Subject: Are students smarter or dumber?

Posted by Paul Newton on 2/28/2010
In Reply To:Are students smarter or dumber? Posted by Richard Turnock on 2/22/2010

Message:

Two questions...

Question 1: If, as Mark Bauerlein documents(1) and as Niall Palfreyman wrote(2) "kids are performing less well now than 10 years ago,", then I wonder whether such reducing performance might be caused by a "feedback loop that weaves its way around society and by so doing goes unnoticed"(3). If we are getting dumber over generations or faster, then what are our hypotheses for such feedback loops that could be responsible?

Question 2: Neil Howe (2nd sentence in footnote 1) presents an opposing thesis to Bauerlein's (and Palfreyman's evidence). How can we reconcile these two views? Can we come up with a plausible set of feedback loops, a system boundary, that might subsume the evidence cited by, and the resulting views of, both Bauerlein and Howe?

References:

(1) In his book, "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future" Mark Bauerlein presents lots of numerical evidence for his "dumbest generation" thesis. Note that in the video posted to this list by Richard Turnock, Mark Bauerlein was debating Neil Howe, author of the book " Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation," whose thesis is the opposite of Bauerlein's.

(2) in an earlier posting to this list, posting dated Monday, Feb 22, under the Subject "Indus International School - Bangalore, India."

(3) From page 48 of John Morecroft's book "Strategic Modeling and Business Dynamics." Note that the example that Morecroft gives to illustrate such feedback loops (that weave their way around society and so go unnoticed) is the growth of drug-related crime in a community. I've used this example with good effect in introducing systems thinking to teachers and others.