Found something interesting

メグさん、　おもしろい記事（きじ）の紹介（しょうかい）、どうもありがとうございます！

For those of you wanting to read the article, here's a link.

The article is very interesting, but perhaps a bit overstated. For one thing, there have been "kids these days..." type grumblings from the previous generation since the dawn of civilization, and yet the world somehow manages to become a better and better place. (^^)

Also, something else to keep in mind is that Japanese college students are notorious for not taking school seriously, and that's something that's been going on for a long, long time. The fact that they can't recall kanji as well as in the past isn't because they're "dumber" now, it's because (as I have ranted and raved for years now) the ability to hand-write kanji from memory just isn't all that important any more.  I would be more worried if the article says that they couldn't read kanji, but I think that young people now are exposed to far more printed text than they ever were in the past, so literacy is not something that I worry too much about, either. Neither does an anecdote about a single student who was confused as to when the Soviet Union collapsed. (Indeed, I'd be curious to see a poll of US college students asking when they thought that happened...)

The ゆとり教育（きょういく）, or "relaxed education" issue is a big one, and actually was one of the themes of my Masters thesis. In a word, in the late 1990s Japan rewrote a lot of its national school curriculum to lighten the load of its very demanding schools, and now many of the previous generation is a bit paranoid about kids becoming "dumber". Another factor is, as we've been talking about in class recently, shifting attitudes in young people today as to how they should be focusing their life energies.