/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20115825]

Are kids really dumber now than they were a century or two ago? I teach high-school and these kids are completely ignorant when it comes to literature and history, but I can't really compare them to anything since I wasn't alive one-hundred years ago.

[Anonymous No.20115831]

>>20115825
The educated then were smarter than the educated now, but less of the population was educated then.
Blame W Bush and his no child left behind

[Anonymous No.20115832]

>>20115825
Yes. Ever seen Baby Geniuses 2? That's what children used to be like.

[Anonymous No.20115862]

You teach high school, yet you're hyphenating words that don't need to be hyphenated. You're the problem here, buddy. If we had better teachers, then kids would be better educated.

[Anonymous No.20115886]

>>20115862
I teach History, not Grammar, Einstein.

[Anonymous No.20115921]

>>20115886
history*, not grammer*--;* Ein-stein*

[Anonymous No.20115931]

>>20115825
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1612113114
Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289613000470
Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time

Human capital mediates natural selection in contemporary humans
https://research-portal.uea.ac.uk/en/publications/human-capital-mediates-natural-selection-in-contemporary-humans

Most likely, our society seems to be highly dysgenic. Peruse the last article to see how every new generation is fatter, less conscientious, and less intelligent.

[Anonymous No.20116069]

>>20115825
Knowledge and intelligence are separate.

[Anonymous No.20116086]

I imagine kids today actually might have way better-tuned social skills. Internet and ironic meme culture probably make kids have way more fine-tuned bullshit radars on certain things.

They probably have way less regard for things like literature and history because of their attention spans though, and how readily available that information is checkable through Google kind of devaluing it.

[Anonymous No.20116115]

I blame Google and Wikipedia to a large extent. They've made it so that you don't even need to research anything since a quick rundown of all information is so readily available. Yeah, of course, encyclopedias existed in the past, but even the act of going to the library and looking up x topic is far more involved than just taking 10 seconds to look it up on your pocket super computer.
t. older zoomer

[Anonymous No.20116140]

>>20116086
>Internet and ironic meme culture probably make kids have way more fine-tuned bullshit radars on certain things.

Dude have you been on Twitter or Tiktok? Everyone there is delusional.

[Anonymous No.20116148]

>>20116086
>I imagine kids today actually might have way better-tuned social skills. Internet and ironic meme culture probably make kids have way more fine-tuned bullshit radars on certain things.
dis nigga straight cappin frfr

[Anonymous No.20116340]

>>20115825
The state doesn’t need elitist schools teaching people how to overthrow them. The elite only learn how to game the system. Very few intelligent people seep through the cracks and are looked at like aliens and traitors for speaking up. This is the world we live in

[Anonymous No.20116410]

>>20116340
>no one was ever overthrown before schools taught them how to do it
retard alert

[Hector Godfrey, Editor No.20116444]

Alan Moore and Stewart Lee on Batman, Superman, and Doctor Who
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSXXIuKZ6qA

>New Frontiersman

[Anonymous No.20116483]

>>20116410
The stage these states are in now have indeed dumbed down their education. They've compartmentalized them, but of course eliminated most free thinking and oppositional thinkers. You think they haven’t, but they allow only so much of it, and create controlled opposition groups to waste the would-be rebels. You don’t think about this sort of thing, much less read anything on it. Go glow somewhere else

[Anonymous No.20116537]

>>20115825
Way what you will about Capitalist Realism, but the section on students nowadays and attention spans was spot on. It’s only gotten worse since.

[Anonymous No.20116545]

>>20115862
he's not your buddy, pal. take your autism somewhere it belongs, furry

[Anonymous No.20116547]

>>20115825
Apparently adults are dumber than ever as well. For your students sake I hope you are just larping and have no students.

[Anonymous No.20116568]

>>20116547
Are we really going to insist history anon is a bad teacher over like less than 200 words exchanged in a vacuum? Lighten the fuck up, you smug assholes. Teachers can be huge influencers and you're quick to pounce on one that browses this board.

[Anonymous No.20116576]

>>20116568
If he actually thinks that children were smarter a century ago than yes, bad teacher and even worse if he is a history teacher.

[Anonymous No.20116587]

"No Child Left Behind" ruined education for the gifted, so it ruined education for everyone that mattered.

