Forget the “Kids These Days” Narratives- Kids These Days Know More Than Ever Before

I have been adamant that this statement is true for a long time. Generations above love to put down those below. The narrative is always, “they know less, they can do less.” So it has always been, and you can thank Socrates for that (Paul Fairie writes incredible Twitter threads, soon to be in book form, about narratives like this… “kids don’t want to work”, “kids can’t do math”, etc.

You can be bullish, or bearish, on the youth of today, and it is perhaps the role of the aging pedagogue (like myself), to look down from grizzled grey beard and bemoan the state of education. This post is not that, and I steadfastly refuse to do so, in any case. I am fully bullish on the youth of today, and my confidence in them has been borne out, over and over again.

You will note that Dall-E does a terrible job of predicting what a future classroom will look like. We also do a terrible job. More computers and devices? Less? More of those floppy stools and medicine balls? Whiteboards? What remains true is that education’s main mode will still be students in a room with teachers, even as a kind of hybrid or cyborg intelligence has taken over the world (human+Internet, and eventually, human+AI).