Rant re: Why Kids Are Dumb

I have a short intellectual temper. Occasionally I see something online which infuriates me, and this blog entry and the comments which ensue are certainly such things. It’s a blog entry showing the text of one-star reviews of The Diary of Anne Frank made by dumb teenagers on Amazon.com. The blog comments are all exasperated expressions of how misguided the youth is. I posted the following comment, moderator approval pending:

“It was really really boring. Its about some girl and her life- who cares!?! It is a total girly-girl book. Too dull to even care. I couldnt even pay attention to what happened to her, why it was so awful. Oh Well, NEXT…”

Kids want to be entertained, not educated. Teachers’ fault, parents’ fault, society’s fault, this is the utopian nihilism we’ve been chasing after for centuries. Nobody’s responsible for anything so everybody’s free to do and say whatever they want. Because children are immature and their ability to overcome base desires isn’t developed (and probably never will be), they spend most of their time chasing mindless distractions like TV and video games and text messaging (your friends have become mindless distractions, the whole world is a shallow circus of entertainment. Celebrate. Obama’s the president, everybody’s happy, no responsibility, someone else is handling the problems, we’re free! FREE!)

Nobody’s willing or able to point them to a more worthwhile way to spend their time, despite a wealth of literature on the subject. Authors who have struggled to find meaning  in existence (and thus meaningful, non-distraction ways to use one’s time) include most of the important authors in the Western literary canon, from Homer to Schopenhauer to Dostoevsky, Camus and Shakespeare, Jung and Dante.

This entertainment/distraction mindset has crippled the development of our young people’s attention spans. The pharmaceutical industry capitalized on this by marketing Ritalin, a drug which is similar in its composition and effects to cocaine. It’s FDA-approved so parents blindly feed it to their children, just like the rest of our society’s garbage. No responsibility. Even pigs know to care for their young; the pig-man apparently does not.

Look at the comments these kids are leaving: this is the world you’ve created, a world you’re just as responsible for as anyone else.

As far as the book itself goes, the kids are correct in noting its lack of literary merit or interesting content. There are well-written books about the Shoah, suffering in life, teenage awakening, and living in captivity. There is literally no good reason to read this book beyond appeasing graders at the compulsory brain-washing that is somehow supposed to be a substantial education.