So Much for the Information Age

Today's college students have tuned out the world, and it's partly our fault
by TED GUP
I teach a seminar called "Secrecy: Forbidden Knowledge." I recently asked my class of 16 freshmen and sophomores, many of whom had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes and had dazzling SAT scores, how many had heard the word "rendition."

Not one hand went up.

This is after four years of the word appearing on the front pages of the nation's newspapers, on network and cable news, and online. This is after years of highly publicized lawsuits, Congressional inquiries, and international controversy and condemnation. This is after the release of a Hollywood film of that title, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, and Reese Witherspoon.

I was dumbstruck. Finally one hand went up, and the student sheepishly asked if rendition had anything to do with a version of a movie or a play.

I nodded charitably, then attempted to define the word in its more public context. I described specific accounts of U.S. abductions of foreign citizens, of the likely treatment accorded such prisoners when placed in the hands of countries like Syria and Egypt, of the months and years of detention. I spoke of the lack of formal charges, of some prisoners' eventual release and how their subsequent lawsuits against the U.S. government were stymied in the name of national security and secrecy.

The students were visibly disturbed. They expressed astonishment, then revulsion. They asked how such practices could go on.

I told them to look around the room at one another's faces; they were seated next to the answer. I suggested that they were, in part, the reason that rendition, waterboarding, Guantánamo detention, warrantless searches and intercepts, and a host of other such practices have not been more roundly discredited. I admit it was harsh.

That instance was no aberration. In recent years I have administered a dumbed-down quiz on current events and history early in each semester to get a sense of what my students know and don't know. Initially I worried that its simplicity would insult them, but my fears were unfounded. The results have been, well, horrifying.
Nearly half of a recent class could not name a single country that bordered Israel. In an introductory journalism class, 11 of 18 students could not name what country Kabul was in, although we have been at war there for half a decade. Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries — China, Cuba, India, and Japan — not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses — half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn't pretty.

As a journalist, professor, and citizen, I find it profoundly discouraging to encounter such ignorance of critical issues. But it would be both unfair and inaccurate to hold those young people accountable for the moral and legal morass we now find ourselves in as a nation. They are earnest, readily educable, and, when informed, impassioned.

I make it clear to my students that it is not only their right but their duty to arrive at their own conclusions. They are free to defend rendition, waterboarding, or any other aspect of America's post-9/11 armamentarium. But I challenge their right to tune out the world, and I question any system or society that can produce such students and call them educated. I am concerned for the nation when a cohort of students so talented and bright is oblivious to all such matters. If they are failing us, it is because we have failed them.

Still, it is hard to reconcile the students' lack of knowledge with the notion that they are a part of the celebrated information age, creatures of the Internet who arguably have at their disposal more information than all the preceding generations combined. Despite their BlackBerrys, cellphones, and Wi-Fi, they are, in their own way, as isolated as the remote tribes of New Guinea. They disprove the notion that technology fosters engagement, that connectivity and community are synonymous. I despair to think that this is the generation brought up under the banner of "No Child Left Behind." What I see is the specter of an entire generation left behind and left out.
It is not easy to explain how we got into this sad state, or to separate symptoms from causes. Newspaper readership is in steep decline. My students simply do not read newspapers, online or otherwise, and many grew up in households that did not subscribe to a paper. Those who tune in to television "news" are subjected to a barrage of opinions from talking heads like CNN's demagogic Lou Dobbs and MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Fox's Bill O'Reilly and his dizzying "No Spin Zone." In today's journalistic world, opinion trumps fact (the former being cheaper to produce), and rank partisanship and virulent culture wars make the middle ground uninhabitable. Small wonder, then, that my students shrink from it.

Then, too, there is the explosion of citizen journalism. An army of average Joes, equipped with cellphones, laptops, and video cameras, has commandeered our news media. The mantra of "We want to hear from you!" is all the rage, from CNN to NPR; but, although invigorating and democratizing, it has failed to supplant the provision of essential facts, generating more heat than light. Many of my students can report on the latest travails of celebrities or the sexual follies of politicos, and can be forgiven for thinking that such matters dominate the news — they do. Even those students whose home pages open onto news sites have tailored them to parochial interests — sports, entertainment, weather — that are a pale substitute for the scope and sweep of a good front page or the PBS NewsHour With Jim Lehrer (which many students seem ready to pickle in formaldehyde).

Civics is decidedly out of fashion in the high-school classroom, a quaint throwback superseded by courses in technology. As teachers scramble to "teach to the test," civics is increasingly relegated to after-school clubs and geeky graduation prizes. Somehow my students sailed through high-school courses in government and social studies without acquiring the habit of keeping abreast of national and international events. What little they know of such matters they have absorbed through popular culture — song lyrics, parody, and comedy. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart is as close as many dare get to actual news.

