America is being "dumbed down"

Pros arguments in this last round were much more on target with the resolution, however he sill disregards many of the points I have raised and also asserts a new concept to his arguments that we are dumber because we have greater technology. I’ll start by addressing the former, then refute the latter. Texting I don’t disagree with Pros argument that texting lingo itself is a dumbed down version of how we communicate. What I have been arguing is the fact that students have to learn proper English and texting lingo in today’s America. Pros points to this lingo showing up in school papers to make his case, but this is not surprising. If you try to learn two new languages you will certainly make more mistakes then if you tried to learn just one, but learning two is still more difficult. Pro also completely misunderstands my natural development argument. It was a response to Pros point that students don’t have to learn texting lingo. I simply showed that there is more of a need to learn this then he acknowledges. It really wasn’t a necessary point. Neither is Pros “full and confident” response, which really made no sense anyway and in fact only seemed to affirm my point about the pressure on young people to learn the lingo. Where Pro goes wrong is to use this argument to claim that it forces young people to abandon their “educated” form of communication. They are learning both, that is not dumber then learning just one. Pros also asserts that educators should simply build on top of traditional education and not eliminate it. Pro misses the entire point of the cursive writing debate. If it were that simple then educators would not have to concern themselves with what to teach, they would simply teach everything. The problem is that there is too much that needs to be taught so they must choose between two things they want. When we as human beings have this type of dilemma the result is for us to push harder. We may not accomplish everything we hope, but we will certainly accomplish more then we would have if the challenge were not as great. Educators and students today have a greater challenge then they did years ago. That is not dumbing down. Technology Pro provides many examples of technology diminishing the need for people to learn things for themselves. While his example sounds convincing, that is only because he ignores the effects these devices have on society and our way of life. Pros argument is one that has been made for nearly a century now, despite being proven wrong time and time again. Back when machines first started being used in factories people cried that the workforce would one day be replaced by machines. They didn’t understand what they would possibly do for a living now that their work was being outsourced to mass production. However, what we learned was that this actually created a new demand for people to build, fix, and improve these machines. And once we had machines doing our mindless work, we now had a large segment of society available to pursue other fields which has helped advance our society further improving our way of life. The concept of these side effects apply to every one of Pros examples. Calculators has made us less efficient at simple math, but has freed us up to learn much more complicated math which is why we developed scientific calculators and now MS Excel. Spell check is great but people still have to learn how to spell in order to type, and now they also have to learn how to use MS word which allows them to put together a 50 page report instead of 10. The list goes on. As technology takes on the simple tasks for us we are now freed up to pursue the more complicated ones. Instead of practicing how to divide 5,601,345 by 31.3, we have moved on to practicing cosigns and tangents. Instead of spending our time hand writing reports we spend more of our time researching them and amassing more information. That is why we now have less and less factory workers and more engineers, and why technology continuously advances. Religion and Science I think Pro could use a calculator himself. If 1 person believes in Evolution and 2 believe in creationism, then 33% believe in evolution and 66% believe in creationism. If we add 1 person to each side, then we would now have 2 people (40%) who believe in evolution and 3 people (60%) who believe in creationism. This does not favor Pros argument. When determining what the general consensus is, the number of the total population does not count. That is why we developed percentages. State of the Union vs. the Super Bowl Saying that more people watch football does not mean that more people are abandoning education, they could simply be abandoning other less educated forms of entertainment. Pro has made no attempt to show that this is not the case. If more people were abandoning their education then their would not be a growing percentage of the population graduating from high school and earning college degrees as I have shown. Pros argument here is not only irrelevant, but already proven wrong in round one. Education Pro now claims that if America goes from having 50% of the smart people in the world to 25% then we are getting dumber. He seems to think of smart people as athletes who get traded from one team to another. It does not work that way. There is not some magical limit to how much intelligence can exist in the world. If one person gets smarter that does not mean that someone else gets dumber. They can both get smarter. Pro fails to recognize that the term “smart” is a relative term. When we say a person is smart we are speaking in relation to others. You may be smart amongst your dumb friends, but amongst a group of leading scientists you may be considered dumb as a door knob. America stood out in the world because other nations were really dumb. Now they are getting smarter so we stand out less even if we have gotten smarter ourselves, which we have. Pro asks whether we would rather have scientists who can figure out complex math on a pen and paper, or a computer. My answer is the same as NASA’s: Both. That means today’s scientists have to learn more, not less. And that makes sense since today we are accomplishing more, not less. Conclusion Pros case in this last round is essentially that people are learning less because we have technology to do everything for us. He ignores the fact that as a result we now have to learn the technology. His mindset is no different then decades ago when we all thought the workforce would be replaced with machines. That mindset has been proven wrong, and so too has his resolution. Being a part of American society today is much more complicated then it was many years ago. That has forced us to be overall smarter, not dumber.