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.
My birthday was yesterday, it was my 72nd. I taught mathematics.
Nate correctly points out a crucial difference between age cohorts: the environment of our respective youths have differing mores. When I was a child in the 50's the US was undergoing a tremendous economic boom that was fueled by the GI Bill. Thousands upon thousands of new engineers entered the workforce. Equal multitudes entered teaching and graduate departments were overflowing with masters and doctoral students. None of these people could have dreamed of entering college before. For a brief shinning time, public university education was free in most states. When I graduated high school only a few states still offered free public university education. The education -- debt cycle was starting to ramp up. But still Joe Biden had not entered the Senate yet and student loans could be discharged. Public university tuition was an order of magnitude lower. It is a shame many of my cohorts selectively forget this. I have a few friends who paid for tuition and room and board by working a summer union job stocking groceries. They actually wonder why these kids don't do the same.
I have an answer for them. It's a fuck ton more expensive. And there are no longer summer union jobs. When I entered university in my late 30's tuition had already undergone massive increases. In fact, the president of my land grant institution boasted of initiating 5 straight years of tuition increases. Lucky me, I got to endure 3 of those. The crippling fees I managed to barely pay for are a mere shadow of what today's students face! I managed by working a full time job at the university tutoring mathematics. I too suffered the class contempt delivered by the educated elite. I was interviewing for a doctoral student placement at a prestigious physics department. One interviewer asked why I did not cite any independent research on my application. Uh, dude(!), what does working full-time while going to classes mean to you?
Why those on the GI bill and those who were afforded tuition free public education did not storm the ramparts to ensure those circumstances were codified as rights will not answer. They lie in graves.
We're both 67. Our kids were educated in the 80s and early 90s in Wisconsin and Missouri. I guess that was far enough back (pre-most tech) that they were spared what is described here. There weren't computers in the schools until they were in late middle school. Cell phones barely existed. We had computers as early adopters, which we've never regretted. We are voracious readers and they picked that up from us. Both ended up with advanced degrees. One is the first Ph.D. in the family. They may have been among the last generation that didn't have screen addiction, for which we're very grateful.
They have carried that along to their children. When our grandchildren have children, will they be able to maintain our family traditions? I honestly don't know, and that really worries me.
Going back to the early 90's when I was enrolled in a PhD program, me and my fellow teaching assistants had a descriptive hypothesis for our present students difficulties, it was the C-word. That C standing for calculator and its introduction into pre-college education. Now what is interesting about this is that I was about 15 years older than my compatriots and they introduced the term to me! All of us though noticed the difficulty our students had with symbol manipulation.
Now what can really exacerbate difficulty with mathematical concepts is poor reading skills. Reading is truly fundamental!
I strongly believe that to drill in concepts that are essential facts: you must read them, voice them and write them on paper. I always strongly recommended a pencil and eraser in lieu of pens.
Our school boards have been bribed to procure tablets and even more expensive computing devices in place of the good old basic reading, writing and arithmetic. It is striking that Silicon Valley big shots send their kids to academies that eschew screen devices.
But as Nate Bear so eloquently points out, there is a moral dimension to this dilemma. Screen devices do not need to be addictive. There needs to be strong regulation for any screen device marketed as fit for children. Too, fuck capitalism! Parents deserve the time necessary to raise their children and vice versa, the kids need their parents. The work week needs to be halved.
Here's another Atlantic article about the awful young people. They truly sound like a pack of self-indulgent lightweights. Freeloading on their parents, living in basements, doing bullshit low-status 'jobs', not taking life or themselves seriously.
It's from 1975, apparently those Boomer kids aint' cuttin it.
This is AMAZING my mind it blown. If you had not told me it was from 1975 I would have assumed one of my middle aged American peers wrote it.
I am struck by the “parents gathering for recreation” who aren’t happy with any of their kids choices, not the married law student, or the married mom of 2, or the part time worker doing art, or the one who is traveling and working . . . they actually referred to their kids as possessions in there somewhere.
