*I had written this a week ago, but am publishing it now because I forgot to bring my laptop to Florida with me. I will write about Florida shortly.
In his book, The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein paints a bleak picture of the American youth. They are remarkably uneducated, Bauerlein says, despite the unprecedented access they have to information.
You can imagine what he forecasts for America if nothing changes, if it is left in the hands of these unprepared, dim-witted youths. Bauerlein reveals how the young of today are reading less and even exhibit a bizarre sense of pride in how little they read. He details how technology isn't improving learning in or out of the classroom, but rather hinders it in many instances. An entire chapter is spent arguing that enjoyment and achievement have "no necessary relation" -- in other words whether a child loves or hates school doesn't alter how much they absorb or retain [this is a rebuttal to the movement that says "maybe kids will learn more/study more/go to school more if school is more fun]. He argues that the youth are choosing to use technology to become more informed about other peers, about their friend's lives than they use it do research Plato's Republic or Napoleon's return from Elba. And it's quite simple why they make this choice -- being informed about friends, being aware of youtube videos and being able to get pop culture references -- all that leads to acceptance, which is of the utmost importance during adolescence.
His book reminded me of titles like Freakanomics, Blink, The Tipping Point -- books loaded with studies, statistics and easily-digestible arguments; books that soar up bestseller charts and are widely talked about until of course a new book comes out that's just as well-researched, just as digestible, just as explosive, but only more recent and probably more relevant. Then the book fades and the author looks for something else that can be researched, crunched, and packaged for all of America to read.
And so Bauerlein sits on the outside looking in, trying to explain and categorize a generation that has known nothing but a world with internet and ipods and cell-phones -- a world he can never know, never truly comprehend. So while he laments how many hours a teen spends on social networking sites, we sit here and wonder how you knew anything about your friends, let alone kept in touch with them, before social networking. He wonders why the world isn't the way it was, why we aren't reading, learning, retaining like previous generations. Bauerlein frets at the alarming decrease in engineering and math majors -- why aren't more people striving for those jobs like they did a few decades ago? He wonders what will happen to the electoral process if the voters are becoming increasingly less-informed.
Bauerlein divides the world into old and young, into teachers and students. And if you read the book you get the sense that old is good and young is bad.
Towards the end of the book Bauerlein writes: "Furthermore, they [confidence and enjoyment] prevent the students from forming the one essential ingredient of long-term success: an accurate, realistic appraisal of their present capabilities."
Doesn't he get it?
Bauerlein tries to define intelligence and I believe he does so poorly. When he tries to define success, he fails miserably. Bauerlein thinks being an engineer, majoring in math, graduating from good schools, being a professor [he is one], scoring high on multiple choice tests -- those are indicators of success. He thinks being able to "realistically appraise" is crucial to finding success. The ideal student looks at themself in a mirror and says "well, I'm not good at drawing, so I probably should put more time into studying math, because then I can be an engineer."
Those jobs -- engineers, professors, scientists, lawyers -- they are outdated measuring sticks of success, much like the IQ test is an outdated barometer of intelligence. (You can't help but wonder if they were ever worthwhile modes of measurement in the first place.) But by trying to push them on the dumbest generation, he fits perfectly into the divided world he has created; he is the old, all-knowing sage, who looks at the troubled youth of today and their dreams and then uses words like "realistic" and "success" to sober them to the unpleasant struggle that is life. Success lies in stability, in a degree, in a job title.
Doesn't he get it?
The best and the brightest that Halberstam writes about -- men who Bauerlein would love to have in every classroom across America -- orchestrated Vietnam. The dumbest generation helped elect a black president.
There are glaring problems with our generation, as there have been with every generation that preceded ours. We read less. Bauerlein's generation turned fire hoses on African-Americans trying to vote. We check facebook too often. Men from Bauerlein's generation got elected to office and started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Men from Bauerlein's generation who were economic geniuses [I wonder how they would have scored on those intelligence tests] started those disasterous hedge funds like Long Term Capital Management, they became CEOs of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and gambled with money so egregiously that our economy is in the teeth of a brutal recession -- a recession that makes young, dumb, kids like me have fewer jobs to find.
We can't add. We don't know about the Peace of Westphalia. We can't find Iraq on a map. Alarming? Yes. But so is being forty-five, diabetically obese, divorced, and having no real relationship with your children. Unless of course you're a lawyer. Or an engineer. Or a professor. Then it's success. Right?
I'm confused. Perhaps that's to be expected.
After all, I am part of the dumbest generation.
