Technology is Dumbing Down our Children

The other night I was talking to a friend of mine about the fact that in general, part of the reason that kids seem to be getting dumber (besides the fact that they have so much access to technology), is that they have access to technology. Back in the deep dark 80s when I was growing up without a cell phone, a computer, or even a VHS VCR (we had Beta, and if you don't know what a VCR is, you are not old enough to read my blog), I actually had to retain information that I learned. Ms. B made us read books in Senior English. Can you believe having to read books? Instead of a Kindle?

These days if you don't know something, you google it. No need to retain knowledge at all. The only real skills that are critical are texting, googling, and Downloading. If you had said those words in the 80s to anyone other than a computer geek, no one would have known what you were talking about. Even a computer geek would have had to stop at "Downloading".

I remember when I first had email. It was about a week AFTER I graduated from college. Which means I had to do things like go to the library and look things up in books to write papers. And guess what? Sometimes those books were checked out, which means I had to wait. WAIT for information. Can you believe that? No wonder I am so, like, patient and like, smart.

If I can teach my kids anything it will be to look things up and remember them. It will be how to research, retain, and synthesize information. It will be to open an actual book every once in a while. I'm going old school on these babies. And if I can keep them from saying the word "like" in a sentence five times, I will be declared the best mother on the planet.

But that might be too difficult, because, after all, I am a child of the 80s.

1 comment:

  1. Not only look up information, read it and sort it out, but we had to actually type it on a piece of paper, letter by letter, word by word. No copy and paste for us!

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