This article was extremely astounding at first, because it amazed me how some teenagers can be so cut off from the world and society to not know some basic knowledge of our world. But then, after I began to think about it, I began to realize that I wouldn’t know some the answers to some questions about our basic history. We know what we are taught and what we have kept in our brains because we found it to be important. It is amazing if you think about the way we now learn, and what teens now excel in, but it also makes sense.
While reading this article, I immediately flashed back to Ortega y Gasset’s piece, “On Studying,” which criticized the way in which students are now being taught, emphasized the errors in our teaching and the importance of instilling a curiosity in students, and acknowledged that students will find the answer if they need to know it. In this article, it mentions that, “60 percent [of college freshmen who found it important to keep up with political affairs] in 1966 to 36 percent in 2005,” (2). However, it also states that this is a direct result of the fact that these college freshmen were fresh bait to be shipped off to Vietnam to fight in the war, so it was essential that they knew what was going on in the world and politics.
Also, I feel that although we do not know a lot of facts or knowledge of the world around us, despite how necessary this is, we are not dumb. We possess other forms of knowledge, something that may not be as easy to measure as whether someone knows the correct answer or not, but just as vital. I think it could be considered right to call our generation dumb, just because we do not know certain answers, but we are not stupid. There are new extraordinary advancements made everyday thanks to our generation’s minds and way of thinking. If we were stupid, this would not be possible. Also, knowing the capital of a state is not necessary to build a robot or a new cell phone. All that is necessary for that is knowledge on how these things work and a way of thinking how to create what is needed. It may be decent to say that our generation lacks vital knowledge, but we also hold extreme amounts of knowledge. Knowledge comes in different forms, and as Ortega y Gasset said in “On Studying,” we learn and know what we need, and our generation needs to know how to advance our culture and technology and how to improve people’s everyday lifestyles. Although it is important to know our history so we do not go to repeating ourselves, I think that is no longer the most pressing issue.
Despite the fact that some people did not know the answers to some of the questions about history, that does not mean that as a whole, we are dumb to the world. There are still those great number of people who would answer all of the questions in this article with the correct answer. Also, I think it is important to note that most likely the people in power in America are not the teens so the “unknowledgeable” teens will not be having to make decisions that could be a result of not knowing our mistaken pasts.
I will admit that teens are our country’s future, and some are not extremely bright, but the majority of our teens, who are excelling on the SAT, and going to top universities, are the people that will lead our country in the future. It is not quite a threat to our wellbeing for our teens to be unknowledgeable because they will most likely never get to a place of extreme power where they will have to make decisions that affect our whole country. It is the teens that are excelling in rigorous classes, getting perfect scores on the SAT, and creating new technological codes, who control the reins of our future and their way of thinking is a way of thinking that is necessary for our modern world. We no longer need to know about politics, because we are no longer drafted. Although it would be much better if more of the teens in America knew the answer to more of these questions, the knowledge these teens possess may be more substantial to our modern world, thus bringing us to higher ground and rising our country to a better place. And for this reason, I believe it is unfair to call American teens dumb for not knowing certain facts because their knowledge of other areas, perhaps more vital areas, surpasses that of previous generations.
