Your child is not a technological luminary, assume it now.

Anyone who interacts with parents of young children has to put up with hearing the expression "I'm a parent". "my baby is super handy with the cell phone."The reality will crush them hard, most of them, in a few years, when they will realize that they are not the only ones who can create in a blink of an eye a program for space rockets. Reality will crush them hard, most of them, in a few years, when they will realize that those same children who are mega skilled to the death with mobile video games are unable to use a spreadsheet or word processor.. And that's something that many of us who deal with millennials y generation Z we have realized, that their digital skills are worse than those of their parents. Believing that learning to walk makes you an Olympic runner is more or less in line with the thinking we were talking about at the beginning of this paragraph, about the mobile skills of the little ones.

But that has now been confirmed in the recent study of the OECD where, under the title "Twenty-first century readers: developing reading skills in a digital world.The study, "Internet comprehension skills of 15 year olds," exposes the Internet comprehension skills of 15 year olds. In the study, only 41% of Spanish children were able to distinguish fact from opinion. (the international average is 54%). And there is an explanation for this, and it is that in schools children are not being trained to understand the difference between opinion and information (knowing what is the eukaryotic cellThe fact that the children know that what is published on the Internet is not true... is not true). Most young people in the OECD are instructed on this matter, in Spain it is only done with 46%.

This leads us to believe that the cliché that the new generations will be "critical and technologically skilled adults" is a fallacy.

The OECD comprehension study is not the only one to dismiss this idea, another study in the journal Teaching and Teacher Education states that "despite claims [...] there is no evidence to suggest that digital natives are more tech-savvy or good at multitasking than those of higher generations". To top it off, another study The fallacy of the 'digital native deepens the idea that millennials are no better than their elders at using basic computer programs.

U.S. surveys show that only 58% of millennials have technology skills that enhance their productivity at workdespite the fact that most of them work with digital media. Already in 2012, the OECD found in a survey that only 42% of the young people were able to perform operations of a complexity equal to or greater than locating data in a spreadsheet and sending it by e-mail.. In this Xataka article They also expose the erroneous assertion that digital natives are more prepared for the productive (not playful) use of technology than previous generations.

And to this we add the "technically correct" assertion that in recent times the current generation will be the first to have "a lower IQ than their parents".. An explosive cocktail that combines lack of understanding of an online discourse, lack of technological skills with a general lack of understanding. And let's be honest, we have reached this point because of laziness. By an education that is still anchored in the twentieth century when young people were trained to work in factories, by a false paternalistic belief that children are always better than parents and by a complete neglect on the part of society to encourage, foster and promote the skills of the new generations.... beyond the cult of beauty and brutal consumerism.

Cover image by Todd Trapani at Unsplash