By default, children are collectors of information. They have to be. What is different now is the sheer amount of information that assaults them. By increasing the information they collect, I think we have actually slowed their intellectual development, as they simply have far too much to try and process at one time. True, they learn to multi-task at a much earlier age, but I also think it is no mere coincidence that the increased diagnoses of ADD and similar “conditions” parallel the increased advances in information dispersal.

It’s an incomplete thought at this point, but one I haven’t been able to shake since I made this post. I do think that we as a generation have not taught children to take responsibility for themselves, and it’s something I want to address in the classroom as much as I can. But with the parents hovering, protecting and, in reality, enabling their children to continue being lazy, there isn’t an easy way out of it that I can grasp.

So you’re quiet right, it is indeed a form of laziness. And its only going to get worse.

Then again, it was George Orwell who said, “Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” Maybe you and I are just getting crochety in our old age.