Dummies for Dummies

Via Russo, let me heartily endorse Greg Toppo's article in USA Today about people who preface this or that agenda with the assertion that students today are stupider than they've ever been, which they know because some study indicates that many students are ignorant of some historical or geographical fact that they happen to care about. To wit, Toppo begins:

In her new book, The Age of American Unreason, cultural critic Susan Jacoby tells of a dinner conversation with a student who was about to graduate with honors from Michigan State University in 2006. After Jacoby dropped a reference to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "fireside chats," she watched as the student "looked absolutely blank" in response.

According to Wikipedia, Susan Jacoby was born in 1945. She grew up in the years immediately after the Roosevelt presidency, among, one presumes, people who had personally listened to his fireside chats. As her Web site details, she's spent the last four decades as a public intellectual, during which time I imagine she's learned a tremendous amount. The honors student, by contrast, was probably born around 1985, and has no personal memory of presidents before George H. W. Bush. Prior to their dinner conversation, she had spent 40 fewer years than Jacoby living and learning.

Which is to say that (1) A person's sense of what facts and ideas matter most is inevitably influenced by their personal history and frame of reference, and (2) People are lousy at maintaining an accurate sense of what they knew, when. Without direct evidence to the contrary, as in "I didn't know that then because it hadn't happened yet," I think we unconsciously assume that we've always known what we now know. At the very least, our sense of this is biased in a way that inaccurately minimizes our previous ignorance, and thus convinces us that we were smarter then than people of a similar age are now.

I'm guessing, for example, that had Susan Jacoby been unlucky enough to have dinner with a professional scold in 1966, she might have shocked him with her ignorance of some noteworthy detail of Grover Cleveland's second administration.

Toppo's article also highlights the sin of attributing the alleged ignorance of today's youth to whatever trendy phenomenon is mostly likely to get people's attention and offer opportunities for facile analogies and unsupported assertions. You know, the kids today with their MTV hippity-hop music Ipods Myspaces Internet chat rooms:

[Mark] Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, due in May, blames digital technology, which distracts kids in ways their parents could never imagine. "When we were 17 years old, social life stopped at the front door," says Bauerlein, 49. Now teens can continue their conversations online, on Facebook, by instant messaging or on cellphones in their bedrooms — all night. "Peer-to-peer contact … has no limitation in space or time."

On some level, this is understandable. Bauerlein was 17 in 1976, well before the Federal Communications Commission lifted its now-infamous ban on the installation of telephones in teenagers' bedrooms.  

Now, there are people out there with legitimate things to say on this topic, people like E.D. Hirsch (who Toppo quotes) and his ideas about the role that knowledge plays in learning. Hirsch, it should be noted, is not as conservative as people think based on the conservative embrace of Cultural Literacy; his work focuses less on knowledge for specific knowledge's sake than knowledge as an essential building block for learning to read and gaining higher conceptual skills.

But there are plenty of others who bemoan the fact that some large percentage of high school seniors got the wrong answer on a multiple choice question of historical fact and then quickly proceed to denounce educational reforms that emphasize rote memorization skills as measured by multiple choice tests.