Living in the Counterintuitive World
If you grew up in the 60's, 70's, or even the 80's, everything you know about school runs counterintuitive to the reality of secondary education today. While for the most part teenagers don't change, even over millennia, the social millieu in which any generation lives determines much of what goes on in schools.
That, according to Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory Univserity, is exactly what is wrong with students today. The social millieu in which they live has been taken over by constant text messaging and social networking to the exclusion of deep meaning in other areas of students' lives.
Bauerlein contends that even though Advanced Placement course enrollment is up and college enrollment is rising, actual student knowledge is stagnant at best, but most probably in decline. Anyone who has tried to take that graduation test from the turn of the century that floated around the Internet might suspect this is true. One might also believe him, based on his experience as a professor who has seen classes of the best and brightest come and go, and so has a yardstick by which to measure.
Bauerlein is not the first professor to question what has happened to American education. In 1963 Richard Hofstadter penned a book called Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. In 1987 Alan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind. He was followed by E.D. Hirsch who claimed that we were losing our cultural literacy and so wrote several books on what every school child should know. This year Professor Bauerlein published the most scathing expose of our youth yet, entitled The Dumbest Generation. Evidently Americans can get even dumber than they were in 1963.
I can also cite one of my favorite professors at OU, J. Fears, who obtained a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to bring American history teachers up to par. Evidently freshmen in the required American history courses knew little about our country, even though they have civics in middle school and American history and government (and possibly AP Government) in high school. Dr. Fears surmised it was the teachers who were not prepared. What he discovered after several years of teaching the NEH History of Liberty Summer Institute course was that the teachers knew their history, loved it and taught it with passion to the best of their ability. Somewhere, somehow, though, the transfer of knowledge did not make it from teacher to student.
We all know that every generation thinks the succeeding generation is not quite up to snuff. I suspect that what is at play here is that yes, for whatever reason - rap music, the self-esteem movement, desegregation, free love, or helicopter parents - students are not as well educated as in the past. But another factor is that in all our affluence and technology, we expect better kids and can't understand why they aren't smarter given all the money spent on education, feel good programs, and, of course, technology. It could be the answer has more to do with human nature than with our belabored schools and shallow teenagers.
That, according to Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory Univserity, is exactly what is wrong with students today. The social millieu in which they live has been taken over by constant text messaging and social networking to the exclusion of deep meaning in other areas of students' lives.
Bauerlein contends that even though Advanced Placement course enrollment is up and college enrollment is rising, actual student knowledge is stagnant at best, but most probably in decline. Anyone who has tried to take that graduation test from the turn of the century that floated around the Internet might suspect this is true. One might also believe him, based on his experience as a professor who has seen classes of the best and brightest come and go, and so has a yardstick by which to measure.
Bauerlein is not the first professor to question what has happened to American education. In 1963 Richard Hofstadter penned a book called Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. In 1987 Alan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind. He was followed by E.D. Hirsch who claimed that we were losing our cultural literacy and so wrote several books on what every school child should know. This year Professor Bauerlein published the most scathing expose of our youth yet, entitled The Dumbest Generation. Evidently Americans can get even dumber than they were in 1963.
I can also cite one of my favorite professors at OU, J. Fears, who obtained a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to bring American history teachers up to par. Evidently freshmen in the required American history courses knew little about our country, even though they have civics in middle school and American history and government (and possibly AP Government) in high school. Dr. Fears surmised it was the teachers who were not prepared. What he discovered after several years of teaching the NEH History of Liberty Summer Institute course was that the teachers knew their history, loved it and taught it with passion to the best of their ability. Somewhere, somehow, though, the transfer of knowledge did not make it from teacher to student.
We all know that every generation thinks the succeeding generation is not quite up to snuff. I suspect that what is at play here is that yes, for whatever reason - rap music, the self-esteem movement, desegregation, free love, or helicopter parents - students are not as well educated as in the past. But another factor is that in all our affluence and technology, we expect better kids and can't understand why they aren't smarter given all the money spent on education, feel good programs, and, of course, technology. It could be the answer has more to do with human nature than with our belabored schools and shallow teenagers.
Labels: Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation
posted by Melony Carey and Chrissie Wagner at
5:37 PM
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