Changing racial rates as well. Just facts, people.

[Anonymous No.20116610]

>>20115825
They are adjusted to modern life. History and literature are not necessary to survive in our world. In fact, the qualities that reading might instill in children might be harmful to them.

[Anonymous No.20116639]

>>20116587
Naw. It was a farce. Stop being a bubba.

[Anonymous No.20116652]

>>20115832
Based.

[Anonymous No.20116756]

>>20115825
Isn't religion and philosophy proof that people are the same as ever? All the solutions to life within these resources and yet, the world seems to be no different than it was thirty thousand years ago.

[Anonymous No.20116769]

>>20116115
So how old are older zoomed like 30s or mid twenties I can't keep it straight.

[Anonymous No.20116775]

>>20116769
most zoomers are only 20–21 now

[Anonymous No.20116789]

>>20116756
You've discovered eternal recurrence. Congratulations, anon.

[Anonymous No.20116794]

>>20116769
Gen Y are “millennials” because half were born before and half after 2000 (if I recall correctly)
Gen Z (named after zoom calls and the Russian ground forces “Z”) are all still under 20. So 75% of fourchan posters.

t. Gen X (named after the X-Files, and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X bio-flick)

[Anonymous No.20117026]

>>20115825
I read the other day results of some research showed that inhaling exhaust fumes from cars running on lead petrol caused American kids to lose IQ points.
But I personally believe everyone in the developed world is suffering sometimes from life being too easy, so they don't have to try. Especially with development of technology, era before smartphones and internet required more active research and planning.
However, kids being dumber or not has very little to do with teenagers not giving a fuck when they can get away with it.

[Anonymous No.20117058]

>>20116537
Loved when he went full boomer on the students, like he is some talkshow radio listening southerner.

[Anonymous No.20117061]

>>20115825
You can find accounts from old professors and teachers who've been in the game a long, long time that claim students have been getting progressively less intelligent for decades. Look out for those articles that crop up semi-regularly on the state of modern academia or the youth. They basically write themselves. I've had similar conversations with academics and it's hard to find an optimist among them.

Now, I don't doubt that the cohorts attending school/uni are getting dumber. But what I want to know is how much of this is down to decline within a population, Vs decline due to a change of population. I.e.: is everybody getting dumber, or are the boundaries of "everybody" changing and that alone accounts for the decline? Perhaps the decline can be solely explained by the presence illiterate, 3rd world peasants in previously decent education systems. I doubt this only because I think that mainstream culture has become aggressively anti-literate and I reckon this must have a universal retarding effect.

[Anonymous No.20117069]

>>20117061
Fuck I accidentally a word maybe it is I who am the illiterate bessant

[Anonymous No.20117095]

>>20117061
Those in the developing world at least used to have good educational institutions. I do think in general people have lost a great deal of their attention span and other things like general geographical knowledge of their surroundings due to the reliance of a GPS instead of a map. Also everyone seems to be getting gaslit or baited by the media they rely on for information instead of utilising critical thinking skills as they weren't taught in the first place. I strongly believe the entire education system is child abuse. Let the children experience the world around them to learn and socialise eith their community to be fulfilled and of use. They don't develop well after being stuck in a classroom for 12 years of their life, following a rigid, structure of being taught things you'll likely forget or not care about then a break, back to class, all dictated by a Pavlovian bell. This traumatises the individual and it shows through anxious dreams even decades after being released from school.

[Anonymous No.20117114]

>>20117026
Yeah IQ scores and delinquency rates were being wrecked by lead fumes.

IQ scores rise slightly from generation to generation (the Flynn effect, technically IQ score stay the same but getting the average becomes harder) but it doesn’t strictly mean that people are getting smarter. There is lots of speculation about why it happens but even if it was proof that people are getting smarter then the rate of growth is still too small to matter. I think in general the quality of education that kids get is lower and teachers and universities seem to be doing everything they can to ensure it gets even worse

[Anonymous No.20117129]

On second thought, no. Definite no, OP. I think the most clear cut example is looking at the first world and the third world. The third worlds' citizens show you that education works in the first world. Progressively, the third world advanced maybe 20-30 years at best. They basically are the same as it was a hundred or two hundred years ago. Maybe even worse since they have access to technology they shouldn't otherwise have. Do you really think literature and history matter when you've got Africa's situation around? That place alone is enough to tell you that people are not getting dumber because if people were, the entire world would be stuck in an unfixable shithole cycle where wells and tools are destroyed just because.

