If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might as well have viewed it as an act of war.
(National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983:1)
Critics knew as early as the McCarthy period that America’s schools were failing, but a growing number of older scholars have bestowed the title of “dumbest generation” upon generation Z. Joel Best, a sociology and criminology professor at the University of Delaware has now cosigned this message. I cannot and will not let a baby boomer give my generation a shady superlative in the social sciences yearbook without some historical context so let us examine how generation z, through no fault of our own, has indeed become the dumbest generation.
Best correctly denotes that stupidity is “lacking basic knowledge and skills” and ignorance is just “what we do not know”, I want to posit that you cannot seek knowledge if you haven’t been socialized to rigorously question the status quo. Common Core curriculums and the prevalence of standardized tests under No Child Left Behind have decimated our love for learning and made K-12 about memorizing dummied down information for tests only to discard this knowledge later (as in the next class period).
The game is off balance!
Jermaine Lamarr Cole (2019)
As a member of generation z who entered adolescence in the mid-2010s, I can attest, that we have come of age in a knowledge society where new information is constantly generated (Ungar 2003).
The digital space, more specifically social media, keeps us informed about the geopolitical movements and influencers we support but the constant influx of new, often time-sensitive information can harm our ability to think critically about what we just heard or read. As a collective, Generation Z has a short attention span. We’ll be outraged over the latest racist ad campaign until the steal her man challenge goes viral. The operating systems of smartphones and the algorithms that determine our social media feeds were purposefully designed by our elders to exploit our dopamine receptors in a way that mimics heroin use. The time we spend on our phones is so destructive to our aptitude and emotional health that the creators of our most popular devices didn’t allow their own children to use them.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both baby boomers I might add. Best also correctly ascertains that “highlighting America’s ignorance has become routine.” It seems like “a basic theme of national stupidity [runs] through popular culture. The failure of many of the adult contestants to win on the hit 2007 show “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-grader” is a poignant example but our reverence for stupidity has only increased. We now live in a world where mass media is oversaturated with stupidity and it is not the world that generation z created. We are simply the victims of a Common Core, meme-filled society that has exploited us from birth. Our plateaued intellectual growth continues to line the pockets of the generation that remembers Watergate and young Robert Redford.
We are not the gatekeepers of the entertainment industry and we do not greenlight sleazy reality shows. We are not the generation that has to claim the 45th president. Mic Drop.
Camille Alexander 