rats are running slower.
But what they forget is that apparently, some other countries are still getting smarter. Like maybe the concept of yeridas hadoros doesn’t apply to Asia. So basically, we need to daven that everyone gets less intelligent, across the board. Whatever the opposite of “Atah Chonen” is.
We’re definitely scoring worse on standardized tests. You show kids a test these days, and they say, “This is Chinese!” So obviously, the kids in China are going to do better, because they know Chinese.
Who is writing these tests?!
We have to stop outsourcing these things to Asia.
Or we say, “Yeah, but some people just don’t test well,” which doesn’t sound at all like what we tell ourselves to make it sound like we’re smarter than we are. Time was, part of the definition of smart was “proficient at multiple things.”
A lot of people say that we’re getting less intelligent because we have to think less because of technology. And Asia, for example, has no technology! On the other hand, future generations were always less intelligent than previous generations, and they couldn’t blame technology. Though technically, there was always new technology. At some point, someone was like, “Kids nowadays with their wheels… In my day, we had to figure out how to get lumber home from Home Depot without wheels. Now, kids will never know.” And the kids said, “We’ll never have to know!” And the adults said, “Well, you won’t have your wheels on you wherever you go. You’ll see.”
So maybe kids just don’t have to be as smart.
You don’t even have to be smart enough to keep yourself alive, because nowadays, there are laws and rules for that. It used to be that people had to figure out how to stay alive. We went outside and played with no supervision, we made up our own games with zero intruding advice from adults, and whoever was left came in for dinner. Whereas nowadays, kids can no longer go out on their own, and as a result, they are no longer developing their creativity by coming up with their own games, for example.
You know what? Maybe I’m wrong. Just this Shabbos, two of my teenagers did come up with a new game, and they were playing it nicely without any fighting or arguing of any sort. The game involves pillows from the couch. (90% of made-up childhood Shabbos games involve pillows from the couch.) The way you play is you throw a pillow up against the wall as high as you can, and the goal is, as it slides down the wall, to try to stop it with your face.
They’ve been playing it for 10 minutes now. I hope this game doesn’t make them even less intelligent. So I take back everything I said.
I would continue my argument at this point, but basically my entire target audience has just walked off to play the pillow game.
Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].