Yes, the post-9/11 world is a scary place, and plenty of diversions can absorb young people's attention and energies, as well as distract them from the anxieties of preparing for a career in an increasingly uncertain economy. But that respite comes at a cost.

As a journalist, I have spent my career promoting transparency and accountability. But my experiences in the classroom humble and chasten me. They remind me that challenges to secrecy and opacity are moot if society does not avail itself of information that is readily accessible. Indeed, our very failure to digest the accessible helps to create an environment in which secrecy can run rampant.

It is time to once again make current events an essential part of the curriculum. Families and schools must instill in students the habit of following what is happening in the world. A global economy will have little use for a country whose people are so self-absorbed that they know nothing of their own nation's present or past, much less the world's. There is a fundamental difference between shouldering the rights and responsibilities that come with citizenship — engagement, participation, debate — and merely inhabiting the land.

As a nation, we spend an inordinate amount of time fretting about illegal immigration and painfully little on what it means to be a citizen, beyond the legal status conferred by accident of birth or public processing. We are too busy building a wall around us to notice that we are shutting ourselves in. Intent on exporting democracy — spending blood and billions in pursuit of it abroad — we have shown a decided lack of interest in exercising or promoting democracy at home.

The noted American scholar Robert M. Hutchins said, decades ago: "The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens." He warned that "the death of a democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." I fear he was right.

I tell the students in my secrecy class that they are required to attend. After all, we count on one another; without student participation, it just doesn't work. The same might be said of democracy. Attendance is mandatory.

Ted Gup is a professor of journalism at Case Western Reserve University and author of Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life (Doubleday, 2007).

Come On, People

NBC Meet the Press Netcast

...and pull your pants up.

Childhood in America has changed a lot since I was a kid. When I was growing up, childhood was viewed as training for adulthood; children were adults-in-waiting. Today’s kids are helpless retards who need to be completely shielded from the reality of dirty words, mind-altering substances (unless it’s Ritalin) and human sexuality, while being simultaneously showered with material excess and the ridiculous notion that they are somehow special. When I was a kid, I was thrilled to receive a $12 pair of Converse All-Stars; today, kids are shooting each other over $170 Air Jordans. I often joke that I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I think this is a result of my upbringing, which instilled in me a sense of curiosity, anticipation and delayed gratification that seems to be absent from today’s youth, many of whom seem much older and jaded than I am even as they struggle to perpetuate their childhood. I’m not trying to use myself as the archetype of the Successful American Adult—far from it—it’s just that I marvel at how we can view school shootings and melting glaciers and corporate corruption as anything but the inevitable result of our approach to child rearing.

Maybe it’s because my siblings were all older than I was, but as a kid, I always wanted to be older. The older kids always got to do stuff that I couldn’t do, and the achievement of each level of freedom brought eager anticipation for the next. But that anticipation was accompanied by the knowledge that additional responsibilities would be the cost of enjoying the new freedom. The hypothesis (which worked most of the time) was that this system of gradually increasing freedoms and responsibilities would prepare the child for adulthood. There were lawns to be mowed, paper routes to take over from older kids, part-time jobs, and a whole menu of chores and duties the completion of which signaled your readiness for the next level of freedom.

We seem to have replaced that adult-in-training process with one that shields children from nearly every daily reality until they are in their mid-twenties, at which point they are supposed to magically become adults. Many of these overgrown children then decide to have kids of their own as if to clarify for the public that they are now adults—children having children. So they suddenly find themselves at thirty longing for childhood because adulthood came in one huge chunk instead of bit by bit. The divorce and alcoholism and workaholism and materialism and workplace violence and greedy, self-absorbed nihilism that is the unavoidable result of this process inadvertently scars the kids, even as the parents endeavor in futility to shelter them from reality. So, instead of gradually increasing levels of freedom and responsibility, parents offer their kids wild fluctuations between fantasy and reality. And their children—exposed only to reality’s bad parts—eagerly await the freedom of adulthood, which they view as perpetual childhood. And the cycle continues.

The news is full of divorce. The only reason the divorce rate is down slightly from its 1980 peak is that many young couples are choosing cohabitation over marriage, and breakups of these relationships are not factored into the divorce rate. But the fact remains that our culture views romantic entanglements as temporary conveniences rather than lifelong commitments, and spouses blame each other for the fact that adulthood always turns out to be too full of reality. My hometown paper, the Star Tribune, recently ran a three-part series on divorce. Part two chronicles this woman’s reason for leaving her husband of 23 years. “I loved my husband, but I was not in love with him,” she explains. This is something a teenage girl says to her boyfriend when she wants to date someone else, not something we should expect from a grown woman with two grown children.

