Not everyone would agree…
If today’s kids are smarter than their parents and grandparents why do math skills and reading skills keep declining and S.A.T.tests are made easier today and NY State4 is dropping Regents exams as a requirement for high school graduation.? When was the last time you met a young clerk that could make change?
I get the humor, it’s funny.
However, the real question is, what is “smart”?
Everyone older bemoans the degradation of the following generations. If things were so dire, how do we continue to advance and do ever greater things? Medicine, space, physics… we continue to advance and do ever greater accomplishments. How would that be possible unless the younger generations are doing it?
The fact is, what is considered “smart” continues to change as technology evolves and relieves us of doing certain things- like simple math for example. Take it a step further, how many people could start a fire? Back in caveman days, you’d probably croak if you didn’t have that skill. It’s no longer needed. How many people today could make bread from scratch? And so on. And the older generations back then that had to make bread every day- look at these idiots that can’t make bread… 
In order to move forward, we have to move beyond spending time mastering skills that are no longer needed to advance. Understand the fundamental concepts, yes, but not master them. There’s no time to sit around learning rote math, we need next generations to concentrate on much more complex topics. And despite the segment of youth that seem to be falling behind, there is a huge segment that is excelling and advancing our knowledge across many fields.
Schools need to change to match the current needs. Testing or better yet, the measure of comprehension, needs to evolve along with it. I don’t support the removal of testing but the content surely needs to continue evolving as the technology advances.
Finally, being “smart” has many facets. You can be smart at a particular topic and quite ignorant about others. And not discounting people who are just common sense smart…The key is to leverage areas where you do excel and foster opportunities to grow them.
I don’t remember 1976 owners manuals having valve adjustment instructions.
Agreed, one reason owners manuals stopped have valve adjustment instructions is because most engines went to hydraulic lifters that don’t require valve adjustments anymore…
They are NOT made easier. My brother is a teacher. And he took part of an experiment where teachers took the SAT’s. Their scores were about the same as when they took the SAT’s some 50+ years ago. They used teachers because they were familiar with the material.
With credit cards rewards and almost every place has Tap and Go payment machines why would you need change ?
+1
I really have to wonder where these tales about “the SAT is easier than it used to be, back in The Good Old Days” originated. I am a former testing supervisor for Educational Testing Service, and I can tell you that the only substantive change to the SAT over the years is that certain calculators have been allowed during the math portion of the test for… probably… more than 25 years. However, we had to personally inspect each calculator prior to testing, to be sure that it wasn’t a calculator that was on the “prohibited” list.
Also, the test is now computer-based (using the school’s computers), rather than relying on paper test booklets and answer sheets. The amount of lugging that I had to do in order to securely ship the materials back to ETS in Princeton was really tiresome, but–fortunately–that grunt work for supervisors is now a thing of the past.
And, even though students can now use a calculator, if someone has no clue regarding exactly what a particular test item is seeking, a calculator will not help him/her.
My career teaching college courses in mathematics, statistics and computer scitence began in 1962 and ended when I retired in 2011. I didn’t see a decline in the ability level of students over this time period. In my last years of teaching when students asked about my grading scale, I responded "I have lowered my standards. My old standard was if you know no more than I do at the end of the semester, younwon’t pass the course. These days if you don’t know any more about the subject than I know, the highest grade you can earn is a C. The A and B grades are for students who know more than I do about the subject. Civilization won’t progress if your generation doesn’t know more than my generation.
The last semester before I retired, I taught an upper division course in data structures. In one class session, I put an algorithm on the board. One female student said very shyly, “I think I know an algorithm that will run faster”. I invited her to come up and put her algorithm on the board which she did. After we analyzed her algorithm, it would indeed run faster. “Young lady, that’s great. You deserve an A for the day”, I exclaimed. I stood back and liooked at it again. I then said, “I’ve changed my mind. You really showed up your old prof. Your grade for today is an F”. The class started to snicker. I then said, “I’ll tell you what I am going to do. I am going to average the grades and give you a C”. The class then laughed. I then reminded them about my grading scale. I then said to the class “This is my last semester. I am retiring at the end of the school year. This is best retirement present I could receive when you take the material and expand on it. This is what I meant by my grading scale”. The class got very quiet and then applauded.
