The title is a joke before people start telling me I misspelled whole. Here is an article from the Wall Street Journal about the decline in SAT scores. To sum up the article, reading and writing scores are at their lowest since 1972 when this data was being recorded. 49% of students who have taken the core classes (4 years of English and 3 or more of Math) are college ready. 30% who haven’t taken the core classes are ready. These are pathetic numbers. It also says that an increase in minorities taking the test may have decreased the scores noting that English isn’t even their first language in some cases. So I pose the question, why are we dumber now than 40 years ago?

I think this is actually pretty easy to answer. People 40 years ago didn’t have as many distractions like TV’s, video games, internet porn… If you give these kids hand eye coordination tests now, I bet the scores would be through the roof with all the Medal of Honor and Halo that is played. Kids just don’t read as much. When I think about all my friends, I can hardly think of any that actually sit down and read a book. I’m not patting myself on the back but I find reading to be highly entertaining and actually enjoy it. Reading words that you don’t know, looking them up and learning something is beneficial. Since reading Game of Thrones, I’ll never forget the word usurper because they use it every paragraph. Plus, reading makes you use your imagination which has to stimulate the brain more than just watching something on TV. I did awful on the reading section of my SAT’s. If you read my blog you’ll see that I’m not a tremendous writer. I just have plenty of lame brain ideas that I can somehow formulate into posts. It’s sad in a way to see our youth actually getting dumber. I feel like I’ve turned into that old man who starts every sentence with “in my day”. It just seems like the US has gotten so laissez faire with education. They need to start cracking whips and turn our students more like the kids in Pacific. Asians have become the smartest race in the world and I’m sure it has a lot to do with discipline. Asians also have the highest salaries to back up their intelligence. The US has more problems than they can count and education is just another.