Marriage is full of shitty diapers and shitty jobs and shitty school boards and crooked mortgage companies and buying the minivan when you really want a Porsche and endless sacrifices and compromises and emergencies. And at the end, all you get is a sore back, arthritic fingers and death. But it can also be a beautiful enterprise in which both partners share triumph and defeat together, because no matter what happens, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, they have each other. This used to be the American Dream, and the American Dream used to be good enough for most Americans. But that American Dream has been replaced with a phony and unattainable cornucopia of fake tits and relentless luxury where women are madly, deeply in love with handsome, opinionless men who never raise their voices or smell bad. Here’s a secret: Fake tits only look good on TeeVee; up close they’re kind of gross, and that man you’re with is going to have hair growing out of his ears in about twenty years.

America’s collective refusal to accept reality at almost every level has resulted in a corrupt, ruined planet; and as reality gets worse and worse, we concoct more and more elaborate methods for denying it, the most tragic of which is an endless cycle of abuse whereby each generation is less prepared for adulthood than the last. Children are not stupid; they’re simply inexperienced. They can handle all of the realities of life and death as long as those realities are presented to them in a logical and gradual manner.

No, You Can't Have a Playstation. Do Your Homework.

I grew up watching "Sesame Street," "The Electric Company," "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" and "Zoom", so I'm no stranger to the "you are special" refrain that echoed through those programs. But as I grew older, I began to question the wisdom of that educational approach. After all, you're only special if you do something special. Until then, you are just a food tube.

I can't quite fathom the purpose of indoctrinating each and every child into believing that they are one-of-a-kind little snowflakes. I guess the educational establishment figured it would improve childrens' self esteem. But what I think would really improve their self esteem would be to convince them that they can learn the difference between plurals and possessives. Or that history isn't boring. Or that I know algebra is difficult but if you try just a little harder you'll get it.

Instead, what we have taught them is that they are special no matter how distracted or lazy or willfully ignorant they are. As a result, we have become a nation of greedy, self absorbed, check-mailing nincompoops. And instead of toning down the 'you are special' rhetoric, we have accelerated it. I mean, changing the words of the pre-school song, Frere Jacques to "I am special, I am special. Look at me?"

WHAT THE FUCK WERE WE/THEY THINKING???

Anyway, once again an academic study has emerged validating my sentiments. From the Associated Press:

Study: College students more narcissistic
By DAVID CRARY, AP National WriterTue Feb 27, 12:32 AM ET
Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.
"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."
Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.
The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I can live my life any way I want to."
The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.
Narcissism can have benefits, said study co-author W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, suggesting it could be useful in meeting new people "or auditioning on 'American Idol.'"
"Unfortunately, narcissism can also have very negative consequences for society, including the breakdown of close relationships with others," he said.
The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."
Twenge, the author of "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before," said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others.
The researchers traced the phenomenon back to what they called the "self-esteem movement" that emerged in the 1980s, asserting that the effort to build self-confidence had gone too far.
As an example, Twenge cited a song commonly sung to the tune of "Frere Jacques" in preschool: "I am special, I am special. Look at me."
"Current technology fuels the increase in narcissism," Twenge said. "By its very name, MySpace encourages attention-seeking, as does YouTube."
Some analysts have commended today's young people for increased commitment to volunteer work. But Twenge viewed even this phenomenon skeptically, noting that many high schools require community service and many youths feel pressure to list such endeavors on college applications.
Campbell said the narcissism upsurge seemed so pronounced that he was unsure if there were obvious remedies.
"Permissiveness seems to be a component," he said. "A potential antidote would be more authoritative parenting. Less indulgence might be called for."
The new report follows a study released by UCLA last month which found that nearly three-quarters of the freshmen it surveyed thought it was important to be "very well-off financially." That compared with 62.5 percent who said the same in 1980 and 42 percent in 1966.
Yet students, while acknowledging some legitimacy to such findings, don't necessarily accept negative generalizations about their generation.
Hanady Kader, a University of Washington senior, said she worked unpaid last summer helping resettle refugees and considers many of her peers to be civic-minded. But she is dismayed by the competitiveness of some students who seem prematurely focused on career status.
"We're encouraged a lot to be individuals and go out there and do what you want, and nobody should stand in your way," Kader said. "I can see goals and ambitions getting in the way of other things like relationships."
Kari Dalane, a University of Vermont sophomore, says most of her contemporaries are politically active and not overly self-centered.
"People are worried about themselves — but in the sense of where are they're going to find a place in the world," she said. "People want to look their best, have a good time, but it doesn't mean they're not concerned about the rest of the world."
Besides, some of the responses on the narcissism test might not be worrisome, Dalane said. "It would be more depressing if people answered, 'No, I'm not special.'"