My take on declining intelligence.

I've mentioned functional illiteracy on the Internet before. I don't understand how someone who obviously doesn't enjoy reading or writing-- the only two skills needed to use the Internet-- would spend so much time using it. And yet, a quick perusal of any place an assortment of people like to post will reveal vast numbers of people who do not have any idea as to how to communicate with one another using anything resembling a language, and this number raises exponentially anywhere young people post.

The thing is, we, as a country-- actually, I'll take it a step further and say we as a species-- are quick to point fingers at the easy target. And the easy target, in this case, is the education system.

Now, I have seen first-hand just how the education system can go wrong, especially with inner-city kids. I used to live in the poorest part of Phoenix, AZ. I had a neighbor who told me about the neighborhood school. There were teachers who taught entire classes in Spanish because it was easier for the students to understand. Once, his English teacher called out sick, the substitute that they sent didn't actually speak any English, and a friend had to translate everything for him.

Despite knowing what can go wrong in the public education system, I don't blame it for the functional illiteracy of today's youth. Saying that education is letting our youth down is completely true, but also only part of the bigger picture. The real, bigger problem is that we, as a society, are raising an entire generation of kids that don't care anything about learning. It's not that they are necessarily being taught poorly-- obviously, in some cases they are, but the question is, why are young people intentionally ignoring what they are taught in school?

Our problem can't be solved on a larger scale with vouchers or better school lunches or private schooling or, perhaps the absolutely worst idea, home schooling. The problem we need to address is how do we get students to care about learning? How do we get them to want to learn? How do we get them to know that reading and writing in complete sentences exercises their brain, and is beneficial to them in the long run, whereas no literacy skills creates a lazy brain, just as not using your body for physical reasons creates a fat, lazy body. How do we get them to understand that math skills are good for all parts of their daily life, and that ignoring it creates a person less prepared for life than someone who didn't ignore it? How do we teach the same of kids for science and social studies? Making schools better will help, but all it will do is educate the people that want to learn more than they're already learning. Once we figure out exactly what we're doing wrong as a society that is dissuading kids from learning to educate themselves, then we'll have the key to making our school systems better. Until then, however, we're going to continue to lose our youth to ignorance.