This helps me understand why boomers worship small businesses owners like they do. They wanted to have a homemade candle business but their parents crapped on them for it, so now they want to support those ventures (to show their parents they were wrong I guess?). Seems the only successful life they envisioned for these kids was CEO or Military.
Anyway, this written in 50 years ago?:
“It was your very superiority, said the critics and commentators, your very refusal to tolerate the cruelty and inhumanity of the acquisitive life which had brought you to turn your backs on it. What the pundits did not tell you was that their passionate advocacy of your attitudes was the material with which they themselves were attempting to forge a powerful and well-paid position in the world. Your hanging back from the contest, in other words, had become the stuff of their own determined effort to win it. No wonder they beatified you; and no wonder your anxiety persisted.”
So true. I'm Gen X and I remember high school teachers constantly going on and on about how stupid we were and how we were never going to get jobs/have a life because we were lazy and couldn't sit still. I also remember my college Poli Sci professor completely losing it because we weren't working hard enough. Everything old is new again.
No one addressed the monetization of the elementary public school system in the USA. FL had FCAT that rewarded high performing schools for the high stakes test. Critical thinking was replaced by strategies for answering multiple choices questions. Skills pushed onto small children in K. No more play based learning. The joy of learning stripped away at the age of 6. I worked as an instructional assistant. I watched the degredation of education.
How does someone even know that someone else is gambling on their phone whilst pretending to write notes?
Maybe, just maybe, these oh so clever lecturers aren't actually that good at getting the subjects they profess to love across to people who don't know as much as they do yet?
Well said. My daughter used to tell me that student’s eyes glazed over as every class started - especially “all the boys” - since middle school on. Part of this is normal, but we need to understand also that these children and young adults were and are learning very, very well. They are learning what we are teaching them. Ike Eisenhower noted “we will crucify humanity upon a cross of iron” over 60 years ago. You can look it up.
We are teaching our children that rape, pillage, and plunder are the core values of our civilization. We are teaching our children to move fast and break things. We are teaching our children to conform and remain complicit to ecocidal and genocidal crimes against planet and people.
The young people I talk with are quite often very clear about what they have learned from the older generations. They have learned to deeply discount the future and to deeply reject the propaganda of a civilization that has no generativity, no future. There is no way forward for the corrupt, demonic institutions of a civilization that has turned its back on the obvious brutal necropolitics of our day.
There may be a way forward for some humans. There are individuals who strive to be loving, honest, and true. But the way forward is treacherous, and few will survive.
Jim Dator, who taught for decades as a futurologist at the U of Hawaii, used to say that we need to prepare to surf the tsunamis of change that are coming. Those who study the ecological crisis understand clearly that we are well into a very rapid anthropogenic extinction event. Young people I talk to turn to their digital devices as a kind of digital crack cocaine that they can use to number the pain of “no future”. Mostly they feel betrayed. They while away the hours as they wait for the brutes who dominate human civilization to act their predictable roles in the self-terminating drama of a civilization that has long since betrayed the future.
I know very few young people who will have children. They see the end of this civilization as it self-immolates, sacrificing the future while thrashing about with god-like technologies we have neither the spiritual maturity nor the wisdom to wield.
I do not predict a complete extinction event, but I am honest with young people - especially those who are young parents. We may strengthen some of the institutions that yet make a way for life, but we must prepare as these institutions self-terminate. We can form small arks of believed community in which to ride out the tsunamis that come, but our species is not in control of the planet as it changes. We are not even at all in control of our own civilization.
In the last thirty years we have used more materials and energy than in all of previous human history, and we have also dumped more toxins into the world than in all of previous history. The next thirty years are going to require even more devastation - we are depleting and toxifying the planet even more, and we are using more and more of “our resources” to engage in resource wars.
Young people I know can simply look around and see the world around them, and know what they are up against. Many choose to hide in the propaganda of political and religious and ideological movements. Many just give up. A few are trying even so to make a way for life, as long as they can.