[Anonymous No.20117131]

>>20117114
I work at a faculty, the amount of hand-holding is significantly bigger compared to the time I was a student. It's different from institution to institution, but in some technicians are actually made to be nannies hovering over students, quickly correcting any minor mistake so students themselves don't have to really think about what they are doing.
Students get printed notes, on which they just have to expand during class. The notes have questions at the end, some of which will come in exam, yet each year we see more and more students failing what should have been a breeze, even when the professor literally repeats questions from previous exam. The easier they have, the harder it seems for them.

[Anonymous No.20117137]

>>20117114
the truth is that general intelligence is worthless. what society wants is people with high IQ related exclusively to mathematics, chemistry etc. so that we can advance scientifically but these people might as well be complete retards in other spheres, it doesn't matter. "Intelligence" was never truly desirable. It isn't even that important in nature since bugs and other dumb creatures have been extremely successful genetically speaking without any need to develop intelligence.

[Anonymous No.20117140]

>>20115825
C. S. Lewis was learning Greek in high school according to his auto biography. I can’t imagine a zoomer pulling this off.

[Anonymous No.20117148]

>>20117140
Greek zoomers though?

[Anonymous No.20117150]

>>20117140
Italians used to be taught Latin and Greek in HS but I am not sure if this still the case. Either way it's worthless. The reason why nobody gives a shit anymore is that learning is no longer valuable. What is valuable in our society is conformity and compliance, the more absolute the merrier. Kids implicitly know this. Reading the Western Canon not only is worthless but may actively cripple your chances to be successful in life.

[Anonymous No.20117153]

>>20116086
I think this is a good take, albeit the social skills are developed exclusively within the internet realm. I wonder how metaverse is gonna impact this - after all, this is a return of the avatar-based chatrooms, so popular in the 90's

[Anonymous No.20117161]

>>20117140
Latin is being taught in Polish HS

[Anonymous No.20117163]

>>20117153
There's no return to anything, we have been sinking deeper into this hole for20 years. That "take" is wrong. Knowing how to navigate hyperreality isn't social skills. Drop a zoomer among people who are slightly older and he doesn't have any tact or ability to read anything about the situation. That is by definition a deficiency in social skills, if you can only interact with people who are 100% absorbed in the same context as you and entirely compliant to its narrative.

[Anonymous No.20117166]

>>20117140
In Europe the high-tier high schools are language schools(classical and asian language schools are usually among the top in respective countries), but you need very good grades on the city level.

[Anonymous No.20117175]

>>20115825

You would have to be tracking changes by ethnicity due to the. 8 correlation. Filling a German school with sub saharan africans doesn't meam tje kids are getting dumber, it means the kids are dumber

[Anonymous No.20117178]

>>20117150
It builds general knowledge and logical skills that you can't get anywhere else. Also it greatly increases your convo abilities if you are initially a loser NEET shutin.

[Anonymous No.20117201]

>>20117150
greek+latin don't matter anymore because we don't care about the greeks, we don't care about the romans, we don't care about philosophy as a whole in society anymore. The languages were used to read authors from antiquity in their original language (obviously). Western canon was essential at one point to a successful upbringing but yes nowadays it doesn't mean shit tbqh.

[Anonymous No.20117212]

>>20117140
I went to a dogshit uk school and was born in 94, so am technically a zoomer. I bought wheelock when i was 16 and started teaching myself latin. i'm not particularly smart, either, just the right kind of autist.

>>20117175
see
>>20117061
presence of afrikangz obviously lowers the average but i don't think accounts for everything. question is which is the leading order term.

[Anonymous No.20117216]

>>20117178
>general knowledge
useless in 2022, you can look up your trivia on Wikipedia
>logical skills
actively detrimental in 2022
>greatly increases your convo abilities
highly debatable since the only good literature belongs to dead eras with entirely different values.
I am not trolling, of course I like muh classics and I hate modernity but objectively speaking, we no longer need any of this. This is why literature, the arts etc. have found a new life as propaganda for the industrialized society that we must serve at all costs. Practically everything we learn in schools except mathematics etc. is vestigial. I'd wager that soon enough it might not even be necessary to have a groundwork in STEM subjects since we might start automating all the number crunching and "science" bits. The doctor or engineer will become akin to a factory worker.

