Now that summer is over, arbitrarily, it’s time to send your kids back to school! Or whatever, for all the good it’s doing. Kids are definitely getting less and less intelligent with each passing year.
Obviously, when I say “kids,” I’m talking about people my kids’ age. Obviously, my generation is smarter than our parents.
Or maybe not. For example, I am definitely dumber than my parents, as is evidenced, first of all, by the fact that I am struggling to feed less than half the number of kids that my parents were always struggling to feed. They must have had secrets, and they are not sharing them with me, “because I don’t call enough.” A small part of me thinks that my father’s #1 secret was to always make a huge deal when people leave lights on in rooms they’re not in or when people play with the thermostat. Even when no one plays with the thermostat, keep coming back to it and turning it down. But there has to be more to it than that. The other way I know my parents are smarter than me is that my parents raised me, whereas I’m raising my kids. And if you’ve ever heard me write about my kids, I am not impressed.
Because our schools definitely seem to be less effective these days. And it’s the teachers’ fault.
And I say this as a teacher. Because I read my students’ essays, and I’m thinking, “These are horrible! I’m not getting through to these kids at all!”
On the other hand, I tell myself, that’s the job. As soon as they’re good writers, they’ll leave my class. That’s the whole idea. I am doomed to forever be reading bad writing. But maybe this is just something I’m telling myself to make me feel better. Maybe I’m a horrible teacher. I mean, the students do complain, if that’s any indication. And they complain every day: “Why don’t you come up with more interesting lessons? I don’t care that this knowledge might help me as an adult. Make it appeal to me as a kid.”
And I do. I come up with lessons that every adult I show them to says, “Wow! I wish I had this when I was in school! It’s informative, entertaining, and funny, all at the same time!” But my students are not interested in what’s actually in the lesson; they want to spend more time negotiating about whether I should be giving the lesson at all. I have to sell them on the concept of school every day. Like they’re not already here.
“Hey, I’m not the one who shows up every day and still doesn’t know why. Who’s less intelligent, again?”
Actually, I don’t know why I show up either. All we do is argue.
And then every summer, during the time of day I would normally be teaching, I update my lessons to incorporate my arguments pre-emptively. But for whom? It’s a brand-new class who doesn’t care about the previous classes’ complaints. So I’m not that smart either.
Case in point, in my early days of teaching, I had to deal with students saying, “Why do I need to learn this stuff? I’m going to go into chinuch!” Because people in chinuch don’t need to communicate proficiently in the language in which they speak. But I’ve been teaching for 16 years, and you’d think that I would have heard of at least one of these students’ names in the world of chinuch by now. In fact, I recently met the father of one of the first kids who gave me this argument, whose son is now in his 30s, and I asked him straight out: “Is your son in chinuch?” and he said, “No.”
Anyway, over the years of being maavir sedra, I noticed that for example a lot of Rashi’s comments are predicated on him noticing, in the pesukim, grammar concepts that I talk about in class. So I started incorporating some of these Rashis into the lessons. And as it turns out, my students hate it.
“I thought you all wanted to learn for the rest of your lives!”
“Yeah, but not in the afternoons!”
“Oh, then you’ll do amazing in kollel. ‘I don’t want to learn Rashis after 3:30.’”
Maybe society is going down the drain, and like a drain, with every rotation, the circumference gets smaller and smaller and the pace faster and faster.
(Let’s give the younger generation a minute to look up which one is circumference.)
But it’s not just me saying this. All these studies keep coming out that say that the younger generation is less intelligent. The thing is, though, that it’s always the older generations conducting these studies. The younger generation does not conduct studies.
And some kids justify it. They say, “It’s not a big deal, because if the whole world gets dumber, no one loses. As long as everyone gets dumber at the same time.” After all, you can still win a rat race if all the rats are running slower.
But what they forget is that apparently, some other countries are still getting smarter. Like maybe the concept of yeridas hadoros doesn’t apply to Asia. So basically, we need to daven that everyone gets less intelligent, across the board. Whatever the opposite of “Atah Chonen” is.
We’re definitely scoring worse on standardized tests. You show kids a test these days, and they say, “This is Chinese!” So obviously, the kids in China are going to do better, because they know Chinese.
Who is writing these tests?!
We have to stop outsourcing these things to Asia.
Or we say, “Yeah, but some people just don’t test well,” which doesn’t sound at all like what we tell ourselves to make it sound like we’re smarter than we are. Time was, part of the definition of smart was “proficient at multiple things.”
Let’s give the younger generation a minute to look up proficient. That’s proficient with a C. You’d think they could look at the word in the previous paragraph and know that, but I can tell you firsthand that they cannot.
For example, there is one Adjectives worksheet that I give out in which my students have to turn nouns into adjectives. For example, I write “salad invented in Israel,” and they have to write “Israeli salad.” And more and more students every year misspell the word “Isreal.” As in “Eretz Yisreal.” Even though the word is spelled correctly, by me, right next to where they have to rewrite it.
“You don’t know how to spell Israel?” I ask them. “Aren’t you Jewish?”
And they say, “We don’t call it Israel; we call it Eretz Yisrael.” Which is neither here nor there, because they still have to follow it in the news.
Once we take the Y off the front of the word, we spell it differently.
“Amazing,” I say. “But what do you call the salad?!”
Oh, ok, they’re back.
A lot of people say that we’re getting less intelligent because we have to think less because of technology. And Asia, for example, has no technology! But for example, it used to be that we had to remember things. But there’s no point in remembering things, because nowadays, every argument ends with someone looking things up.
On the other hand, future generations were always less intelligent than previous generations, and they couldn’t blame technology. Though technically, there was always new technology. At some point, someone was like, “Kids nowadays with their wheels… In my day, we had to figure out how to get lumber home from Home Depot without wheels. Now, kids will never know.” And the kids said, “We’ll never have to know!” And the adults said, “Well, you won’t have your wheels on you wherever you go. You’ll see.”
So maybe kids just don’t have to be as smart.
You don’t even have to be smart enough to keep yourself alive, because nowadays, there are laws and rules for that. It used to be that people had to figure out how to stay alive. We went outside and played with no supervision, we made up our own games with zero intruding advice from adults, and whoever was left came in for dinner. I’m not saying that was a great system, but the people who came home were stronger for it. Whereas nowadays, we have for example the bike helmet law, for the people who don’t mind getting horrifically injured but do mind incurring a fine. And because kids can’t go out and be on their own, they are no longer using their creativity to come up with their own games, for example.
You know what? Maybe I’m wrong. Just this Shabbos, while this article was stewing in my head, two of my teenagers did come up with a new game, and they were playing it nicely without any fighting or arguing of any sort. The game involves pillows from the couch. (90% of made-up childhood Shabbos games involve pillows from the couch.) The way you play is you throw a pillow up against the wall as high as you can, and the goal is, as it slides down the wall, to try to stop it with your face.
They’ve been playing it for ten minutes now. I hope this game doesn’t make them even less intelligent. So I take back everything I said.
I would continue my argument at this point, but basically everyone I’m talking to has just walked off to play the pillow game.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
