The Dumbest Generation (28 page)
Read The Dumbest Generation Online
Authors: Mark Bauerlein
All too often, the mentors don’t see the results of their indulgence, which emerge only after students leave their class, leaving teachers unaware of how the approach misleads their charges. A recent study of teachers’ expectations touches one of the significant thresholds in a person’s educational life: graduation. When a student graduates from high school, the diploma is supposed to signify a certain level of skill and knowledge, but the teachers who have graded them don’t seem to realize the levels actually expected of students at the next stage. Instead, high school teachers consistently assess the skills of their graduating students much more highly than college teachers assess the skills of their entering students. That’s the finding of companion surveys sponsored by the
Chronicle of Higher Education
in 2006, one of them directed at high school teachers, the other at college professors (see
Chronicle of Higher Education,
“What Professors and Teachers Think”). Researchers asked 746 high school teachers and 1,098 college professors specifically about the college readiness of the kids they instructed, and the variance was huge. On the general question “How well prepared are your students for college-level work?” 31 percent of the teachers stated “Very well,” while only 13 percent of professors stated “Very well.” In the “Not well” category, professors doubled the teacher score, 24 percent to 12 percent, meaning that while only one in eight high school teachers found among the students “large gaps in preparation” that left them “struggling,” one in four college teachers found them. In certain subject areas, the discrepancy between high school and college perceptions increased to a ratio of nine to one. In mathematics, fully 37 percent of teachers estimated that the students were “Very well prepared, ” while a meager 4 percent of professors agreed. For science, 38 percent of teachers gave them “Very well prepared,” but only 5 percent of professors did. In writing, nearly half the professors (44 percent) rated the freshman class “Not well prepared,” while only 10 percent of teachers were equally judgmental. Interestingly, for motivational traits the discrepancy shrank significantly, for example, with teachers and professors differing by only three points in judging students “Very well prepared” to “work hard.” The decrease indicates that the problem lies not in the students’ diligence but in their intellectual tool kits, and that the energy students devote to schoolwork (and leisure play) often dodges activities that build college-level knowledge and skills.
Chronicle of Higher Education
in 2006, one of them directed at high school teachers, the other at college professors (see
Chronicle of Higher Education,
“What Professors and Teachers Think”). Researchers asked 746 high school teachers and 1,098 college professors specifically about the college readiness of the kids they instructed, and the variance was huge. On the general question “How well prepared are your students for college-level work?” 31 percent of the teachers stated “Very well,” while only 13 percent of professors stated “Very well.” In the “Not well” category, professors doubled the teacher score, 24 percent to 12 percent, meaning that while only one in eight high school teachers found among the students “large gaps in preparation” that left them “struggling,” one in four college teachers found them. In certain subject areas, the discrepancy between high school and college perceptions increased to a ratio of nine to one. In mathematics, fully 37 percent of teachers estimated that the students were “Very well prepared, ” while a meager 4 percent of professors agreed. For science, 38 percent of teachers gave them “Very well prepared,” but only 5 percent of professors did. In writing, nearly half the professors (44 percent) rated the freshman class “Not well prepared,” while only 10 percent of teachers were equally judgmental. Interestingly, for motivational traits the discrepancy shrank significantly, for example, with teachers and professors differing by only three points in judging students “Very well prepared” to “work hard.” The decrease indicates that the problem lies not in the students’ diligence but in their intellectual tool kits, and that the energy students devote to schoolwork (and leisure play) often dodges activities that build college-level knowledge and skills.
One of the most precious tools they lack does not appear in predominant education philosophies, however, nor does it shape training programs for teachers and professors, nor does it arise in discussions of American competitiveness and innovation among business leaders and politicians interested in education. When foundation personnel talk of school improvement and education officers announce academic outcomes, they cite test scores, retention rates, school choice plans, technology, and a dozen other topics, but not this one. And if it were posed to intellectuals, academics, educators, and journalists, a few might seize it as crucial but most would give it a limp nod of approval, or stare blankly, or reject it outright. It sounds fainthearted to them, or outmoded, moralistic, or irrelevant. The tool is precisely what has been lost in the shifting attitude in favor of youth: self-criticism in the light of tradition.
ADOLESCENTS ARE painfully self-conscious, to be sure, and they feel their being intensely, agonizing over a blemish on the cheek and a misstep in the lunchroom. But the yardstick of their judgment comes not from the past but from the present, not from wise men and women but from cool classmates, not from art and thought through the ages but from pop culture of the moment. They pass through school and home ever aware of inadequacy, but the ideals they honor raise them only to the condition of peer respect. Their idols are peer idols, their triumphs the envy of friends, not adults. Their self-criticism isn’t enlightened and forward-looking, nor is it backward-looking. It’s social and shortsighted.
