Anecdotal evidence indicates the lamentably low intelligence of the younger generations
In this photo taken on March 22, 2019, a woman records video footage on her smartphone while standing beside a map in Tokyo's Shinjuku district. (Photo: AFP)
A couple of years ago a shocking survey was made public. The physical abilities of Japanese children were found to be sorely lacking.
The total score obtained by 11-14-year-olds in eight sporting events, including the 50-meter sprint, the standing jump, abdominal and grip strength, was the worst in 10 years since the test was first carried out.
It was extensive research involving the entire nation, in which children from all public schools participated, based on data taken from two million individuals.
But what was the cause of this sharp decline in performance? The suspects were rounded up by experts. Time spent in front of the TV, smartphones, and too much video games.
Recently there have been equivalent distressing signals. Although this time the alarm was not sounded from a general population survey but comes from personal experience.
A friend of mine who is the head of the human resources department of an important Japanese company recently told me something with a very worried tone. His job is to supervise the hiring of scores of new recruits every year.
He said they have totally given up on the idea of hiring smart people and now concentrate all their efforts on avoiding hiring “bad apples,” meaning lazy individuals with no work ethic.
Why? I asked.
The reason is simple, he straightforwardly replied. Young people are getting dumber and dumber, and finding a smart person is such a rarity that the company has given up on the fortuitous chance of it happening altogether.
So, instead, the company has revised its work practices. The strategy is to hire anyone with average intelligence and then teach them the job. But since the new employees are not the smartest (to use a euphemism), the company had to implement a change in how the work was to be carried out. It had to be much simpler and easily comprehensible.
To summarize, amid the chronic lack of workers, the need for new recruits cannot stop without compromising the production cycle. But since the newcomers, freshly graduated from university, are not able to comprehend or perform the job, the job itself had to be transformed. Forget about problem-solving skills; they have to be guided every step of the way. Very limited and clear guidelines so that the probability of mistakes is hopefully reduced.
But how did this change come about? My friend in HR is not the only person I recently spoke to who complained about the woeful quality of new young recruits. Another friend told me this story.
Her company had to come up with specific questions to gauge whether the people they were supposed to hire, regardless of their degree, were capable of independent thinking. One of these questions was: “If the boss tells you to read 50 books by tomorrow, what would you do?”
They expected the interviewee to at least ask what is the motivation behind such an odd request. Why do they need to do that, and for what purpose? Instead, nobody asked. They mostly said things like: “I’ll search online for a brief version” or “I’ll google it” or “I will not sleep to get it done.” Some people at the end of the interview even asked what was the correct answer.
Nobody ever inquired about the purpose of the task in the first place. Information gathered is not evaluated or analyzed, is simply an input to which they are expected to react with an exact answer.
Another friend told me that during online meetings young recruits, especially women, kept adjusting their hair like someone would do in a mirror (or a smartphone), apparently unconscious of the fact that everyone is watching.
Also, contrary to what one would assume, their computer skills are by far worse than the previous generation. Youngsters are indeed continuously attached to their devices only it always happens to be a smartphone, rarely a computer, which requires different manual and discerning skills.
But how did Japan come to this point? Sure, we can easily point the finger at smartphones and social media. But education is a major culprit. No matter how low their motivation for studying is, or how poor their intellectual abilities are, in Japan you can always find a private school to graduate from. And the public schools are not getting stricter either.
There is no effort to improve logical and critical thinking. Education is reduced to a lazy catechism of right/wrong answers. Reading and writing skills are at their lowest. Young people don’t read and when they do they find it extremely hard to comprehend sentences. So much so that the books they find most appealing are those written in a casual style, such as university lectures transcribed into easy-to-read essays.
As youngsters seem unable to even comprehend the most simple questions or the intentions behind a request, this means they are deficient in the power of abstraction. All in all, this is what we define as intelligence. When you add the fact that kids get their daily news from entertainment apps like TikTok you wonder if this trend is not the perfect cocktail for guaranteed future social mayhem.
*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.
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