I engage and support young people who are waking up to the obvious reality that our media and politics, churches and academic institutions mostly obscure. Every Monet of life is precious.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever… The old civilizations claimed that they were founded upon love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred.” — George Orwell, 1984
“We live in a strange time where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The catastrophe is not coming - it is already here, embedded in the normal function8ng of our economic system…” Slavoj Zizek, Living In the End Times
“The more doom-filled reports the scientists release, the stronger the pushback from politicians whose power, ideology, and funding depends on maintaining the status quo, and who are supported by those who fear the solutions to climate change more than they fear its impacts.” Katharine Hayhoe - Saving Us
“Who created this world?” EXACTLY. I am Gen X & childfree and I don’t remember exactly when participation trophies became a thing, but I always thought it was very strange that my generation made fun of people for receiving them when those kids weren’t giving trophies to themselves. That would’ve been one of us. But I suppose that’s the same thing as women being ridiculed for “daddy issues” when we didn’t abandon ourselves, that was a dad.
I also think it’s funny we accuse young people of being unable to sit still, while we also accuse them of being addicted to screens. They wouldn’t be able to “game all day” if they couldn’t sit still, so which is it?
But the inability to read books anymore? I feel seen, and sad. Between ADHD, PEM from MECFS, and perimenopause, I struggle to read books now. (I could read when I started kindergarten at age 5 so it’s not a skill issue.) It’s not just a young person thing.
THANK YOU for saying it, you’re literally the first one i’ve seen mention Covid at all and i was getting so sick and tired of everyone pretending a years-long mass disabling pandemic event couldn’t possibly have anything do to with why shit’s hit the fan lately.
IMHO it’s covid brain damage/ brain fog on both fronts, yes affecting the students but also the teachers’ emotional regulation, which compounds their experience of just generally having a terrible time. Bad parenting has existed since the dawn of time so it makes no sense to blame the change on that alone.
Kids gambling online while in class? What could be driving that? How about the infestation of all sports by legalized gambling? Though gambling has been a known vice for thousands of years, it is now embraced by pro sports organizations and they have entire shows on sports channels dedicated solely to gambling. Anything to make a buck. We knew gambling was a tragic activity that ruins lives, but, we are the US! We don’t give a fuck.
I was born in 1966 and I know all these things were said about me without having cell phones. Walkmans weren’t even a thing until I was a teenager. But the bigger point is the problem of individualism and how it serves an important function under capitalism. If you blame individuals, like these students, then you don’t look at the society that played a much bigger role in creating the problem.
I believe that there is literally no such thing as free will. Every one of us acts as he or she does because of inherent and external forces, threshholds, events, interpretations, experience, triggers, knowledge, wisdom, beliefs, representations by authorities, etc., etc.
So I agree that blaming the younger generation for anything isn't ultimately productive. It is the fault of those authorities who orchestrate the content of the minds of the current generations (via media, academia, politics), including the dissembling ideologues who trained those authorities.
Also, a lens that ignores the rest of the world. I live in Canada, kids have phones, capitalism is burning the world down, conditions are similar. Covid is damaging brains.
And yet.
Our kids perform better on global testing. Teachers here aren't complaining of the same disenchanted and disengagment. We are so similar, but:
Our kids don't have to worry about dying in the school. We don't have the same level of standardized testing. (Only tests in grades 6, 9 and 12 in my province.) We don't have a curriculum seemingly designed to eliminate exploratory learning for memorization. School funding is not based on community tax rates, but on city/region wide tax pools. These are not huge differences but have huge outcome disparities.
I was born in '61 a tail end baby boomer. I grew up in an academic arts and humanities household filled the greatest writers from my parent's generation and the previous one. I got lost in books, reading for seven or eight hours at a time as a teen. They informed me in a way my formal education never did. Without that library and parents that instilled a love of reading in me, I would not be the person I am now.
When I entered college, my father who had risen to dean of arts and humanities in school number six or so, forced to from personal integrity and tiring of the best and brightest faculty getting screwed by the tenure system, he still managed to fit in teaching one fine arts class a semester. This was all he wanted to do, create art and teach. He believed deeply in education as the way to lift society as a whole and empower individuals. However, even at that time, education was in deep trouble. My 101 English class was an insult to what I had read and learned by 6th grade, and my father, handed out questionnaires at the end of each semester for students to critique, which he shared with me. The illiteracy and inability to express cogent thoughts was often stunning. It's not just young people now, or in your generation or mine. Ignorance has been a persistent problem for differing reasons over all of human history. Capture by smartphones and tech bros is just the latest iteration of deliberately created ignorance that is now set to extinguish us all.
