Dumbed Down
As time goes on I’m seeing more and more first-hand evidence of something I’ve believed for a while now: our population is being dumbed down. I don’t say that to sound like an intellectual snob nor to condemn those younger than myself. If anything, my generation (generation X) is largely culpable for the dumbing down of those 20 years old and younger as we are the educators, parents, and policy makers that have reared them.
I was out shopping for a birthday present for my father this evening and I went into the Best Buy at QEW and Brant Street in Burlington. I wanted to get him a carrying case for his new video camera so I asked a young man who looked to be between 15 and 17 whether they sold cases for my father’s brand of camera. He indicated that they didn’t have brand-specific cases but he directed me over to their rack of generic cases. I found one that I thought was suitable and brought it over to the display of video cameras which included the brand my father owns. I held up the case to the camera and it looked like it would fit but the camera had a bulky security tether attached to the bottom of it and, as such, I couldn’t place it in the case in a way that I was sure it fit properly. I asked the kid if he could remove the tether so that I could try it out in the case and he said something along the lines of, “I can’t. They don’t come off.” I responded by saying, “They must come off” to which he replied, “If I take it off an alarm will sound.” For the next few minutes I tried to convince him that, even if he’s not able to do it, there must be some way that someone in the store could remove it. I asked him to at least try and remove the tether and, after he fumbled for a minute or so with a screwdriver to no effect, I asked him if he could just take a new camera out of the box to which he replied, “I can’t do that. Then we can’t sell it.” At that point I just left.
I am seeing this behaviour more and more among people under 20: an almost complete inability to think laterally outside of specific instructions of little complexity. This sales clerk’s world view was such that the cable on that camera did not come off. Not that they’re “not supposed to come off” or that “I’m not allowed to take them off” or even “I don’t know how to take it off.” In his mind at that moment that tether on that camera was a permanent fixture that existed in perpetuity, period. The idea to ask his manager to take the cable off simply did not enter his head. I don’t even think, in this particular case, that this was due to “teenage laziness.” This kid was articulate, well-spoken, attentive, and well-groomed, not your stereotypical acne-ridden slob just there to collect minimum wage with as little effort as possible. What’s concerning to me is that he was doing his job as instructed with zero deviation from instruction and not because he was consciously adhering to his training but rather because the notion to do otherwise never even occurred to him. This, to me, speaks of a complacent, cowed population and it scares me.