| 1 | | For anyone looking honestly at the American intellectual landscape today, it is |
| | impossible to escape the fear that something has gone badly wrong with |
| | ‘diffusion of knowledge throughout the community’ – even though, ironically, |
| | the internet offers the most powerful tool ever invented for the spread of |
| | education. And everything that has gone wrong has gone particularly wrong |
| | among the young. |
| 2 | | The standard political approach from both Democrats and Republicans has |
| | been to blame undeniable educational deficiencies on bad schools and bad |
| | teachers. The ‘No Child Left Behind Act’, a centrepiece of President George W. |
| | Bush’s domestic agenda, mandates standardised tests and evaluates teachers and |
| | schools based on the test scores. But the chief effect seems to have been to force |
| | teachers to devote disproportionate time to stuffing students with soon-to-beforgotten |
| | facts for the state-approved quizzes. The same teenagers falter when |
| | confronted with an international examination designed, as the Organisation for |
| | Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) test is, to assess their ability |
| | to apply scientific facts to real-life problems. |
| 3 | | Among Americans aged 18 to 24, four out of ten never read any books – |
| | fiction or non-fiction – unless required for work or school. As for news, the |
| | majority of people under 30 are not paying attention at all. According to a study |
| | conducted by the journal Television Quarterly, only one in 12 adults under 30 |
| | reads a daily newspaper. Television newscasts are watched by one in six. Those |
| | figures are no surprise, but the study also [id:71962] that the young have simply |
| | shifted their news-gathering to the web. In fact, only one out of eight Americans |
| | under 30 regularly reads news on the internet. Approximately half of men from |
| | 18 to 34, by contrast, spend nearly three hours a day playing video games. |
| 4 | | It is hardly surprising that in 2006, three years into Iraq war, nearly two |
| | thirds of adults aged between 18 and 24 were unable to find Iraq on a map |
| | marked with the names of countries – meaning that they did not have the |
| | slightest idea of where in the world to look. [id:71968] was another finding from the |
| | same poll, conducted by National Geographic-Roper. Nearly half of young |
| | Americans do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in |
| | which important news is being made. It is ignorant not to know where your |
| | country is fighting a war, but it is arrogant and anti-rational to insist that such |
| | ignorance does not matter. |
| 5 | | One of the more heated debates in the US today is whether ‘reading’ on the |
| | internet bears any resemblance to reading in the traditional sense. A horde of |
| | technophile writers and scholars (most of whom owe their living to the ‘new |
| | media’) predictably promotes the notion that worries about the decline of |
| | reading are confined to fuddy-duddy Luddites1). A recent article in the New York |
| | Times (coyly headlined, ‘Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?’) quoted |
| | Donna E. Alverman, a professor of language and literacy education at the |
| | University of Georgia, who said that young people ‘are using sound and images |
| | so that they have a world of ideas to put together that aren’t necessarily language |
| | oriented’. What codswallop! |
| 6 | | A more revealing comment in the same article came from a high-school |
| | student, Hunter Gaudet, who observed that he never read books unless forced to |
| | do so and said that ‘they go through a lot of details that aren’t really needed’. He |
| | added, ‘Online just gives you what you need, nothing more or less.’ |
| 7 | | American foundations and businesses are now spending huge amounts of |
| | money to develop more ‘educational’ video games, so that schools will not have |
| | to depend on pesky books with ‘details’ that aren’t really needed. The Federation |
| | of American Scientists, an organisation best known for advising the government |
| | on national security issues, issued a widely publicised report titled ‘Harnessing |
| | the Power of Video Games for Learning’. The document was released in |
| | conjunction with the Entertainment Software Corporation, a public relations |
| | group promoting video games that has cornered roughly 90 per cent of the $7 |
| | billion gaming market worldwide. |
| 8 | | Of course, the empire of infotainment knows no national boundaries, and |
| | neither do the knowledge deficits promoted by the decline of reading. There are |
| | several reasons why the dumbing down of American culture ought to worry |
| | people in parts of the world that are still behind the US on the ignorance curve. |
| | First and most obvious, there is the elephant-in-the-room factor. If the US turns |
| | to video games to address classroom problems created, in significant measure, |
| | by children’s addiction to video, only a nanosecond will pass before education |
| | establishment Pooh Bahs2), in the UK and elsewhere, start pushing schoolsponsored |
| | video games, in the absence of any evidence of their utility, as a way |
| | to improve student performance. |
| 9 | | A more subtle factor is the impossibility of conducting informed discourse, |
| | nationally or internationally, when most of the public has lost its ability to follow |
| | a narrative. In our culture of distraction, more and more people cannot |
| | remember what they knew only a year ago – much less what happened five years |
| | ago. |
| 10 | | This intellectual crisis – it is not too strong a word – clearly transcends |
| | politics. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a visionary 1837 speech at Harvard known as |
| | the ‘American Scholar’ oration, declared that ‘the mind of this country, taught to |
| | aim at low objects, eats upon itself’. This line resonates even more strongly |
| | today, when the low objects are purveyed along an infotainment highway that |
| | fragments memory and encourages confusion between information and the |
| | genuine framework of knowledge essential to turning isolated facts (and errors) |
| | into a reasoned civic dialogue. |
| | |
| | Susan Jacoby in The Spectator, 2008 |
noot 1 Luddites: people who oppose technical or technological change.
