Experimenting With Our Children Seems To Have Gone Out Of Style

In 1966, the BBC conducted a series of interviews with schoolchildren attending well-reputed English schools. When asked to predict life in the year 2000, the children foresee nuclear disaster, a spaceship to the moon, racial integration, automation driving people out of work. A girl notes that “computers are taking over now, computers and automation, and in the year 2000, there just won’t be enough jobs to go around, and the only jobs … will be for people with … high IQ.” 

Another girl worries, “I don’t think it’s going to be so nice … All machines everywhere, everyone doing everything for you.” Nuclear disaster aside, the kids turned in fairly accurate predictions. What’s more, they articulated their ideas clearly and eloquently, in a manner many adults would struggle to surpass today. The BBC picked intelligent children, of course. But one wonders whether they could find a similar crop of kids in 2025, and how difficult the task would be. Especially given widespread access to smartphones and tablets which are, as psychology professor Jean M. Twenge writes, eating your child’s education. (RELATED: High School Seniors Are Struggling To Read — It’s Time To Overhaul Our Education System)