'Fat, drunk and stupid' is no way to go through life

The guy driving this wagon 300 years ago was smarter than kids now.

By JIM PURCELL

It used to amaze me when my mother or father wrote something or did mathematics, especially my father. He was born in May, 1919, the son of Irish immigrants, straight off the boat from Leprechaunville. His penmanship was immaculate, and he did math in his head -- totally accurately. He did not do "long division" or carry this or that. He thought about three or four large sums, rolled his eyes a bit and there was the answer.

Both my mother and father's penmanship was near perfect and, though both of them were high school drop-outs, they both wrote cursively in a way that would have made for excellent invitations to a formal gala. Both of them could recite all of the presidents until Herbert Hoover, and then they lived through the other ones so they didn't have to think about those. They each knew when the Declaration of Independence was signed, where it was signed, notable signatories, when the Constitution was signed, who basically made it and could give you a mini-lecture on states' rights if you had the time. Again, they were drop-outs from public school. 

Dad had to work for his family, to make ends meet, and Mom, who was a few years younger than Dad, left school during the outset of World War II to help make tank parts at the future Revlon plant in Edison. Of course, Mom stayed at the tank plant until it became the Revlon plant, so she could have drawn you a schematic of the building. 

The point is that even though these people were not educated in any way anyone would consider 'meaningful' today, they had a lot more effective education than those who did finish high school later. Indeed, their vocabulary, though smaller than those of some others, was strong. They could spell very well and use grammar, including colons and semi-colons, the way it is supposed to be used. 

How things have changed. I know college graduates who cannot spell or use grammar effectively. If not for the calculators on cell phones, how would sums ever be calculated? As for knowing the English language in the written sense, I ask you this: If you cannot fluently use the spoken and the written language -- do you even know the language at all? Is English just becoming an oral tradition that now includes emojis and computer jargon? I will take the leap and say that this bridge has already been crossed. I am saying people are so ignorant and dim today that they do not even know how much they do not even know anymore. 

Computers seem to be the measure of intelligence now -- but no one even remembers how to program using Computer Basic language, So, the one thing -- computers -- that people are supposed to be 'smart' at, and they do not even remember how to program in fundamental language anymore. 

I am taking a long time to make a simple point: We are living in the dumbest era of American history right here, right now. Yes, we have Dr. Stephen Hawking, and this is an era of great scholars, but they are the very few and not the many. The knowledge disparity between the very smart and the very dumb is as steep an angle right now as the angle between the very rich and the very poor. To put it plainly, people are so stupid today that I am surprised they do not go about their business wearing a football helmet to buffer their craniums from minor slip and fall accidents, should they arise. 

Today, the United States ranks 28th in the globe among First World nations in education, far behind Japan and South Korea, and even lagging behind Ireland (where there are still thatch, one-room multi-grade school houses) and Canada (which closes some of its schools for months at a time for inclement weather).

What is the answer to this mess? Well, the answer is to start educating children correctly and I think that means worrying more about curriculum than what deity is or is not paid homage to first thing in the morning. I think the teaching of creationism should be a flogging offense in science class, and English class needs to have a lot more -- English in it. 

I hear there has never been young people so obese than today, and that young people have never faced more concerns about drugs in school. So, I will sum this up with the sentiment of Dean Vernon Wormer from the movie "Animal House," when he looked at one of his freshmen and said, "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son."

I agree.

Can we, as a country, do better? It might very well be that, if we all collectively tried, we could not do worse.