[Anonymous No.20117341]

>>20117163
Eh, maybe it's because I'm from Poland but I didn't notice what you're describing.The only asocial zoomers are the ones stuck in echo-chambers or subcultures, and it's fun observing them, they seem so out of place that they fit in

[Anonymous No.20117421]

>>20115825
yes
scientific progress = intellectual regress

[Anonymous No.20117422]

>>20116794
>t. Gen X (named after the X-Files, and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X bio-flick)

Nice try, but some of us remember.

[Anonymous No.20117426]

>>20115886
thats not an excuse
kys

[Anonymous No.20117466]

>>20116086
>They probably have way less regard for things like literature and history because of their attention spans though, and how readily available that information is checkable through Google kind of devaluing it.
History is a complex process by which we try to find out what happened before. It's not something that can just be googled, or even taught in a High School classroom. History, like philosophy, cannot be summarized, because if it could then it would not be a subject at all. Google provides a false answer, the truth is too difficult for people.

Also their social radar is shot. Zoomers are probably the generation most disconnected from reality in human history, since they are the first who truly do not have to engage with it on a meaningful level to make money.

[Anonymous No.20117480]

>>20116340
>Very few intelligent people seep through the cracks and are looked at like aliens and traitors for speaking up. This is the world we live in
What exactly do you mean by this?

[Anonymous No.20117502]

>>20115825
can't let the working class develop any kind of critical thinking skills

[Anonymous No.20117513]

>>20116069

Based and correct

[Anonymous No.20117516]

>>20116769
zoomer isn’t an age category, it is a state of mind

[Anonymous No.20117572]

>>20115825
Yeah seems like it. Children used to learn Latin, Greek and Euclid without too much fuss. As an aside People meme about muh white genocide tranny feminism ruining our schools!1, but social justice is legitimately starting to interfere with modern education. At the very least, it's taking multiple days of school time away that could have been spent on spelling tests or reading a book in class

[Anonymous No.20117618]

>>20117572
>Children used to learn Latin, Greek and Euclid without too much fuss.
Oh they most certainly fussed, it's just that back then parents and teachers could beat up kids that refused to study.

[Anonymous No.20117634]

>>20115931
Blame corn syrup

[Anonymous No.20117637]

>>20117618
Did that work? Weren't the Boomers the last ones to have that happened to? Not sure what that means.

[Anonymous No.20117702]

>It's another boomers complain about Zoomers thread
Literally every generation does this. Your cope is going to be 'but it is!' even though the generation before you thought you were all hopeless retards in a crash collision with self destruction. You have nothing to say besides children are stupid (This is universally true regardless of generation) or that the majority of people aren't interested in what you are.

[Anonymous No.20117709]

>>20117702
>even though the generation before you thought you were all hopeless retards in a crash collision with self destruction.

Are you implying that the west is *not* on a crash course towards self-destruction? Guess you could argue about the semantics of "destruction", but a lot of good dancing around the point is going to do for you, eh?

[Anonymous No.20117752]

>>20116069
Yeah, kids these days are not only dumb as bricks but also don't know shit.

[Anonymous No.20117794]

>>20117216
>muh wikipedia
Nigger, don't act like you're thoroughly studying the relevant Wikipedia article whenever a topic comes up.

Even if you are, you're basically spending 10-20 minutes on a rough summary. At most, you'll get some surface knowledge with no real understanding.
>inb4 you only real basic knowledge in the real world
kys literal npc

[Anonymous No.20117838]

>>20115825
I don’t know about the West; here in the Philippines, it seems that the youth are doing better than their parents - which isn’t saying much. The public educational system is a spectacular train-wreck however and the smartest kids usually learn more outside of school than within it. In addition, the year-long online schooling may hinder any progress they would have had had the government opened the schools earlier.

[Anonymous No.20117900]

>>20117838
It's similar here in Croatia, for years many students had to take extra classes outside school to finally understand properly what is being taught. The problem is that not only are teachers required to rush through catalogue, but some teachers don't have what it takes to pass the knowledge onto others. Instead of learning properly, students mostly learn to parrot info for the test, which means at some point they will hit the wall, as they will be unable to analyze info.

