Mere speculation, but as a former teacher at the high school level in the U.S., I see some disturbing trends:
First is the increase in digital toys, even at pre-school levels. In former generations, kids had to use toys creatively or even make their own to construct their own scenarios. My generation had Lincoln Logs, Legos, sticks and rocks. Today, parents buy electronic gadgets requiring batteries and knowledge of where to push the button.
Entertainment is now predominately television or video games. Sit and watch or sit and exercise hand-eye coordination skills. The entertainment is given, not created and imagined. "Entertain me." A corollary is that watching has morphed from sit-coms (Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie & Harriet) to MTV-type video flash images. While one may argue that the information stream is greater, I'll argue that the depth of comprehension is close to nil, while attention spans have eroded tremendously. Few students can listen to a classroom presentation without video entertainment of some form. And, as an aside, note the growth of the mega-churches that have capitalized on entertainment to attract the current generation of short spanners.
Reading, chess and the like are too "old fashioned" to be of interest to most students. Lower socio-economic families don't often encourage children to read. Single parents are not around to monitor the use of discretionary time and cannot often find time to help with library trips. Upper socio-economic families buy the expensive computerized toys, smart phones, iPads and the like for their children to keep up with the others on their perceived level while they by-pass conventional brain-intensive challenges.
So combine the lack of reading (vocabulary), lack of attention span and lack of supervision, and we see SAT scores eroding, and, at least in the U.S., declining verbal and math test scores, especially compared to the rest of the civilized world. But then, that's my view, and I left teaching at the high school level over 20 years ago, so what do I know?
It's easy enough to complain about things. Declining SAT scores are not surprising. The creative question is, does it matter, and what do we do about it?