And Bauerlein does this -- the studies, the logical progression -- as well as Gladwell or Levitt and Dubner. It is a quick, informative read. The perfect book to sit down on a long flight and get through and feel informed, and more importantly, somewhat alarmed.
But unfortunately Bauerlein is wrong. Not about the enjoyment-achievement relationship. Not about the effect of technology in the classroom. Not about the alarming decline in reading. Those points are hard to argue, and are frankly ones that I agree with. But he is wrong, or at least misguided.
Bauerlein spends much of the book hammering home the point that advances in technology have not led to improvement in the classroom, and in some cases have actually led to declining performance. To illustrate this, he'll talk about a study, which shows that "x" percentage of schools in America have access to computers and the internet today as opposed to a smaller "y" percentage of schools that had the same access ten years ago. He'll then compare math and science and reading scores from today with the ones from ten years ago and find no difference, and in some cases, a slight regression. The conclusion is obvious. And it's not just one study. It's fifteen more, mixed with anecdotes. It's compelling.
However, Bauerlein's error is that these studies assume that "intelligence", "learning" -- any and all those big buzz words we hear tossed around in conversations about education -- all those studies assume that intelligence can be measured in a multiple choice test.
Ken Robinson, in his book The Element, spends pages and pages railing against such generic and widespread testing because it can only measure one type of intelligence. It tests memorization, statistical retention, certain types of problem solving. Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers argues alongside Robinson -- that there are multiple types of intelligence, and yet we rarely think of it as such. Gladwell tells the story of two men. One has an absurdly high IQ [a standard way of measuring intelligence] -- 30 points higher than Einstein's. The other is above average, most certainly intelligent, but not off the charts. One wins a nobel prize. The other lives alone on a ranch, barely making enough to support his ranch. It was the "less intelligent" one that wins the Nobel Prize. It was the prodigious genius who lives alone, not even able to graduate from college. And the reason Gladwell gives for this unexpected discrepancy is that the Nobel Prize winner displayed a much higher level of social intelligence. He could interact with people, work amongst them, coddle professors to give him high marks, understand the politics of working in a competitive field of science. The genius couldn't. He was awkward, abrasive to those who didn't understand him. He offended professors, insulted their intelligence, so they looked for reasons to fail him and they of course found plenty.
The Genius would score off the charts in any test Bauerlein could put in front him, but yet he can't function in society, or even a classroom. One type of intelligence is easy to measure. The other types of intelligence are just as and perhaps -- if the story about the Nobel Prize winner and the Dropout Genius are any indication -- perhaps those other types are even more useful. So why is Bauerlein condemning an entire generation when he seems to be measuring one, out of many, types of intelligence?
Bauerlein spends much of the book hammering home the point that advances in technology have not led to improvement in the classroom, and in some cases have actually led to declining performance. To illustrate this, he'll talk about a study, which shows that "x" percentage of schools in America have access to computers and the internet today as opposed to a smaller "y" percentage of schools that had the same access ten years ago. He'll then compare math and science and reading scores from today with the ones from ten years ago and find no difference, and in some cases, a slight regression. The conclusion is obvious. And it's not just one study. It's fifteen more, mixed with anecdotes. It's compelling.
However, Bauerlein's error is that these studies assume that "intelligence", "learning" -- any and all those big buzz words we hear tossed around in conversations about education -- all those studies assume that intelligence can be measured in a multiple choice test.
Ken Robinson, in his book The Element, spends pages and pages railing against such generic and widespread testing because it can only measure one type of intelligence. It tests memorization, statistical retention, certain types of problem solving. Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers argues alongside Robinson -- that there are multiple types of intelligence, and yet we rarely think of it as such. Gladwell tells the story of two men. One has an absurdly high IQ [a standard way of measuring intelligence] -- 30 points higher than Einstein's. The other is above average, most certainly intelligent, but not off the charts. One wins a nobel prize. The other lives alone on a ranch, barely making enough to support his ranch. It was the "less intelligent" one that wins the Nobel Prize. It was the prodigious genius who lives alone, not even able to graduate from college. And the reason Gladwell gives for this unexpected discrepancy is that the Nobel Prize winner displayed a much higher level of social intelligence. He could interact with people, work amongst them, coddle professors to give him high marks, understand the politics of working in a competitive field of science. The genius couldn't. He was awkward, abrasive to those who didn't understand him. He offended professors, insulted their intelligence, so they looked for reasons to fail him and they of course found plenty.