My intial, kneejerk opinion on why this shite is happening:
What might be termed "old ways" no longer have any respected authority to defend them. Everywhere you look, modern "authorities" -- political, academic, and social -- have given today's youth the green light to hold such ways in contempt, to believe that the young are more advanced than people of "old times" (whether we're talking ancient or old or just a couple or few decades ago). It's easy to convince a young person that he knows more than he does, by the very nature of the fact that he doesn't. At least not yet. But in most cases, the modern world is gonna make sure he doesn't.
Not only have the old guardians of civilized human values been trashed by modern sans-tellectuals in the media and universities and TV and movies and music, but the young have at the same time been shown how to get around having to submit to such "old school" knowledge and character building: via empty, shite, alternative courses that do nothing for them, AI counterfeiting of independent thought, technologies that let them play in class rather than listen, relaxed academic penalties for the too-cool dudes (duds) who can't be bothered to listen or participate in class, by professor-cancellation policies available to any student who thinks he should be offended by something, and on and f*cking on.
It's not accident. It's takeover. Breed the younger generations to detach themselves from solid, foundational values, skills, knowledge, and wisdom in favor of shiny techie gadets and AI, and (2) trash all the old ways without any legitimate hearing, including those people most responsible for perpetrating those old ways, those being old or dead "white men."
“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.”
Jesus fucking Christ. Michael Gove certainly got one thing right about experts.
My birthday was yesterday, it was my 72nd. I taught mathematics.
Nate correctly points out a crucial difference between age cohorts: the environment of our respective youths have differing mores. When I was a child in the 50's the US was undergoing a tremendous economic boom that was fueled by the GI Bill. Thousands upon thousands of new engineers entered the workforce. Equal multitudes entered teaching and graduate departments were overflowing with masters and doctoral students. None of these people could have dreamed of entering college before. For a brief shinning time, public university education was free in most states. When I graduated high school only a few states still offered free public university education. The education -- debt cycle was starting to ramp up. But still Joe Biden had not entered the Senate yet and student loans could be discharged. Public university tuition was an order of magnitude lower. It is a shame many of my cohorts selectively forget this. I have a few friends who paid for tuition and room and board by working a summer union job stocking groceries. They actually wonder why these kids don't do the same.
I have an answer for them. It's a fuck ton more expensive. And there are no longer summer union jobs. When I entered university in my late 30's tuition had already undergone massive increases. In fact, the president of my land grant institution boasted of initiating 5 straight years of tuition increases. Lucky me, I got to endure 3 of those. The crippling fees I managed to barely pay for are a mere shadow of what today's students face! I managed by working a full time job at the university tutoring mathematics. I too suffered the class contempt delivered by the educated elite. I was interviewing for a doctoral student placement at a prestigious physics department. One interviewer asked why I did not cite any independent research on my application. Uh, dude(!), what does working full-time while going to classes mean to you?
Why those on the GI bill and those who were afforded tuition free public education did not storm the ramparts to ensure those circumstances were codified as rights will not answer. They lie in graves.
Well said.
We're both 67. Our kids were educated in the 80s and early 90s in Wisconsin and Missouri. I guess that was far enough back (pre-most tech) that they were spared what is described here. There weren't computers in the schools until they were in late middle school. Cell phones barely existed. We had computers as early adopters, which we've never regretted. We are voracious readers and they picked that up from us. Both ended up with advanced degrees. One is the first Ph.D. in the family. They may have been among the last generation that didn't have screen addiction, for which we're very grateful.
They have carried that along to their children. When our grandchildren have children, will they be able to maintain our family traditions? I honestly don't know, and that really worries me.
Greg, thanks for your reply!
