That's the conclusion of a well-reasoned warning piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
In it, author Mark Bauerlein argues that the proliferation of electronic media-- television, email, cel phones, blogs-- is increasingly distracting American students from their studies, and contributing to the woeful condition of their knowledge about the larger world.
We can be certain that they have mastered the fare that fills their five hours per day with screens — TV, DVD, video games, computers for fun — leaving young adults with extraordinarily precise knowledge of popular music, celebrities, sports, and fashion. But when it comes to the traditional subjects of liberal education, the young mind goes nearly blank. In the last few years, an accumulation of survey research on civics, history, literature, the fine arts, geography, and politics reveals one dismal finding after another. The surveys vary in sample size and question design, and they tend to focus on basic facts, but they consistently draw the same general inference: Young people are cut off from the worlds beyond their social circuit. While the wealth and education of young Americans has increased, their knowledge levels have either dropped or remained flat. . .
At first glance, there's little to quibble with in Bauerlein's piece. After all, a student's attention span is definitely a zero-sum game. Fill that span with candy, and you exclude essential mental "nutrition," ultimately and inevitably leading to a rotted brain.
That said, Bauerlein's thesis strikes me as somewhat isolationist, insofar as he does not consider the scholarly performances of students overseas. While specifics vary from country to country, you can't tell me that students in Japan aren't just as distracted by their cel phones, or that French students don't also email their friends. Yet by most objective standards of measurement, students in developed nations perform better than American students. Why is that, if not for some explanation that extends beyond technological distractions?
Of course, Bauerlein is talking specifically about American *college* students, but I'm sure their bad habits didn't begin the day they first stepped foot on a university campus. From my limited yet vivid experience of the modern American college student, I can vouch for one thing: it's not their lack of knowledge that's dispiriting (although that very much is) so much as their startling lack of curiosity and humility.
Many students-- many Americans-- lack intellectual curiosity. We always have. At most, Americans have a casual interest in trivia ("Hey, look what's on the Discovery Channel tonight!"), but few seek out in-depth knowledge of subjects, let alone expert mastery. As both the number of distractions and the wealth of accumalated knowledge has proliferated (school these days must cover plenty more than the three R's), it's become more difficult for people to acquire and retain knowledge without significant effort.
And, gee, significant effort is *hard*, duh!
I believe that the larger cause for this lack of curiosity, however, is the decline of respect for knowledge, and ultimately, a lack of humility before authority. Americans have always had a welcome skepticism of authority, but only recently has it been accepted that *all* authority must be questioned. What's worse, everyone is entitled to question authority, even if they do not have the faculties available in order to skillfully question it. Pompous know-it-all experts are terrible, insufferable beings matched only by the pompous know-it-all amateurs who know nothing yet are told they know everything.
Self-esteem gurus constantly tell our children that they're unique, and special, and they've earned the right to stand up as equals to their elders. Unfortunately, our educational system-- not to mention America's increasingly brittle social fabric, from the family to the village square-- no longer provides these students with either the tools to acquire, or even the desire to acquire the tools necessary to back up this otherwise healthy skepticism with facts, let alone achieve higher-order reasoning.
This deficiency in higher-order reasoning affects all areas of knowledge, but in my experience it's by far the worst in the "soft" subjects like history, literature and the humanities. Unlike math and science, whose technical aspects largely resist casual opinionating, these soft subjects permit it. In fact, soft subject professors at all levels encourage opinionating in attempts to "generate dialogues" and "elicit interpretation." The problem, of course, is that without a solid mastery of the facts, a student's opinion of, say, the causes of the American Civil War (or the War on Terror) is worthless.
Americans routinely accept the need for expertise in technical areas-- you don't want an amateur operating on your heart or designing your skyscraper, for instance-- yet we constantly deny the need for *any* expertise in soft subjects. In fact, we often celebrate our ignorance, decrying any drive towards a grasp of even the most rudimentary facts. Who needs to learn names, dates, places? Who needs to memorize poetry? That's boring. Besides, all that info is online anyway. Who needs a factual education when there's Wikipedia?
Unfortunately, just as you wouldn't trust a doctor that hadn't learned Biology 101, or an architect that never learned basic math, these fundamental building blocks in our soft subjects are absolutely essential in order to perform the higher-order reasoning our "opinions" of modern life require. To give but one example, tell me again why I, or anyone else, should afford great weight to the opinion on the War in Iraq of someone who can't find Iraq on a map, let alone explain the difference between a Kurd and a Sunni?
Humility is important for one other reason, however: it affords us the opportunity to know when we *don't* know what we are talking about. Often, it's less important to know the answer than to know when you don't know the answer, yet few educators-- and fewer parents-- bother to instill this basic lesson in children. And if you don't learn it as a child, you won't learn it as an adult. And as many people will acknowledge, there are few things in life worse than dealing with the uneducated, incurious, arrogant know-it-all who's ignorant of his or her limitations.
It's a complex world. Blowing off the basic facts of today's world won't make it any easier to understand. That's the first lesson of the day, folks.
H/T to Stanley Kurtz in The Corner for highlighting that Chronicle article.
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