The Genius would score off the charts in any test Bauerlein could put in front him, but yet he can't function in society, or even a classroom. One type of intelligence is easy to measure. The other types of intelligence are just as and perhaps -- if the story about the Nobel Prize winner and the Dropout Genius are any indication -- perhaps those other types are even more useful. So why is Bauerlein condemning an entire generation when he seems to be measuring one, out of many, types of intelligence?
The issue of intelligence continues to be debated quite hotly [judging by all the books published on the topic in the last few years]. It is a topic that has hundreds of thousands of pages of literature on it, and my two paragraphs are by no means definitive. It is something to think about, though.
If that was the only mistake Bauerlein was guilty of, I wouldn't be writing this. The problem with his book isn't that he doesn't understand intelligence. It's that he doesn't understand the generation he writes about.
Bauerlein is writing about, even tries to categorize and define, a generation he is not a part of. The great writers who pen works that come to serve as a voice for a generation -- whether it's Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or Kerouac's On The Road -- they were all a part of the generation that they came to symbolize. And more importantly, they didn't set out to write about a generation. They set out to tell a story, which in the end, told much more.
If that was the only mistake Bauerlein was guilty of, I wouldn't be writing this. The problem with his book isn't that he doesn't understand intelligence. It's that he doesn't understand the generation he writes about.
Bauerlein is writing about, even tries to categorize and define, a generation he is not a part of. The great writers who pen works that come to serve as a voice for a generation -- whether it's Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or Kerouac's On The Road -- they were all a part of the generation that they came to symbolize. And more importantly, they didn't set out to write about a generation. They set out to tell a story, which in the end, told much more.
And so Bauerlein sits on the outside looking in, trying to explain and categorize a generation that has known nothing but a world with internet and ipods and cell-phones -- a world he can never know, never truly comprehend. So while he laments how many hours a teen spends on social networking sites, we sit here and wonder how you knew anything about your friends, let alone kept in touch with them, before social networking. He wonders why the world isn't the way it was, why we aren't reading, learning, retaining like previous generations. Bauerlein frets at the alarming decrease in engineering and math majors -- why aren't more people striving for those jobs like they did a few decades ago? He wonders what will happen to the electoral process if the voters are becoming increasingly less-informed.
Bauerlein divides the world into old and young, into teachers and students. And if you read the book you get the sense that old is good and young is bad.
Towards the end of the book Bauerlein writes: "Furthermore, they [confidence and enjoyment] prevent the students from forming the one essential ingredient of long-term success: an accurate, realistic appraisal of their present capabilities."
Doesn't he get it?
Bauerlein tries to define intelligence and I believe he does so poorly. When he tries to define success, he fails miserably. Bauerlein thinks being an engineer, majoring in math, graduating from good schools, being a professor [he is one], scoring high on multiple choice tests -- those are indicators of success. He thinks being able to "realistically appraise" is crucial to finding success. The ideal student looks at themself in a mirror and says "well, I'm not good at drawing, so I probably should put more time into studying math, because then I can be an engineer."
Those jobs -- engineers, professors, scientists, lawyers -- they are outdated measuring sticks of success, much like the IQ test is an outdated barometer of intelligence. (You can't help but wonder if they were ever worthwhile modes of measurement in the first place.) But by trying to push them on the dumbest generation, he fits perfectly into the divided world he has created; he is the old, all-knowing sage, who looks at the troubled youth of today and their dreams and then uses words like "realistic" and "success" to sober them to the unpleasant struggle that is life. Success lies in stability, in a degree, in a job title.
Doesn't he get it?
The best and the brightest that Halberstam writes about -- men who Bauerlein would love to have in every classroom across America -- orchestrated Vietnam. The dumbest generation helped elect a black president.
There are glaring problems with our generation, as there have been with every generation that preceded ours. We read less. Bauerlein's generation turned fire hoses on African-Americans trying to vote. We check facebook too often. Men from Bauerlein's generation got elected to office and started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Men from Bauerlein's generation who were economic geniuses [I wonder how they would have scored on those intelligence tests] started those disasterous hedge funds like Long Term Capital Management, they became CEOs of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and gambled with money so egregiously that our economy is in the teeth of a brutal recession -- a recession that makes young, dumb, kids like me have fewer jobs to find.
We can't add. We don't know about the Peace of Westphalia. We can't find Iraq on a map. Alarming? Yes. But so is being forty-five, diabetically obese, divorced, and having no real relationship with your children. Unless of course you're a lawyer. Or an engineer. Or a professor. Then it's success. Right?
I'm confused. Perhaps that's to be expected.
After all, I am part of the dumbest generation.
No comments:
Post a Comment