This is important

8 Comments

1. Imrahil says:

   23 June 2025 at 11:18 AM

   Well, in the Middle Ages, a really sizable portion of the educated and pious people could quote the Bible by heart. (St. Thomas devoted an article in his Commentary on the Sentences, which I know from being included in the Summa theologica’s supplement under no. 36 II, to explain that this while praiseworthy is not quite required to be admitted to Holy Orders; and he does give off the vibe that to not only praise but require this, while ultimately wrong, might really be an idea that comes to many well-intended people.)

   And then Gutenberg came along and invented the printing press.

   Also, we’ve been playing football (both sorts), etc., as a sport for some 150 years very roughly. (The word “sport” used to mean “leasure pastime”.) And reinvented the Olympic Games in the process, etc. A English Lord founded the Scout movement, etc. – The basic reason seems to be that (specifically for the classes these were originally intended for, in English public-schools etc.) everyday life and work is not so physical as it used to be… And after all, it’s not like this development is entirely for the worse; to some part rather probably, to a large part for the pessimists, but playing is not entirely wrong.

   With that being said, the chief reason why there aren’t many nine-year-olds who read “Paradise Lost” and similar grown-up works these days is peer-pressure; plus a lot of work to do for school etc. so that they don’t get the time and energy. If we didn’t have that, the great majority still wouldn’t but we’d have a sizeable number that would.

   (And I wasn’t quite out of the ordinary – sure, rather good at school etc., but it didn’t have the air of unnormalcy – when I read a translation of Moby-Dick [and a translation of the original in all its complexity, not a boyish rider’s digest] and, as a not native-speaker, the English original of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone [which I refuse to call by its bogus American title, but I digress] at the age of 13.)
2. David says:

   23 June 2025 at 11:21 AM

   Here is a PDF of the full article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (otherwise behind a paywall)

   https://religioustech.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Carr-Nicholas-Is-Google-Making-Us-Stupid.pdf
3. Kathleen10 says:

   23 June 2025 at 11:34 AM

   There are questions about the effect of cumulative vaccines on IQ. Many parents today are barely literate, and they don’t see why their kids should be literate. The so-called intellectual dummies prefer dogs to kids, even though they’ll have to replace the kids in ten years, so they’re kind of out of the gene pool. Too many high school grads can barely read or do math, and once elite universities like Harvard now must include remedial reading and math for college students. The University of Connecticut has a student born in Puerto Rico as an incoming freshman who cannot read at all. But the important thing is, how do these students FEEL about themselves. Education in the US is badly maimed and we are definitely dumber. Anyone looking at any American middle or high textbook or essay or test from before 1950 can see it.
4. VForr says:

   23 June 2025 at 11:53 AM

   I feel like I have gotten dumber thanks to technology. I am actively working to combat it though.
5. Suburbanbanshee says:

   23 June 2025 at 4:04 PM

   If you don’t teach kids to read with phonics, you don’t teach kids to read.

   However, a lot of people seem to be “reading” fairly complex audiobooks, watching videos about abstruse topics, and forming a cheering section for theological debates.

   I’m also interested by how many people ask good questions, if given a chance.

   So obviously some people do take an interest in a high level of education, whether or not they got that education in school.

   But we have to bring back phonics education, math memorization, language learning, hands-on science demonstrations and experiments, musical instrument instruction, and all the rest of the things that we know will work.

   I’d also like to see more memory work. Yes, we live in a world where people can look stuff up, but the brain needs stretching. And for those with visualization skills, the ars memoriae would be cool.

   And yes, rhetoric and logic. The kids need it for self-defense, if nothing else.
6. Suburbanbanshee says:

   23 June 2025 at 4:06 PM

   Also… for most of human history, advanced education was often obtained through tutors or small classes. If we’re going to pay zillions for kids’ educations, why can’t they have private tutors in any subject where they fall behind?

   (And yup, some kids will need phys ed tutors, like personal trainers or physical therapists. But if everybody has some weak subjects, those kids will just be part of the crowd.)
7. Loquitur says:

   23 June 2025 at 6:08 PM

   Joseph Dzhugashvili (AKA Stalin) lost his faith at the age of 12 or 13 when he read The Origin Of Species and The Descent Of Man, according to a contemporary in the local Russian Orthodox junior seminary in Georgia. He read many adult works of philosophy and literature even before he went to the major seminary in Tiblisi at 15. Although a negative example, (and I don’t want to trigger a debate about Darwinism), it does confirm the same general point.
8. Venerator Sti Lot says:

   23 June 2025 at 7:25 PM

   To take up Suburbanbanshee’s ‘aural reading’ and Imrahil’s learning-by-heart points together, I know some children who profitably had all of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (though not the whole of the Appendices) read aloud to them at nine and six respectively. And I’ve been given to understand (from the character of the earliest surviving manuscripts) that at least in their early history probably all the Latin Mass Propers were taught aurally to, and memorized by, young choristers.