I have seen many changes over the years. My first experience with computers was punching cards with a keypunch to be fed into the card reader on the computer. I could punch a card to fit around the drum in the keypunch to make it shift from alphabetic to numeric mode when punching cards that required both alphbetic and numeric data. Today’s students haven’t even seen an IBM card. I used to be able to repair my television set. If the problem was more than a vacuum tube, I would get out my voltmeter and use thecm schematic to trace down the problem. A couple of years ago, I bought an inexpensive flat screen television at Target. While it was still under warranty, it quit functioning correctly. The warranty said I was to ship the set at my expense to an authorized repair station. The set would be repaired and then shipped back to me. I debated as to what to do. I thought about junking the set. I finally called the toll free number. They sent a technician to my house who showed up in less than an hour. He replaced a circuit board in the set and had it working in 10 minutes. He stayed another half hour at our house playing with our dog. When I told him about how I used to be able to repair my old tube television sets, the repaiman said “! wouldn’t know where to begin to try to rrpair one of these sets”. Different times require different skills. I prefer today’s technology.
My son’s drier shut down and neither the landlord, 2 electricians nor his professional computer repair tech friend could find the problem. It was laughable to find that the double pole single throw breaker was burnt outt on one side and repaired in less than an hour including the drive to Home Depot.
And fwiw I was 70+ yo with a hs school diploma and a self trained mechanic
What we’ve discovered is how stupid people can be. We didn’t know that when cars needed their valves adjusted, but we know it now and feel obligated to help those folks out!
That is a good point. Despite frequent reporting of the rampant scams that are constantly being perpetrated, people continue to fall for–IMO–very obvious scams. Almost every week, when I read my local PD’s “Police Blotter”, there is yet another report of someone who got a phone call from (supposedly) their bank, or the FBI, or the Secret Service, telling them that their bank account had been compromised.
These gullible folks are told to withdraw large sums from their accounts, and to hand the cash to a courier for “safe keeping”. Scams like this have been reported for quite a few years, but people keep falling for them. In the most extreme case, one local woman lost more than $300k to scammers before she realized that she had been scammed.
It’s a 1
$10 billion year business. As long as there are suckers there will be scammers.
Yup! Years ago, “confidence men” would approach people on the street, but today they use the internet and the phone to scam people out of their money. When I was a kid, I read about the M.O. of these confidence men, and it went something like this:
They would approach a stranger on the street, and would say, “I just found a lot of money (typically a few thousand $$), and I’ll share it with you if you give me $500 to show your good faith”. Even as a kid, I had to question the intelligence of anyone who would fall for something like that. Why would that person be motivated to share with a total stranger? What is “good faith”, in an instance like that?
Greed is a constant, and the only things that change are the way that these scams are carried out, and the amount of money that is involved.
My friend was catholic school director. He was hired by MN dept of education for focus on school turnarounds. He raised test scores in Fargo/morehead area and EVERYONE was amazed at results. Pretty easy he said. Then he moved out of state.
I could tell you many stories of widespread fraud in public school system he found. He resigned before he left state.
His spouse got major promotion so they moved.
Hey guys! I miss you all! 
As you already know, I had major heart surgery that unfortunately didn’t go as planned. It took me about a year and a half to finally start feeling a “little” more like my usual self again.
I’m really glad to see that everyone is still here, participating, and having fun. It’s great to see the community still going strong! 
Actually, you just told us that you had very serious health problems, without any specifics.
Welcome back
I’m glad that you came through your ordeal as well as you did.
Most if not all the problems with schools in this country comes down to politics. Cities/towns don’t want to put the money needed into school systems. The states with the best education and highest test scores decided to invest in kids education. Massachusetts is ranked number 1, followed by CT then NJ and NY.
We’ve had this discussion here before. Many states still pay teachers based on years of service and NOT by what subjects they teach. In the real world someone with a degree in English or History does NOT make the same money as someone with a degree in any of the STEM subjects. Many school districts are not getting qualified teachers for these subjects and our kids our suffering. My kids middle school math teachers all had degrees in either History or English. They were woefully unqualified to teach anything beyond arithmetic. More than once I had to go to school because one of my kids’ teachers marked them wrong on a test or homework when their answer was correct. That’s why my kids went to private high schools which had good reputation for academics.
+1
After almost 4 decades in education, I can attest to that reality. In almost every instance, administrators were chosen on the basis of their political affiliation, not on the basis of their ability.
In the district where I was employed, computers did not enter the classrooms (except for a very small number that could be wheeled from room to room, on carts) until the early 2000s.
Many school systems have contracts with a teacher’s union and that determines how they are paid.
I don’t believe that is the case here. My wife was a teacher in a neighboring county and our daughter taught in the county we live in now. They spoke highly of the administrators in the schools they were associated with.