Going back to the early 90's when I was enrolled in a PhD program, me and my fellow teaching assistants had a descriptive hypothesis for our present students difficulties, it was the C-word. That C standing for calculator and its introduction into pre-college education. Now what is interesting about this is that I was about 15 years older than my compatriots and they introduced the term to me! All of us though noticed the difficulty our students had with symbol manipulation.
Now what can really exacerbate difficulty with mathematical concepts is poor reading skills. Reading is truly fundamental!
I strongly believe that to drill in concepts that are essential facts: you must read them, voice them and write them on paper. I always strongly recommended a pencil and eraser in lieu of pens.
Our school boards have been bribed to procure tablets and even more expensive computing devices in place of the good old basic reading, writing and arithmetic. It is striking that Silicon Valley big shots send their kids to academies that eschew screen devices.
But as Nate Bear so eloquently points out, there is a moral dimension to this dilemma. Screen devices do not need to be addictive. There needs to be strong regulation for any screen device marketed as fit for children. Too, fuck capitalism! Parents deserve the time necessary to raise their children and vice versa, the kids need their parents. The work week needs to be halved.
Here's another Atlantic article about the awful young people. They truly sound like a pack of self-indulgent lightweights. Freeloading on their parents, living in basements, doing bullshit low-status 'jobs', not taking life or themselves seriously.
It's from 1975, apparently those Boomer kids aint' cuttin it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1975/02/a-letter-to-the-young-and-to-their-parents/304096/
The Atlantic, same old shit, same old stink.
Amazing, thanks
This is AMAZING my mind it blown. If you had not told me it was from 1975 I would have assumed one of my middle aged American peers wrote it.
I am struck by the “parents gathering for recreation” who aren’t happy with any of their kids choices, not the married law student, or the married mom of 2, or the part time worker doing art, or the one who is traveling and working . . . they actually referred to their kids as possessions in there somewhere.
This helps me understand why boomers worship small businesses owners like they do. They wanted to have a homemade candle business but their parents crapped on them for it, so now they want to support those ventures (to show their parents they were wrong I guess?). Seems the only successful life they envisioned for these kids was CEO or Military.
Anyway, this written in 50 years ago?:
“It was your very superiority, said the critics and commentators, your very refusal to tolerate the cruelty and inhumanity of the acquisitive life which had brought you to turn your backs on it. What the pundits did not tell you was that their passionate advocacy of your attitudes was the material with which they themselves were attempting to forge a powerful and well-paid position in the world. Your hanging back from the contest, in other words, had become the stuff of their own determined effort to win it. No wonder they beatified you; and no wonder your anxiety persisted.”
Eerie.
Nobody writes in that high-handed mid-atlantic style any more though! Just as well!
So true. I'm Gen X and I remember high school teachers constantly going on and on about how stupid we were and how we were never going to get jobs/have a life because we were lazy and couldn't sit still. I also remember my college Poli Sci professor completely losing it because we weren't working hard enough. Everything old is new again.
No one addressed the monetization of the elementary public school system in the USA. FL had FCAT that rewarded high performing schools for the high stakes test. Critical thinking was replaced by strategies for answering multiple choices questions. Skills pushed onto small children in K. No more play based learning. The joy of learning stripped away at the age of 6. I worked as an instructional assistant. I watched the degredation of education.
How does someone even know that someone else is gambling on their phone whilst pretending to write notes?
Maybe, just maybe, these oh so clever lecturers aren't actually that good at getting the subjects they profess to love across to people who don't know as much as they do yet?
Well said. My daughter used to tell me that student’s eyes glazed over as every class started - especially “all the boys” - since middle school on. Part of this is normal, but we need to understand also that these children and young adults were and are learning very, very well. They are learning what we are teaching them. Ike Eisenhower noted “we will crucify humanity upon a cross of iron” over 60 years ago. You can look it up.
We are teaching our children that rape, pillage, and plunder are the core values of our civilization. We are teaching our children to move fast and break things. We are teaching our children to conform and remain complicit to ecocidal and genocidal crimes against planet and people.
