Generation Smug

Prompted by a couple of viral articles about lack of reading comprehension among university students, I was going to write an article about the young people.

But then I read these pieces and now I’m going to write an article about the old people.

One of the articles was a substack post by a Gen X university professor in the US. The line that got people talking was this person’s description of their students as being ‘functionally illiterate’ because they can no longer read a full, literary fiction-style novel.

The other article was in the Atlantic and was actually published last year but found a new lease of life after the functionally illiterate one. Written by a private school educated journalist called Rose Horowitch, it sketched out a dumbscape of campus idiocy, as professor after professor testified to their students’ inability to read a full, high-literature book.

Social media seized on these articles as an opportunity to indulge in that most favoured pastime of posters: point-and-laugh snobbery.

Look how stupid people are!

As well as being full of smug, self-righteous moralising, these articles also, ironically, demonstrated a real intellectual incuriosity about the subject.

After recounting all the ways in which their students are stupid, the substacker promised to interrogate the causes in a section titled ‘What’s Changed?’ The list comprised the following:

• Chronic absenteeism.

• Disappearing students.

• They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes.

• They want me to do their work for them.

• Pretending to type notes on their laptops while they gamble on the internet.

• Indifference.

• ChatGPT.

• Phones. (On this the person offered no critique about the forces driving smartphone culture, only saying young people are so addicted it’s a surprise they ever leave their ‘goon caves’).

Lol. Haha. Goon caves. Good one. Point and laugh.

To tackle the not-sitting-still problem, they say they tell their students to pee before class ‘like a small child on a road trip.’ Imagine being taught by someone who has this level of obvious contempt for you? I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on what they had to say either.

The Atlantic came up with some similar ideas but also attributed the decline of book reading “to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to.”

The socio-psychological analysis of the scoundrel: people are just worse today than before.

So, in summation: they’re lazy, they’re restless, they lie, they cheat, they’re just shitter.

But….that’s not what’s changed, is it? That’s how behaviour (might have) changed in response to whatever has actually changed.

For some reason, these people don’t want to talk about the possible whys, which is interesting. Why don’t they - who spend so much time thinking and analysing - want to think about and analyse the underlying causes that may have changed the conditions?

It’s curious.

Perhaps because all they really want to achieve is feeling smug and self-righteous?

The end of the substack article certainly suggests it: “One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us. We can’t expect them all to burn with the sacred fire we have for our disciplines, to see philosophy, psychology, math, physics, sociology or economics as the divine light of reason in a world of shadow.”

They are not us. We were just better. For whatever reason, we just were. We can’t expect them to be so good. We had a sacred fire. We understood we were striving for the divine light of reason.

Honestly. Can this person even hear themselves over the sound of their pretentious waffling as it drips onto their keyboard?

Has the behaviour of students changed, empirically? We don’t know. Because, as Horowitch, admits, ‘there is no comprehensive data on this trend.’

I’m an older millennial, I have Gen Z friends and friends with school-age kids. I can appreciate how different and, in many ways, more difficult the world is for young people. We didn’t get internet (dial-up) in my home until I was 17. I didn’t get a smartphone until my early twenties. There were no ipads in schools. I never learnt from a screen. There was no online bullying, no whatsapp cliques, no toxic male influencers to poison the well. I had a PC and games consoles, but my vital educational years happened without the internet and without phones.

Yet in both articles there is very little effort to reckon with this and with how the world has shifted in the last twenty years. There is very little acknowledgement that changed conditions might be producing changed behaviours. Much of the commentary suggests there’s just something intrinsically shit and more stupid about young people today.

The substack article links to a few others written by academics noting the same young-people-are-shit-now trend. Similar viral threads have been written about declining maths ability among students. But, as before, whether this is a true empirical trend we don’t know, and the lack of evidence is not noted.

If we’re going with anecdotes alone, my own experience suggests that while smartphones are a new variable, not much else has changed. I went to university in the early-to-mid 2000s. We knew no iPhones. But I missed classes. I appeared indifferent, disconnected (I was pulled up on this regularly). I skim read texts at the last minute. I enjoyed some classes, hated others. Kids dropped out. One of my friends was able to fully plagiarise his way to a degree.

One thing we do know empirically is that people are sicker now because of covid. Sicker more frequently with short-term illnesses and long-term ones. Anyone who isn’t in denial can see this. No students before have had to deal with this. Of course it’s never mentioned as a factor in chronic absenteeism.

But, perhaps most critically, there is zero acknowledgment that underlying all of this change is the political economy of later stage, internet-enabled CAPITALISM.

Examining how behaviour (young and old alike) can only, logically, be an outgrowth of the underlying political economy that shapes all of society is an off-limits area of enquiry, it would seem.

Overall these smug olds really do seem to think they would be immune to overwhelming societal forces and their sacred fire would spark and their divine light burn bright if they were eighteen again today and operating under these conditions.

What are these conditions? Hyper competition in a world of apps that DELIBERATELY attempt to addict us to whatever they’re selling. Often what they are selling is our own appearance and the dopamine feedback we get from advertising ourselves. The kid that’s gambling while pretending to be writing notes? You think that’s his fault for not being of strong moral fibre? Or might CAPITALISM, might BIG TECH have something to do with it? The phone isn’t buzzing and alerting us to every notification FOR NO GOOD REASON. The more engagement, the more screen time, the more eyeballs, the more ads they can sell. Our attention is the profit centre. That’s the point!

A point that seems to elude most commentary about the shit youth.

I existed in the world I was given. A world shaped for me. All of us did.

Who created this world? Who helped create the conditions for the youthful behaviours adults predictably go on to condemn? The adults themselves. Generation after generation, this is one thing I’m confident hasn’t changed.

Students and young people today can only exist in the world they’re given. What do I see from them? I don’t see indifference. On the contrary, I see engagement. Offline engagement. Online engagement. From climate to Palestine, students are on the frontlines of trying to change a world they inherited from the olds. Maybe any indifference towards their tutors stems from the fact that young people recognise the shithole they’ve been left to scrabble a life in. Maybe they just don’t have time to be lectured to by the people who handed them a collapsing biosphere, neofascist politics and neoliberal economics.

While Gen X academics and private school educated Atlantic writers panic about the collapse of student standards, they ignore the much more insidious threat to higher education standards. A threat that doesn’t come from below, from the students, but from above.

Over the last twelve months we’ve seen university administrators in the US invite police on to campuses to tear gas and arrest their own students. We’ve seen university boards from Columbia to Harvard to John Hopkins to Yale expel students and teachers for critical thinking and for activism. We’re now seeing them revoke degrees. We’re seeing them collaborate with ICE to arrest students on campus for free speech. We’re seeing them work with the Trump administration to shut down departments and courses.

Academics bemoaning the decline of student standards should do some introspection and engage in some of the critical thinking they smugly castigate their students for lacking.

Moralising academics should examine their own complicitly in letting things get to this stage.

They should worry less about whether kids can be bothered to read the Iliad or War and Peace cover to cover and more about what they did, and are doing, to stop the forward march of fascism.