There's something of an urban legend that Socrates once said, "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers." 

According to one source, the actual source of that quote is derived from a dissertation published in 1907 by Cambridge University student Kenneth John Freeman, who was in fact presenting in his own words a summary of complaints from various sources in ancient times. In other words, it wasn't Socrates who said it, but there is some evidence the sentiment was truly expressed by the elders of Ancient Greece. 

The reason I bring that up is because I have always known it's a cyclical, generational occurrence: the old lamenting the failures of the young to uphold the ways of our civilization. Kids haven't actually gotten worse. They've always been ... well, kids.

Still, as someone who has worked directly with well over 500 kids in my 16 year career, and has interacted regularly with more than a thousand of them, I see things that have changed from when I started my career to today. Modern kids' vocabularies are shockingly bad. A surprising number of them have attention spans you would attribute to someone with ADHD. I believe it's a direct result of parents using screens as to distract them and babysit them, kind of like how my parents plopped me down in front of a TV in the 80's and let me watch cartoons until my heart's content. 

The reason I think it's worse now than ever, though, is because of computer algorithms, which by design provide kids with short 10-60 second flashy, colourful, funny diversions and mute their imagination by never making them feel bored or think about what they'd like to look at. The only thing TikTok wants to do is to get kids to spend more time on TikTok today than they did yesterday, and to spend more time tomorrow than they do today. That's the goal of every algorithm. If you were on Facebook 20 hours a day, Facebook would be trying to get you to use it 21 hours tomorrow. 

JB mentioned in that thread comic books expanding his vocabulary. And I still remember reading the story in one of Next Men's AFATH about a 1960's tv show depicting the smartest kid in school being revealed to have learned his science knowledge from - gasp! the scandal! - comic books. (Was that the Mary Tyler Moore Show, maybe?)

When I was a kid in middle school, I really got into comics. I still have the memory of a school bully attempting to intimidate me, and while the specifics have been lost in my memory, I said something to him using such a complicated vocabulary that all he was able to do was stare at me for about five seconds before simply turning around and walking away. 

Today's kids - at least the ones I teach, in what technically would qualify as an "inner city school" in Toronto - really are different from before the smartphone era. And it's "different" in a way I equate with scary. The negative impacts of things like being always on devices, having unregulated access to apps like TikTok/Instagram/YouTube, the way they use AI as their personal mental health counsellors ("I asked Chat about my anxiety and I'm trying a new thing to help with it now..."), kids these days don't leave me feeling super optimistic for a future generation fixing the shitshow we've made for them. 

What are your experiences? Do you see evidence that I'm wrong? If so, I'd love to hear about it!

And I want to be fair in what I’m saying. I’ve worked with a lot of kids, the number of which would represent a fraction of the 350,000+ students who have moved through our education system in the last 16 years. There must be many exceptions to my experience. But it’s simply true in what I’ve seen that there are a lot of really good people who had kids but were never equipped to raise them, and it shows.