What young Americans need isn’t more relevance in the classroom, but less. A June 2006 op-ed in
Education Week
on student disengagement in class, “The Small World of Classroom Boredom,” concludes, “Instead of responding to our students as individuals with their own interests and knowledge, the school curriculum is, by and large, remote, providing little connection between the classroom and students’ lives” (see Schultz). Yes, the coursework is remote, but instead of blaming the curriculum and offering more blather about sparking “intellectual curiosity” and “independent thinking,” as the author does, let’s blame “students’ lives” for stretching the divide. Young people need mentors not to go with the youth flow, but to stand staunchly against it, to represent something smarter and finer than the cacophony of social life. They don’t need more pop culture and youth perspectives in the classroom. They get enough of those on their own. Young Americans need someone somewhere in their lives to reveal to them bigger and better human stories than the sagas of summer parties and dormitory diversions and Facebook sites.
Education Week
on student disengagement in class, “The Small World of Classroom Boredom,” concludes, “Instead of responding to our students as individuals with their own interests and knowledge, the school curriculum is, by and large, remote, providing little connection between the classroom and students’ lives” (see Schultz). Yes, the coursework is remote, but instead of blaming the curriculum and offering more blather about sparking “intellectual curiosity” and “independent thinking,” as the author does, let’s blame “students’ lives” for stretching the divide. Young people need mentors not to go with the youth flow, but to stand staunchly against it, to represent something smarter and finer than the cacophony of social life. They don’t need more pop culture and youth perspectives in the classroom. They get enough of those on their own. Young Americans need someone somewhere in their lives to reveal to them bigger and better human stories than the sagas of summer parties and dormitory diversions and Facebook sites.
In slighting the worth of tradition, in allowing teenagers to set their own concerns before the civilization of their forebears, mentors have only opened more minutes to youth contact and youth media. And not just school time, but leisure time, too, for the betrayal of the mentors ripples far beyond the campus. In the past, as long as teachers, parents, journalists, and other authorities insisted that young people respect knowledge and great works, young people devoted a portion of out-of-class hours to activities that complement in-class work. These include the habits we’ve already charted: books for fun, museums, “art music,” dance and theater, politics. They didn’t have to reach high seriousness to do their quasi-educational work, either. Historical curiosity needn’t demand a reading of Thomas Carlyle’s
The French Revolution: A History
(1837). An afternoon trip to a local landmark might do. Reading comprehension tested in class could be enhanced by detective stories and romance novels at home at night. Not all reading had to equal classic Victorian novels. The activities had a sustaining effect, too, for they helped young people increase their store of knowledge and cultivate the critical eye, which in turn made their leisure habits improve.
The French Revolution: A History
(1837). An afternoon trip to a local landmark might do. Reading comprehension tested in class could be enhanced by detective stories and romance novels at home at night. Not all reading had to equal classic Victorian novels. The activities had a sustaining effect, too, for they helped young people increase their store of knowledge and cultivate the critical eye, which in turn made their leisure habits improve.
The more mentors have engaged youth in youth terms, though, the more youth have disengaged from the mentors themselves and from the culture they are supposed to represent. To take one more example: in 1982, 18- to 24-year-olds made up 18.5 percent of the performing arts attendance. In 2002, the portion fell to 11.2 percent, a massive slide in audience makeup, and an ominous sign for the future of arts presenters (National Endowment for the Arts,
Survey of Public Participation in the Arts
).
Survey of Public Participation in the Arts
).
The decline of school-supporting leisure habits—lower reading rates, fewer museum visits, etc.—created a vacuum in leisure time that the stuff of youth filled all too readily, and it doesn’t want to give any of it back. Digital technology has fostered a segregated social reality, peer pressure gone wild, distributing youth content in an instant, across continents, 24/7. Television watching holds steady, while more screens mean more screen time. What passes through them locks young Americans ever more firmly into themselves and one another, and whatever doesn’t pass through them appears irrelevant and profitless. Inside the classroom, they learn a little about the historical past and civic affairs, but once the lesson ends they swerve back to the youth-full, peer-bound present. Cell phones, personal pages, and the rest unleash persistent and simmering forces of adolescence, the volatile mix of cliques and loners, rebelliousness and conformity, ambition and self-destruction, idolatry and irreverence, know-nothing-ness and know-it-all-ness, all of which tradition and knowledge had helped to contain. The impulses were always there, but the stern shadow of moral and cultural canons at home and in class managed now and then to keep them in check. But the guideposts are now unmanned, and the pushback of mentors has dwindled to the sober objections of a faithful few who don’t mind sounding unfashionable and insensitive.
The ingredients come together into an annihilating recipe. Adolescent urgings, a teen world cranked up by technology, a knowledge world cranked down by abdicating mentors . . . they commingle and produce young Americans whose wits are just as keen as ever, but who waste them on screen diversions; kids whose ambitions may even exceed their forebears’, but whose aims merge on career and consumer goals, not higher learning; youths who experience a typical stage of alienation from the adult world, but whose alienation doesn’t stem from countercultural ideas and radical mentors (Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, etc.), but from an enveloping immersion in peer stuff. Their lengthening independence has shortened their mental horizon. Teen material floods their hours and mentors esteem them, believing the kids more knowledgeable and skilled than they really are, or, perhaps, thinking that assurance will make them that way.
