What’s wrong with kids these days?!

July 22, 3:53 PMColorado Education ExaminerTodd Engdahl

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The answer is probably nothing that wasn't wrong with them 30 years ago.

A lot of discussions about both raising children and about education often are based on unstated, even unconscious, assumptions about the past. A common assumption in people’s psyches is that the past was better.

That attitude often colors complaints about the state of the schools.

But, many attributes of teenagers are much the same these days as they were in the mid-1970s, according to a study by the Foundation for Child Development that was reported in USA Today.

Among the findings:

• Reading proficiency was about the same in 2003-05 as in 1975-77
• High school graduation rates up a little
• The teen suicide rate is about the same
• Today’s kids are a bit better at math
• Teen birth rates and use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs are down slightly
• Childhood poverty is up somewhat
• Substantially more kids are overweight or obese

Of course, another facet of at least the American psyche is the belief in progress, that things get better over time. By that measure, it’s discouraging that overall reading proficiency, for instance, hasn’t improved for nearly 30 years.

Another thing to worry about is that we live in a different world than we did in the mid-1970s. Then, China, Russia and India were state-controlled economic backwaters, and other Asian powerhouses like Taiwan, Vietnam and Singapore weren’t on the economic radar.

Something happened to their education systems in the last three decades that didn’t happen here.