[Anonymous No.20117910]

>>20117900
Hungary here. It's the same but with gypsies holding entire classes back. I don't think I would have become a genius but I can't help but wonder if things would have turned out differently had my class separated the braindead gypsies from those of us who actually liked to learn and were somewhat decent at it. I imagine most western schools are like this but with negroes, arabs, pakis, etc.

[Anonymous No.20117932]

>>20116086
>Internet and ironic meme culture probably make kids have way more fine-tuned bullshit radars on certain things.
True if we were talking about the early internet, but todays social media culture mostly facilitates an obsession with pure appearance and vacuous attention-seeking.
It's telling that we've regressed from the interactive, co-created art and culture of forums and imageboards to passive consumers who have internet artifacts selected, reacted to, interpreted, in other words, pre-chewed by content curators. The social media paradigm is defined by people being so afraid of making their own choices or even having their own opinions that they form their identities exclusively through social calibration and mimicry.

[Anonymous No.20117953]

>>20117910
Some parts of the country have schools with gypsy children, same problems like with yours, but it seems that it's not so much that children themselves are of low intelligence, as much as their parents being that old-fashioned kind of stupid that pulls community back down into gutter.
Lot of children are being pulled out of school by their parents so they can help beg on the streets, some of them live in shit conditions where parents just let them do as they please, girls marry young and start giving birth early. The small percentage that manages to finish school, and some even enter high education, shows that they actually have as much potential as the rest of kids, it's just squandered as result of poor guidance in community.

[Anonymous No.20117974]

>>20117953
> it's not so much that children themselves are of low intelligence, as much as their parents being that old-fashioned kind of stupid that pulls community back down into gutter.

It's both. There were more negroes at my university (even here you get a handful) than there were gypsies. Mind you, there are at least one and a half million gyppos in hungary but only a few thousand nigs.

[Anonymous No.20118002]

Father I can't click book

[Anonymous No.20118024]

>>20115825
They're not stupider, they're just significantly worse at basic communication due to the endemic nature of electronics reducing the English language significantly. Due to their early exposure in their development, they didn't learn how to speak and understand things properly. Because of this, they have a much harder time understanding academic concepts that are communicated to them as well as regurgitating academic concepts that they have already digested. So essentially they have a harder time learning and demonstrating what they learned with language.

They're not dumber, they're literally retarded. That is to say "to slow".

You can raise a kid with technology and make sure that their linguistic development is not retarded by it, however it's difficult even if you're aware of the issue and even then most people aren't aware of it.

[Anonymous No.20118033]

>>20118024
>to slow

[Anonymous No.20118039]

>>20118033

[Anonymous No.20118046]

>>20118039
That makes no sense in context. You had just used an adjective.

[Anonymous No.20118047]

>>20118046
I meant the transitive verb in past tense.

I never said I was a linguistic genius either, Anon. I just do my best and sometimes that's not adequate. I hope you still managed to understand the underlying meaning of the statement.

[Anonymous No.20118059]

>>20118047
You really didn't need to spill your guts like this, just take a little teasing like a man.

[Anonymous No.20118069]

>>20118059
I have a hard time telling the difference between vicious retorts and small jabs to be frank.

[Anonymous No.20118100]

>>20115825
I have talked to older folks and I cant say they are any smarter. Many of them are dumb as fuck.

[Anonymous No.20118101]

>>20118069
That's because you're retarded.

[Anonymous No.20118106]

>>20118100
I think it's not so much a matter of old people in general but *our* old people. Previous generations had grandparents who didn't spend most of their lives watching TV.

[Anonymous No.20118160]

>>20118033
it was perfectly intelligible you mongrel

[Anonymous No.20118168]

>>20117932
>passive consumers who have internet artifacts selected, reacted to, interpreted, in other words, pre-chewed by content curators
I've ranted about this calling it "meta-consumption", I know for sure that many zoomers won't watch a movie or play a game but still follow the commentary to be in on the memes.

[Anonymous No.20118170]

>>20118160
Yeah I got the point, retard. It's just embarassing when you put an obvious spelling mistake in a critical part of a post going on about how other people have poor language skills.