Few things are worse for adolescent minds than overblown appraisals of their merits. They rob them of constructive self-criticism and obscure the lessons of tradition. They steer their competitive instincts toward peer triumphs, not civic duty. They make them mistrust their guides, and interpret cynically both praise and censure. They set them up for failure, a kind of Peter Principle in young people’s lives whereby they proceed in school and in social circles without receiving correctives requisite to adult duties and citizenship. They reach a level of incompetence, hit a wall in college or the workplace, and never understand what happened. The rising cohort of Americans is not “The Next Great Generation,” as Strauss and Howe name them in their hagiographic book
Millennials Rising.
We wish they were, but it isn’t so. The twenty-first-century teen, connected and multitasked, autonomous yet peer-mindful, marks no great leap forward in human intelligence, global thinking, or “netizen”-ship. Young users have learned a thousand new things, no doubt. They upload and download, surf and chat, post and design, but they haven’t learned to analyze a complex text, store facts in their heads, comprehend a foreign policy decision, take lessons from history, or spell correctly. Never having recognized their responsibility to the past, they have opened a fissure in our civic foundations, and it shows in their halting passage into adulthood and citizenship. They leave school, but peer fixations continue and social habits stay the same. They join the workforce only to realize that self-esteem lessons of home and class, as well as the behaviors that made them popular, no longer apply, and it takes them years to adjust. They grab snatches of news and sometimes vote, but they regard the civic realm as another planet. And wherever they end up, whomever they marry, however high they land in their careers, most of them never acquire the intellectual tools they should have as teenagers and young adults. Perhaps during their twenties they adapt, acquiring smarter work and finance habits. But the knowledge and culture traits never catch up. It’s too late to read Dante and Milton. There is too little time for the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Political ideas come from a news talk guest or a Sunday op-ed, not a steady diet of books old and new.
Millennials Rising.
We wish they were, but it isn’t so. The twenty-first-century teen, connected and multitasked, autonomous yet peer-mindful, marks no great leap forward in human intelligence, global thinking, or “netizen”-ship. Young users have learned a thousand new things, no doubt. They upload and download, surf and chat, post and design, but they haven’t learned to analyze a complex text, store facts in their heads, comprehend a foreign policy decision, take lessons from history, or spell correctly. Never having recognized their responsibility to the past, they have opened a fissure in our civic foundations, and it shows in their halting passage into adulthood and citizenship. They leave school, but peer fixations continue and social habits stay the same. They join the workforce only to realize that self-esteem lessons of home and class, as well as the behaviors that made them popular, no longer apply, and it takes them years to adjust. They grab snatches of news and sometimes vote, but they regard the civic realm as another planet. And wherever they end up, whomever they marry, however high they land in their careers, most of them never acquire the intellectual tools they should have as teenagers and young adults. Perhaps during their twenties they adapt, acquiring smarter work and finance habits. But the knowledge and culture traits never catch up. It’s too late to read Dante and Milton. There is too little time for the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Political ideas come from a news talk guest or a Sunday op-ed, not a steady diet of books old and new.
A few years of seasoning in the American workplace may secure their income and inculcate maturity in private life, but it won’t sustain the best civic and cultural traditions in American history. If young people don’t read, they shut themselves out of public affairs. Without a knowledge formation in younger years, adults function as more or less partial citizens. Reading and knowledge have to enter their leisure lives, at their own initiative. Anayzing Pew Research data from 2002 and 2004, political scientists Stephen and Linda Bennett lay out the simple fact: “People who read books for pleasure are more likely than non-readers to report voting, being registered to vote, ‘always’ voting, to pay greater attention to news stories about national, international, and local politics, and to be better informed.”
As the rising generation reaches middle age, it won’t re-create the citizenship of its precursors, nor will its ranks produce a set of committed intellectuals ready to trade in ideas, steer public policy, and espouse social values on the basis of learning, eloquence, and a historical sense of human endeavor. This is one damaging consequence of the betrayal of the mentors that is often overlooked. When people warn of America’s future, they usually talk about competitiveness in science, technology, and productivity, not in ideas and values. But the current domestic and geopolitical situation demands that we generate not only more engineers, biochemists, nanophysicists, and entrepreneurs, but also men and women experienced in the ways of culture, prepared for contest in the marketplace of ideas. Knowledge-workers, wordsmiths, policy wonks . . . they don’t emerge from nowhere. They need a long foreground of reading and writing, a home and school environment open to their development, a pipeline ahead and behind them. They need mentors to commend them when they’re right and rebuke them when they’re wrong. They need parents to remind them that social life isn’t everything, and they need peers to respect their intelligence, not scrunch up their eyes at big words. It takes a home, and a schoolhouse, and a village, and a market to make a great public intellectual and policy maker. The formula is flexible, but with the Dumbest Generation its breakdown is under way, and with it the vitality of democracy in the United States.
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