Posted 10/29/2007 05:26:00 PM by Douglas

Kids these days. I'm not the only one that thinks they're getting dumber.

But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

Something tells me that every generation since the beginning of time could say the same thing. But dang, these kids today are friggin' stupid. But here's the money quote, perfectly encapsulating the idiocy of our "educational" system and its standardized testing:

It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it.

Let's not forget the confiscatory taxing authority behind it all, either.