Are Americans today the dumbest they've ever been? It's a question that had kept me up at night, and one that I recently posed to my 11th grade English class.
In his 2008 book, "The Dumbest Generation," Mark Bauerlein, an English professor from Emory University, claims that - as his title suggests - the current generation is, well, the dumbest ever. He attributes this lack of intelligence and ability to a host of issues, including a "miraculously quick and effortless contact with information" and a "brazen disregard of books and reading."
As someone who graduated from college in 2008 and went on to teach high school English the next year, I can see where Bauerlein was coming from. The students I taught in my first years were unmoored, adrift in a world saturated with affordable technology, disconnected from the short stories, novels, and writing assignments I presented to them day after day.
Two years later, though, Kentucky teachers, along with teachers all over the country, began implementing the Common Core State Standards, which call for students to read appropriately complex texts, grapple with academic language, ground their ideas in evidence, and read more nonfiction, especially about history, science, and the arts. With a greater variety of content, all of my students can find texts that are engaging and that connect with their own lives. While the Standards have marked an unnecessary politicization of public education, they've also marked a simple, but extraordinary shift in student learning - from content that applies to some students to skills that benefit every American citizen.
"But more important than my opinions as a teacher, are the opinions that my students have shared with me about the Standards."
Instead of just learning about the difference between adjectives and adverbs, or memorizing the definitions of similes and metaphors, students learn to make thoughtful, persuasive choices as speakers and writers. The Standards emphasize using evidence to support their inferences, to read groups of complex texts and synthesize the ideas and claims of other authors to form their own. They learn how to think, solve, and create.
The Standards mark the dawn of a renaissance in education. They are a harbinger of change, signaling a shift away from the classrooms of the 19th and 20th century toward a model that will prepare our students for a world changing so quickly that many of them will have careers that don't yet exist.
The Standards are not about politics or even curriculum. They are about invention and collaboration: two things that may just save America from itself.
But more important than my opinions as a teacher, are the opinions that my students have shared with me about the Standards.
"We learn to find evidence for everything - for our opinions of what we read, for our own explanations and arguments about the world," Dillion, a 17-year-old student in my English class tells me passionately as we sit together. "If we agree or disagree with someone, that's great, but we have to say why, to explain why people who disagree with us are wrong. The world would be so much different, better, if people did that. And me, I can apply those skills to any career and future I want."
"If we agree or disagree with someone, that's great, but we have to say why, to explain why people who disagree with us are wrong. The world would be so much different, better, if people did that."
Dillion sees in the Standards what many of its opponents fail to see - a focus on application of knowledge that's in step with attainment of knowledge. I've witnessed how quickly Dillion and the rest of my students have adapted and risen to the challenge of the higher academic Standards. I've heard them make connections between their reading in English class and science experiments in chemistry. I watched them confidently apply new ideas to solve problem. I've been blown away by the development in their analytical skills as they engage in complex conversations with their peers. Students in this generation support their ideas with evidence, collaborate, and respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives.
These are simply not the qualities of a "dumb generation." The view in my classroom is clear: Being held to high standards is helping all of them - no matter the color of their skin, the first language they learned, or their zip code - become our most promising generation.