The young people I talk with are quite often very clear about what they have learned from the older generations. They have learned to deeply discount the future and to deeply reject the propaganda of a civilization that has no generativity, no future. There is no way forward for the corrupt, demonic institutions of a civilization that has turned its back on the obvious brutal necropolitics of our day.
There may be a way forward for some humans. There are individuals who strive to be loving, honest, and true. But the way forward is treacherous, and few will survive.
Jim Dator, who taught for decades as a futurologist at the U of Hawaii, used to say that we need to prepare to surf the tsunamis of change that are coming. Those who study the ecological crisis understand clearly that we are well into a very rapid anthropogenic extinction event. Young people I talk to turn to their digital devices as a kind of digital crack cocaine that they can use to number the pain of “no future”. Mostly they feel betrayed. They while away the hours as they wait for the brutes who dominate human civilization to act their predictable roles in the self-terminating drama of a civilization that has long since betrayed the future.
I know very few young people who will have children. They see the end of this civilization as it self-immolates, sacrificing the future while thrashing about with god-like technologies we have neither the spiritual maturity nor the wisdom to wield.
I do not predict a complete extinction event, but I am honest with young people - especially those who are young parents. We may strengthen some of the institutions that yet make a way for life, but we must prepare as these institutions self-terminate. We can form small arks of believed community in which to ride out the tsunamis that come, but our species is not in control of the planet as it changes. We are not even at all in control of our own civilization.
In the last thirty years we have used more materials and energy than in all of previous human history, and we have also dumped more toxins into the world than in all of previous history. The next thirty years are going to require even more devastation - we are depleting and toxifying the planet even more, and we are using more and more of “our resources” to engage in resource wars.
Young people I know can simply look around and see the world around them, and know what they are up against. Many choose to hide in the propaganda of political and religious and ideological movements. Many just give up. A few are trying even so to make a way for life, as long as they can.
I engage and support young people who are waking up to the obvious reality that our media and politics, churches and academic institutions mostly obscure. Every Monet of life is precious.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever… The old civilizations claimed that they were founded upon love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred.” — George Orwell, 1984
“We live in a strange time where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The catastrophe is not coming - it is already here, embedded in the normal function8ng of our economic system…” Slavoj Zizek, Living In the End Times
“The more doom-filled reports the scientists release, the stronger the pushback from politicians whose power, ideology, and funding depends on maintaining the status quo, and who are supported by those who fear the solutions to climate change more than they fear its impacts.” Katharine Hayhoe - Saving Us
“Who created this world?” EXACTLY. I am Gen X & childfree and I don’t remember exactly when participation trophies became a thing, but I always thought it was very strange that my generation made fun of people for receiving them when those kids weren’t giving trophies to themselves. That would’ve been one of us. But I suppose that’s the same thing as women being ridiculed for “daddy issues” when we didn’t abandon ourselves, that was a dad.
I also think it’s funny we accuse young people of being unable to sit still, while we also accuse them of being addicted to screens. They wouldn’t be able to “game all day” if they couldn’t sit still, so which is it?
But the inability to read books anymore? I feel seen, and sad. Between ADHD, PEM from MECFS, and perimenopause, I struggle to read books now. (I could read when I started kindergarten at age 5 so it’s not a skill issue.) It’s not just a young person thing.
THANK YOU for saying it, you’re literally the first one i’ve seen mention Covid at all and i was getting so sick and tired of everyone pretending a years-long mass disabling pandemic event couldn’t possibly have anything do to with why shit’s hit the fan lately.
IMHO it’s covid brain damage/ brain fog on both fronts, yes affecting the students but also the teachers’ emotional regulation, which compounds their experience of just generally having a terrible time. Bad parenting has existed since the dawn of time so it makes no sense to blame the change on that alone.
Kids gambling online while in class? What could be driving that? How about the infestation of all sports by legalized gambling? Though gambling has been a known vice for thousands of years, it is now embraced by pro sports organizations and they have entire shows on sports channels dedicated solely to gambling. Anything to make a buck. We knew gambling was a tragic activity that ruins lives, but, we are the US! We don’t give a fuck.
