Are people smarter than they once were?

"People are smarter and more aware of what's going on than at any other time in human history. The average 19-year old today knows ten times as much as a 19-year old did forty years ago. Look at the technology and information that is routinely mastered."
-- AARON, commenting on earlier post

Do you really think so, Aaron?

I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one, and I think I come to it from a fairly reasonable perspective. You see, I was 19 in 1969, which was exactly 40 years ago.

I'm not going to deny that there is more knowledge available now. After all, 40 years ago this month we were still two months or so from going to the moon for the first time. For most of us, computers were large machines that took punch cards (do not fold, spindle or mutilate) and kept only important records.

Heck, who could have figured that by now we'd have computers in most middle-class homes?

Not me, that's for sure.

In 1969, 19-year-olds weren't allowed to vote. It might have made a difference. If we'd had the vote in 1968, we might have spared the U.S. two terms of Richard Nixon.

But that's not the point.

I think you're making a mistake when you talk about average kids. I think the smarter kids today know things we only dreamed of knowing, but did you know that high school kids in the '60s scored significantly higher on the SAT than kids do now, and that was before the test was dumbed down.



You know what we didn't have?

Video games.

You know what else we didn't have?

Cable TV.

You know what else we didn't have?

An epidemic of fat kids, an epidemic of over-medicated kids, an epidemic of kids whose attention span is about equal to the lifespan of a gnat.

I'll tell you something else. Go back 40 more years -- to 1929 -- and you'll find kids who were more serious about their education and harder-working than we were. Evolution isn't making kids smarter as the years go on. In fact, in an awful lot of cases it's making them soft.

We're turning into a race of eloi, and if you know what that means, you are smarter than the average 19-year-old today. Between a school system that's more about training than it is about teaching and mass media that's aimed more at the groin than at the intellect, we're probably within a generation or two of either total societal collapse or complete authoritarianism.

Did you know that two-thirds of all Americans now work in service industries? We can joke all we want about "Do you want fries with that," but the fact is we used to make things. We used to build things and then stand back and take pride in what we had accomplished.

Comes the time, we'll have decisions to make.

One choice will be to accept the yoke, while the other will be to take to the hills, tear everything down and get back to what America used to be. Heck, we didn't need socialized medicine or any of that other stuff because we had communities. We cared about our neighbors and we took care of each other.

Now most of us don't even know who our neighbors are.

No, Aaron. Things aren't getting better.

They're getting finished.