Old professors – and old non-professors, too – often complain about the younger generation’s illiteracy and philistinism. They sure don’t read newspapers as we did and they often can’t tell the difference between the world wars as we can. One study calculated that vocabulary knowledge – highly correlated with intelligence test scores – has declined since peaking with the generation born in the 1940s. (My gang!)
Yet, there’s much nostalgia and some bias here. (The vocabulary test was designed by people largely in that 1940s generation.) Considerable research on tests of all sorts suggests that, contrary to we geezer’s complaints,
Source: Wilderdom.com via Creative Commons
Americans have been getting more “intelligent” over the generations. But those findings, in turn, require us to confront what we mean by “intelligent” and to ask whether Americans today are wiser than their great-grandparents.
MADE IN AMERICA 