The Dumbing Down of America?

I know, it probably seems like I am going on about the same thing of late. Maybe I am, but it seems to me that what I am seeing around me is a steady dumbing down of our society. Getting young people to read a book is like pulling teeth. Getting them to be able to spell correctly and be able to write and construct a coherent sentence is next to impossible, from what I am hearing from friends who are school teachers. Kids today learn to spell by texting on their cell phones: R U G4C? G2G, TMBL8R. Translated: Are you going for coffee? Got to go, text me back later. But they learn how to write in "text-ese" and not how to spell words out, so that when they have to do so, they are pretty much lost because they do not know how to do anything but abbreviate in text lingo. Reading an entire book for them is a ponderous exercise so they prefer to find books with lots of brightly colored pictures instead of any meaningful words. They're used to short text messages or Twitters that require very little time to read and respond to. They have such short attention spans that I marvel that school teachers can even get their lessons across to them. I despair for the future where kids can't read, write or spell because they are so totally hooked on their cell phones that they are hard pressed to turn them off and put them away. I don't know if all schools permit kids to carry cell phones with them in class but I can imagine how distracted kids would be sending texts to each other instead of paying attention, or photographing tests and then sending them to their friends cell phones with the answers. Honestly, I do not know how teachers cope with classrooms full of kids on cell phones these days and I can only hope that they are banned during class time in elementary schools, middle schools, High Schools and universities and colleges. I wouldn't want to try to teach a classroom full of kids texting to each other while I was trying to teach.

I just wonder what kind of generation we can expect from kids who have known nothing but electronic gewgaws, Internet, cable TV, cell phones and other distractions. This is probably the first generation of kids to come along for whom paper books are a foreign concept. They are so used to e-books, Kindles, laptops and other electronic means of "reading" books that when they do visit the library, all they want are brightly colored picture books with minimal reading required. They don't want to read long sentences and try to digest information that way. They want it quick, bright, flashy. Maybe I'm just hopelessly "old school", but I do fear that we are creating an illiterate generation that has no contact with its cultural treasures due to too many electronic distractions. And since these kids are our future, the thing I fear the most is that those who forget their history are often doomed to repeat it. We've already seen an instance of that in our own time. My generation forgot the lessons of VietNam and it was a member of my generation who consigned us to the costly and unnecessary war in Iraq, and the President at the time was someone who prided himself on his lack of intellect and "gentlemen's C's" at elite Ivy League schools, so we can see firsthand what happens when people don't read or learn their lessons. We are a society very much in danger of a steady dumbing down and this trend must be reversed at once before we reach the tipping point of no return. I just wish I knew how such a thing could be accomplished. Short of getting rid of all the electronic goodies that so easily distract our attention these days, I don't know how to convince people that it's OK to crack open a good book and read it and digest its information and maybe gain a nugget of wisdom from it. Our nation's attention span seems to grow steadily shorter and shorter. We're always jumping that next big thing instead of taking a deep breath and digging in for the long haul on one thing at a time. Maybe if we'd stop trying to rush headlong into tomorrow and expect instant gratification from everything and everyone we encounter, we'd be a far happier nation instead of one that seems currenly mired in a very deep malaise and impatience that things that we want do not happen or come to us immediately. The best things take time and patience, and if we slow down enough to appreciate what is right in front of us, we might be surprised at what we find, like the cultural treasures we seem so eager to dispense with, for example. Maybe there should be a "Stop-Loss" measure put into place to preserve those things for future generations, and schools should require those things to be taught to all students so that they understand from whence they came and even where they are going in the future. Number One measure would be to return libraries to their former mission of being "The People's University", a storehouse of the world's wisdom and knowledge, available free to anyone willing to step through the doors and take advantage of it, instead of trying so hard to reflect pop culture tastes. I understand the need for libraries to compete with online media, but they shouldn't do so at the expense of the world's wisdom and free access to it, because let's face it, there's still a fairly significant digital divide. Libraries are stepping up to bridge it, and that's great, but libraries shouldn't contribute to the steady dumbing down of a culture that's already awash in far too much ignorance. Keep the library as a "People's University", where patrons can access a mixture of the old and the new.