Remembering when one graduated high school, in the year 2000, looking around and wondering why we all still looked like adolescents. It felt weird. Remembered attending high school graduation for elder cousin's, long before, and thinking they looked like soldiers, like men and women.
But accepted, it was probably 'perspectival' (a word which the built-in dictionary of this phone refuses to accept). One was merely incapable of seeing their own advanced physical form, due to some perpetual 'nowness', or reflection defection—just can't see it in oneself.
But later one went and looked and compared high school graduation photos of people from the 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, even 1990's, and compared and contrasted. And though there were obviously people endowed with eternal youth, the average face in the photos kept getting younger (on average). By the time the 2000's came, the average high school graduate appeared, physically, to be in the 8th grade (all things considered).
Society had slowly moved to infantile dimensions. Kids were being coddled to the point of non-advancement, though maybe not intellectually (in terms of academic laws of advancement). Something wasn't adding up.
The average person graduating high school with a common core of capacities believes they have succeeded, but have they? If we keep lowering the bar? Not simply based on test performance, but actually intellectual integration with human life.
And then it hit. One was the first generation to become victims of the 'standardized testing' curriculum. We weren't quite there yet as a society, but soon (and thinking of one's niece and nephew's generation) all of academic life revolves around testing—not only to gauge achievement—but also to acquire funding.
As we slip deeper into this model of education, where kids (and now adults) are believers (academic religionists) in their own advancement based on multiple choice answers to preconcieved and easily studied answers, are we not simply getting dumber?
We can't know. Because we're getting dumber. Smarter at tests, maybe. But dumber at life.
Thank you for the reply. With all due respect to our elder, one would argue this doesn't entirely have to do with education, as such.
Americans have long been socialized to be 'doers' of things, not thinkers. So while our European counterparts in the West were still critically thinking, we were building skyscrapers and dune buggies. It's a difference in kind, not in degree.
However, we literally couldn't build a skyscraper anymore without immigrants from other, less coddled cultures. We have fallen into a trap of 'safety-ism'. A Buddhist concept of 'do no harm' (ahimsa) denuded of its cultural significance.
If one adds this cultural dimension stripped of raw 'doer' mentality to the incumbent anti-intellectual nature of our culture, we are left not only with unthinking people, but gutless people as well.
The idea is that this strange combination is infantilizing the humans within its grip, and stripping them of their moral and experiential character—character producing morality based on experience.