COVID causes brain damage. Every time you get it. Developing minds are at higher risk.
I was born in 1966 and I know all these things were said about me without having cell phones. Walkmans weren’t even a thing until I was a teenager. But the bigger point is the problem of individualism and how it serves an important function under capitalism. If you blame individuals, like these students, then you don’t look at the society that played a much bigger role in creating the problem.
"The younger generation is shit..." is a theme as old as our civilization.
Anytime I hear a new version of it, I just laugh at the idiots proposing it.
I believe that there is literally no such thing as free will. Every one of us acts as he or she does because of inherent and external forces, threshholds, events, interpretations, experience, triggers, knowledge, wisdom, beliefs, representations by authorities, etc., etc.
So I agree that blaming the younger generation for anything isn't ultimately productive. It is the fault of those authorities who orchestrate the content of the minds of the current generations (via media, academia, politics), including the dissembling ideologues who trained those authorities.
I used to go to high school on LSD in the mid-90s. Tell me about "checked out" again.
Also, a lens that ignores the rest of the world. I live in Canada, kids have phones, capitalism is burning the world down, conditions are similar. Covid is damaging brains.
And yet.
Our kids perform better on global testing. Teachers here aren't complaining of the same disenchanted and disengagment. We are so similar, but:
Our kids don't have to worry about dying in the school. We don't have the same level of standardized testing. (Only tests in grades 6, 9 and 12 in my province.) We don't have a curriculum seemingly designed to eliminate exploratory learning for memorization. School funding is not based on community tax rates, but on city/region wide tax pools. These are not huge differences but have huge outcome disparities.
I was born in '61 a tail end baby boomer. I grew up in an academic arts and humanities household filled the greatest writers from my parent's generation and the previous one. I got lost in books, reading for seven or eight hours at a time as a teen. They informed me in a way my formal education never did. Without that library and parents that instilled a love of reading in me, I would not be the person I am now.
When I entered college, my father who had risen to dean of arts and humanities in school number six or so, forced to from personal integrity and tiring of the best and brightest faculty getting screwed by the tenure system, he still managed to fit in teaching one fine arts class a semester. This was all he wanted to do, create art and teach. He believed deeply in education as the way to lift society as a whole and empower individuals. However, even at that time, education was in deep trouble. My 101 English class was an insult to what I had read and learned by 6th grade, and my father, handed out questionnaires at the end of each semester for students to critique, which he shared with me. The illiteracy and inability to express cogent thoughts was often stunning. It's not just young people now, or in your generation or mine. Ignorance has been a persistent problem for differing reasons over all of human history. Capture by smartphones and tech bros is just the latest iteration of deliberately created ignorance that is now set to extinguish us all.
Excellent article.
My intial, kneejerk opinion on why this shite is happening:
What might be termed "old ways" no longer have any respected authority to defend them. Everywhere you look, modern "authorities" -- political, academic, and social -- have given today's youth the green light to hold such ways in contempt, to believe that the young are more advanced than people of "old times" (whether we're talking ancient or old or just a couple or few decades ago). It's easy to convince a young person that he knows more than he does, by the very nature of the fact that he doesn't. At least not yet. But in most cases, the modern world is gonna make sure he doesn't.
Not only have the old guardians of civilized human values been trashed by modern sans-tellectuals in the media and universities and TV and movies and music, but the young have at the same time been shown how to get around having to submit to such "old school" knowledge and character building: via empty, shite, alternative courses that do nothing for them, AI counterfeiting of independent thought, technologies that let them play in class rather than listen, relaxed academic penalties for the too-cool dudes (duds) who can't be bothered to listen or participate in class, by professor-cancellation policies available to any student who thinks he should be offended by something, and on and f*cking on.
It's not accident. It's takeover. Breed the younger generations to detach themselves from solid, foundational values, skills, knowledge, and wisdom in favor of shiny techie gadets and AI, and (2) trash all the old ways without any legitimate hearing, including those people most responsible for perpetrating those old ways, those being old or dead "white men."
“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.”
Jesus fucking Christ. Michael Gove certainly got one thing right about experts.