Dumbing down....even board games

I found an article in the Boston Globe about toy-maker Hasbro introducing “express” versions of Monopoly, Sorry, and Scrabble that will only take about 20 minutes to play. “Busy lives” and “shorter attention spans” the article said.

Has it come down to children’s lives being too busy, and their attention spans too short, to participate in a full game of Monopoly, Sorry, or Scrabble. I personally loved the memories of the hours spent playing those game and many others including Clue, Yahtzee, Chutes and Ladders etc. Instead of speeding up games (or dumbing them down) could we not use board games to teach children focus and patience?

I know some of you are thinking, good grief, not a big deal. I personally think this is just another sign of what our societies family life has come to. I wonder if those same people, who are going to buy the express games, have time to sit and watch a movie? Jake, Joey, Janelle? When is the last time you asked mom and dad if they wanted to sit at the dining room table and play scrabble instead of watching or going to a movie? Do you have enough time in your lives to do that?

I understand there are times that you cannot finish an entire board game. But, spend the extra money to buy express games? Why not just declare a winner? Oh, never mind, that might hurt the child's self-esteem if they lose.

Dumbing Down Part 3

Sitting facing the television, muttering half thoughts or reactions into black space - this is the primary linguistic training ground for most of my students. It does not in any way adequately serve the goal of developing and strengthening verbal communication because there is no meaningful interaction. I have before me in my classroom a generation of youngsters whose world encourages linguistic passivity. I must build an awareness of the demands of clear verbal communication on the most rudimentary interpersonal levels.

A. Jane Hamilton
MIddle School Teacher, Hillsboro, NH



According to Dr. Healy (Endangered Minds) language shapes culture, thinking, and brains. The verbal bath in which society soaks its children arranges their synapses and their intellects; it helps them learn to reason, reflect, and respond to the world. The brain is ravenous for language stimulation in early childhood but becomes increasingly resistant to change when the hour of puberty arrives.

The brains of today's children are being structured in language patterns antagonistic to the values and goals of formal education. The culprit, which is now invading all levels of the socioeconomic spectrum, is diminished and degraded exposure to the forms of good, meaningful language that enable us to converse with others, with the written word, and with our own minds. The results are inevitable: declining literacy, falling test scores, faltering oral expression, ineptitude with the written word that extends from elementary schools into the incoming ranks of professionals. Corporations run writing courses for budding executives, universities re mediate basic skills, secondary schools lower standards, and elementary schools add more "learning disability" classes.

Educational planners ignore the basic problem and tout curriculum and methods devised for a previous generation. Old methods are not working because young brains have not been shaped around language as a quintessential tool for analytic thinking. If we want growing brains to build the foundations for traditional modes of academic excellence, we must confront the habits of our culture that are changing the quality and the quantity of our children's conversation.

As noted in a previous post, much of the blame inevitably falls on television, but that is only one symptom of the problem. According to Dr. Healy, no one has defined long-term effects of headphones versus conversation, of computer games or drills versus active social play, of dvds instead of books. How can children bombarded from birth by noise, frantic schedules, and the caretaking of a fast-paced adult world learn to analyze, reflect, and ponder?

Now, how do I as a parent deal with this? Obviously, we live in a culture of technology, a culture where no one plays outside (I had a neighbor knock on my door yesterday to tell me that my children were playing in puddles of water and mud in the rain and it is gross. I was like, um, it was my idea! I don't think she thinks I am a good parent anymore).

I would love to hear some ideas of what some of you moms, dads, singles, whoever, have done, did, or would do, to help avoid the trap of technology over kill.

Dumbing Down - Part 2

Excerpt from Endangered Minds.

The Two-Minute Mind:

Why don't - or can't - most young people read? One of the most common complaints among this generation is that books are "too hard" or "boring". Many have trouble with the mental organization and sustained effort demanded by reading. Coming to grips with verbal logic, wrestling one's mind into submission to an author's un-familiar point of view, and struggling to make connections appear to be particularly taxing to today's young intellects.

Informal reports help explain the reality behind the statistics. Even some English majors now find sustained prose a drag. Kristin Eddy, a news aide at the Washington Post and literature major at George Washington University, reported recently on a hands-up poll revealing that only half of her upper-level classmates had bothered to finish the assigned All the King's Men, a bestselling favorite of a previous student generation. Why? "Boring!", "Too hard to follow". Another classmate commented that it "went so slowly that it seemed like it was written by a retarded person".

Students may be learning to sound out words, but unless they possess the internal sense of responsibility for extracting the meaning, they are engaging in a hollow and unsatisfying exercise. With major effort's, we have succeeded in teaching students in early grades to "read the words." Test scores jump off a cliff, however, when students must begin to plug the words into language meaning and grapple with the more advanced grammar, vocabulary, and the sustained intellectual demands of a real text.




Going back to my last post, I would like to say that it is not entirely the fault of video games or TV that children are not reading. I think that it is us as parents who are at fault. Obviously, it is easy to blame current technology for a lot of things, but the reality is, parents actually allow their kids to watch TV, or play video games, or do not read to them. The society we live in is one that both parents work, everyone is running around doing "stuff", we are not content to sit at home, read, play a board game as a family, or just run around outside. Children are overstimulated and easily bored.

Also, I found today that Al Mohler actually blogged about the reading issue a few months ago. Check it out.

Part 1 of Dumbing Down

Well, I have decided to do a series on the dumbing down of American children. I know it sounds awful to even say it, but I believe it is true, for many reasons, which is why I have decided to do a series on it.

First, I would like to talk about reading, or lack there of. I believe the affect of video games and TV is that reading a book becomes boring and extremely un-stimulating for a child. Since they do not read, but do other mindless activities, it affects attentions spans etc. I will talk more about that later, for now, just read this statistic.

According to Dr. Bernice Cullinan of New York University (found in Endangered Minds), the proportion of readers in the United States is continuing to become smaller with a steady and significant decline in the number of book readers under twenty-one. Here is the result of a large group of "typical" fifth graders when asked how much they spend reading outside of school:

50% read four minutes a day or less
30% read two minutes a day or less
10% read nothing

The same group of children watched an average of 130 minutes of TV per day.

I will let you chew on that for now. Thoughts?