Why Modern Children's Literature is so badly written
The Power, Money and Corruption involved in purposely dumbing down a civilization
Modern children’s literature talks to your children like they have brain damage. The “Miss Rachel Speech” didn’t come out of nowhere, it was an orchestrated and engineered phenomenon with the combined effort of government, publishing industries and useful idiots in academia. Every modern children’s book is filled with simple, repetitive sentences and idiotic, one dimensional stories because modern pedagogy convinced the government that this was the best way to teach children. As a result, an entire generation has grown up speaking and thinking like they actually do have brain damage. Publishers made fat profits from reducing the effort required to create children’s books while society itself suffered.
An entire generation has been dumbed down. If we want any hope of making it possible for the next generation to escape this downward trend, we have to understand how this happened. Turning off the screens for your child won’t do much good if the books you read to them are just as insidious.
When we see videos of children speaking prior to the 1950s or read letters that children were once capable of writing, it is clear that the intelligence level of the average person has deteriorated significantly. Children spoke and wrote in complete sentences with complex thoughts, used a richer vocabulary and were far more descriptive and attentive of their environments.
For a full transcription of this letter you can visit this website. The boy and girl above, although only thirteen, both write at a level that would be considered advanced even for ordinary adult readership. There are undoubtedly little boys and girls who are capable of writing at this level today, but they are certainly the exceptions rather than the norm: mumbling barbarians and punctuate every shallow observation of life with “like”.
A degradation in one’s ability to express his thoughts is the most reliable predictor of intelligence because writing is the best reflection of how a person’s thinks. The shallow-ness of modern writing reflects the shallow-ness of the modern mind. Because this linguistic and intellectual degradation occurred so long ago, it cannot be blamed on “AI” or even “the internet”. We worry today that AI will replace human writing, but human beings have been writing like robots already for decades. If we want the next generation to actually be able to think, we have to understand what caused them to stop thinking well in the first place.
