“Common Sense isn’t so common.”

How many times have you heard this phrase?

How many times have you really thought about it, though?

It seems like every day I come across some situation where someone’s behavior or the string of words that come out of their mouth are shocking to me. “They don’t have a lick of sense!” would be a usual response around here.

When employees are at work at a retail store and are “spoken to” because they are not being discreet with their phones… and there is no one in the store.  When teachers “modify” a test down from 75 questions to 15. When a young man with autism isn’t paid for a year of work at a restaurant. I could go on.

Maybe we are becoming more individual which is a good thing.  I mean, everyone is entitled to their own opinions and thoughts, and heaven forbid we go back to the days where kids were seen and not heard, and women voted the way their husbands did (or even to the days when women couldn’t vote!). Everyone was polite then, and there were things that just weren’t done — everyone conformed. And that’s not ideal, either.

But I think somehow, with all of this “entitlement” to our opinions, we have lost something. Is it the ability to think rationally? to problem solve? to logically analyze what’s going on and make deductions based on evidence? to reflect on ourselves, our own behavior, motivations, and actions?

I’m not one to bash technology.  I think it’s a great tool, I use it every day, all the time. But I wonder if our reliance on technology has turned us into a people that cannot think for themselves. Not just about opinions, but about facts, evidence, and what to do with those facts and evidence to make things better for other people and ourselves.

I saw it when I was teaching, and asked my 6th graders to really research and think about the purpose music had in different cultures. They would simply go to google and type: “What is the purpose of music in South Africa?”

Thinking takes time and effort, and unfortunately, I think people of all ages are doing less and less of it.  And as I always told my band kids, when they weren’t practicing their skills, “If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.”

Food for thought, my friends.