The Kids Are Dopes

From The Kelly Letter:

I got in trouble recently for asking a friend’s kids, “Can’t either of you dopes pay attention for two minutes?” They’re constantly zoning out and gravitating back to their phones. “Der, nnh hnnh” is about as thoughtful as their responses get.

Their mother wasn’t happy. She told me I don’t know what it’s like for kids these days, they didn’t grow up with books the way I did and, besides, every generation says the kids are a lost cause.

To which I replied, in order: baloney, true, but it’s different this time. I’ll explain. Baloney: I know what it’s like for kids these days because I have to suffer their presence more often than I’d like, and gaze incredulously upon their vacant stares. True: They didn’t grow up with books the way I did, to the detriment of their brains and humanity’s future. It’s different this time: It’s not just curmudgeons like me pointing out that the kids are dopes, because the current ones really are.

In a disturbing report published earlier this month in Slate, “The Loss of Things I Took for Granted,” college educator Adam Kotsko wrote that ten years into his teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively:

“I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation … Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument — skills I used to be able to take for granted.”

He explored two possible culprits, smartphones and covid school shutdowns. The more compelling of the two was smartphones. Every brain entering the halls of higher education today was raised in a phone fog. The iPhone debuted in 2007, making the device itself about college age now.

“Whaa?” a kid might murmur upon hearing this notion, eyes still glued to the screen. To which I might reply, “I said every brain entering — oh, never mind.”

— Note 9, Week in Review, 2/25/24