One of the most important books in ages, The Dumbest Generation tells how modern teens and twenty somethings are more clueless,  more inept, and more well dumb than ever before. While they are able to carry on tons of IM conversations at once and apparently can use a computer for World of Warcraft and video sharing and ripping dvds etc., they do have problems with, oh, reading, writing and arithmetic. 

The reasons for this are many and the book does examine some of them. 

I could get into to some of the reasons here, but I try to keep politics and the like off this blog. Suffice to say this is not by some random chance that this has happened and look no farther than the 60s for when this whole downward slide began. 

You have no idea how hard it is for me not to go into my theory on this. It is a shame I have been told without any uncertainty that I can not put up political or anything other than tech on a site that I give to my students… Make what you will of that… Oh well, if you can find my other site you can read what I have to say about it. :)

UPDATE: I have been reading some of the posts and comments on blogs around the net about this book. It is really quite humorous watching people making excuses for kids or trying to show one or two that are smart so this “proves” that the author is stupid. It is also quite revealing reading the calls to fire the professor who wrote the book or saying that he is dumb. Sigh, well, that sounds about par for the course. If you don’t agree with them, call them a bigot, a racist and try and get them fired. Yep, wouldn’t want anyway to point out the elephant in the room or anything. Heaven forbid kids learned about history or something, I mean we can’t have them questioning Michael Moore, Al Gore and Noam Chomsky, what would the world be then?

As Rush has said, “Most people’s historical perspective begins with the day of their birth.” and people in positions of power are looking to keep it that way forever.

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