Teacher Says Students are Dumber Every Year

[fma001]

"What's sad about this is that we're at a point in human history unlike any other in terms of availability of knowledge."

This is actually part of the problem. Many educators assume that since so much knowledge is at our fingertips we don't need to learn as much anymore. Why learn something if you can instantly look it up on Google? Of course, our brains don't work like that. Our brains use our current knowledge to understand new knowledge, so the less we know the less we can understand. The more we know the more we can understand. Google is useless if you can't understand most of the information you can easily find on it. You see the same thing with math. Many educators insist that knowing math facts and long division are unnecessary because students can use calculators. This outsourcing of the work of the brain is creating a "dumber" population.

[sonya_post]

"What's sad about this is that we're at a point in human history unlike any other in terms of availability of knowledge."

While that may be true, we are running around the same old track when it comes to our foolishness. There is nothing new here. The once great and educated Roman Empire collapsed with an illiterate population. We get fat, rich, and lazy - and make one more circle around.

[Mae_Jakob_Ka]

It saddens me to read this post. So many parents still have misconceptions about early learning in general. My friend just shared her experience and success in teaching her son Math using dot method on our country's online community. She got attacked badly! I feel so sad when I read all the negative comments. Some even compare teaching young children to training "animals". 

I am glad I have found this community where parents with the same mind set mingle and share experiences.

Cheers to Early Learning!!

[Tanikit]

Technology does teach students to keep things short - even posters in this very thread are apologising for lengthy posts. Apparently people who spend a lot of time on message boards (and I imagine skype and sms's etc) become less able to read lengthy articles or books. There is nothing wrong with learning to say things concisely, but one should also be able to take in longer things to.

I do worry about schools gearing everything to prevent any child "being left behind" or saying "we follow the syllabus/curriculum" as mostly then things are being done to the MINIMUM standards rather than doing those things and additional. By leaving no child behind, very often all children are getting left behind - we can all read at the minimum level by the end of grade one instead of some children being able to soar and of course those coming in with the knowledge are going to get thoroughly bored - they will switch off and then suddenly they will be "behind" - maybe this is what the third grade slump is all about - children who have turned off through the elementary gardes out of sheer boredom.

Most of my favourite teachers at school were those who challenged us and expected more from us than the others - if you expect a lot from a child it shows you respect them and think more of them - any child will respond well to this, but getting the message that we can only cope with the minimum will make us do just that and then students will appear dumber.

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