Rick Raw: The Dumbing of American Youth–Generation Stupid

By Rick Grant rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

Could Jay Leno’s "Jaywalking" segment really represent a disturbing trend of the dumbing of America’s youth? Leno goes out on the street and randomly interviews young people testing their knowledge of current events, government, and history. I wondered if these people were shills (plants) purposely acting dumb for the shock value. According to Leno, the people and their stupidity are real. He swears the random interviews are not staged.

Then I delved into this subject more deeply and discovered that recent statistics revealed that reading has declined, not only among the poorly educated, but 67 % of college graduates do not read novels or non fiction books for pleasure. In contrast, it could be argued that the Internet is a vast unlimited source of knowledge and this is where today’s youth do the bulk of their reading and research.

Interestingly, though, the statistics agree with Leno’s straw poll because many of his street interviews are with college students or recent college graduates. The questions are so simple it’s ridiculous, like Leno holding up a picture of Condolezza Rice and asking the person who she was? A young woman, who claimed to be a recent college graduate, didn’t know. Incredibly, most of Leno’s interviewees are dim-bulbs. One young woman, who said she is attending college, couldn’t identify a picture of George W. Bush or his Vice President, Dick Cheney. And so it goes.

Leno’s "Jaywalking" segment is funny but disturbing. But it’s just a snapshot of the problem.
Sage pundits attribute the dumbing of America’s youth to the proliferation of the video gaming culture over print media. Moreover, a rising number of college students graduate with a pedestrian grasp of geography, current events, and history. It could be the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism, causing this paradigm shift of intellect. Self-absorption and frivolous concerns, like the merits of nail polish, or reaching a high level in "Grand Theft Auto IV" seem to occupy young people’s minds.

More significantly, a shocking number of today’s youth admit they get their "news" from John Stewart’s The Daily Show, which is a parody of the news. We journalists know that today’s youth are not reading newspapers. With no new newspaper readers buying subscriptions and advertisers going to television and the Internet, print media is on life support, facing extinction in the near future. Soon newspapers will be a quaint relic of the past like drive-in theaters.

To make matters worse, attention spans are declining in direct proportion to the youth’s intellect. I know this to be true because I’m a movie critic. Over a 24 year period of reviewing films, I’ve noticed that popular movies are aimed at the short attention span culture, with less dialogue and more special effects to keep the vid-kid generation visually stimulated. Explosive action is what they crave, not dramatic scenarios. The release of so called "art films" has drastically declined in the 2000s. Even if a low budget indie film wins an Oscar, it doesn’t benefit from an Oscar bump in attendance of yesteryear. The truth is, no one cares about quality films.

The coup de grace of the dumbing of America’s youth is not only their lack of knowledge, but the fact that Generation Stupid is proud, even arrogant that they deem intellect unimportant. In high schools, bright kids are ridiculed as nerds for being smarter than a five year old. The notion of curling up in front of the fire with a good book is seen as archaic by today’s youth--part of their parents’ generation.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of talented, smart, and ambitious youth coming of age. It’s just they are in the minority. As long as vast numbers of young people spend their spare time playing mind-rot video games that glorify violence, then their intellect will decay like rotten fruit.