I can hardly be offended, especially since I'm nearly thirty, in fact I was intrigued. What is it about young people (or borderline-young people, in the case of me and my wife) that makes some people feel we shouldn't be trusted? I think young people are not trusted, in fact I see it all around me. At one time someone with a BA in any subject could settle into a reliable job without much struggle. Before the Clinton Administration, most of our presidents had only a bachelors degree. Clinton was the first president since Ford to have an advanced degree, and after him Bush had an MBA from Harvard Business School, Obama has a JD from Harvard Law School, and Romney has both. By contrast, Reagan had only a BA from Eureka College. These days, try becoming a register of deeds with only a MA from Eureka College! Until about forty years ago, teachers would have been fine with only a BA in a related subject, or a high school degree in most states. At present, let's just look at some of the state requirements. And let's look at some of the requirements listed in job descriptions on Craigslist of teaching jobs in the greater Los Angeles area. Or, close to the top, let's look at the requirements for an elementary school art teacher; the school board seems determined to maximize what first-graders learn from their art classes. And how about looking at the job descriptions of paralegals. In old movies, paralegals were airheaded women who happened to know how to type and would occasionally say something completely redundant just to fill up space. By contrast, here's a list of requirements now for a "litigation paralegal" in LA:
Westside law firm is seeking an experienced litigation paralegal. Candidates must have 5+ years of solid litigation experience, preferably in the areas of business, securities and IP litigation. BA and ABA approved paralegal certificate required. Must have prior experience with deposition summaries, legal research, propounding and responding to discovery, general trial preparation duties, and trial. Must also be proficient with Summation and Concordance.These days, it often seems like every middle class professional (below a certain age) has either a masters or a doctorate. So it's not surprising that record numbers of graduates from masters-level or doctoral-level programs are on food stamps. And it's not surprising that IQs have been rising, steadily and consistently, all across the globe.
Some people, it seems, would disagree. Mark Baurlein, an English professor at Emory University, published a book in 2007 entitled The Dumbest Generation, and also entitled Don't Trust Anybody Under Thirty. On the front cover we see the Raising of the Flag on Iwo Jima being represented by some animated and seemingly inept robots, rather than a photo by some Jewish-born Catholic of efficient, concerted Marines, together with a Navy Corpsman. So precisely what is it about our generation that's dumb? I read about half the book. From what I read, the emphasis is on young people not reading. And to some degree, he has a point. Looking at previous generations in my family, my father is a retired IT consultant, and a film aficionado who writes scripts as a hobby, and who also reads during much of his spare time, generally alternating between classics and political commentary. His late mother was a voracious reader of novels, particularly mystery novels. Unfortunately his father and brother passed away too early for me to know them. On the other side of my family, my mother is a cool-headed, wicked-humored Englishwoman, as well as a biology teacher, and I always pictured her reading The New Republic or Scientific America or books by Richard Dawkins and his crew. The rest of her family lives in England, so I rarely see them, but I know her brother-in-law in a history buff intent on learning "every language under the sun" according to my cousin, my maternal grandmother's house is a de facto library when I last visited it, with books constantly coming and going, and my grandfather was reading a book about Che Guevara when I last visited him. One quick comment: of the six people whose habits I described, what do they have in common? Well, only two of them are working right now. Two of them are retired, and two have never worked before (except my paternal grandmother, who served a stint as a secretary in the 1950s).
He also mentioned that young people don't seem to read newspapers. Personally I used to prefer printed newspapers because I found them easier to read from than elec tronic versions of the same thing. That only changed when I became familiar enough with major political issues that I could get the main idea without much effort either way. Personally I was always an inefficient reader, even now as an MA student. I learned to succeed by giving myself more time on a task than other students needed. By being a daily news reader, does that make me a minority among young people? It is well-known that circulation of printed news sources have tanked, especially among young people since online readership became the norm. We can also measure subscriptions to electronic sources, but it's difficult to measure the number of people, such as myself, who read Google News. Also, how often do you see young people reading the LA Daily News? Let's look at some statistics from State of the Media concerning readership of weeklies. It seems readership of Time and Newsweek have gradually declined since 1989, then their decline accelerated when electronic sources were becoming the norm, and they plummeted after the housing crisis. However, circulation of The Economist grew rapidly from 1989 until approximately 2003, then accelerated after 2003, then continued to grow but at a slower rate during the recession. Further down, we can see the circulation of The Week, The Atlantic, The Economist and The New Yorker. All four of these periodicals, with the exception of The Atlantic, have grown continually since 1989, with The Economist growing exponentially. Also, interestingly, the number of ads pages on four of the six news sources I mentioned has decreased rapidly. Also, even more interestingly, the median age of The Economist is 44.2, making it lower than the four other periodicals for which they have this statistic: Newsweek (49.2), The Atlantic (52.6), The New Yorker (51.5), and Time (47.7). Some of these magazines are good for people in need of something to relax to during their weekends, but there's a reason they're not encouraged in the very serious institutions of higher learning. During my college years one of my professors required us to subscribe to The Economist and the New York Times, one repeatedly emphasized the brilliance of The Economist and suggested we buy a drink at a campus convenience store in order to read The Economist there without paying for it, one told us it might be the best major commercial news source in existence (without mentioning a second one), and lastly, my professor for a European politics class told us that investors typically read two sources: the Financial Times, and (a student filled him in before he said it). The professor confirmed his answer, then continued: "forget about Time, Newsweek, it's all rubbish." Lastly, it is difficult to infer from the decline in newspaper readership that young people are becoming less political. If we look at statistics, we can see that voter turnout rates have remained quite consistent in both presidential and house representative elections, in fact there have only been six presidential elections with a higher voter turnout rate than in 2008, and only eight with a higher turnout rate than in 2004. If our social fabric is coming apart, I doubt the problem is apathy among the young. And I doubt even more that substance in the thought processes of the young is a problem.
Sometimes I am just too tempted to stalk these public figures on Wikipedia. To give a broader context to Bauerlein's anti-young bias, he seems to be swimming against the current of our times, or at least among the professional class. In 2012, he converted to Catholicism after being an atheist his whole life. Another commentator who seems to have similar opinions on this issue is George Will, whose influence has a much longer history. Apparently Will received a PhD in politics from Princeton, and over the next few decades worked his way up to becoming a visiting professor at Harvard. Meanwhile he also worked as a journalist and would often get hired as a columnist. In his long career he seems to have straddled the boundary quite a lot on political issues. But on social issues he seems like a conservative who would have loathed the invention of the piano. One of his most quoted columns appeared first in the Baltimore Sun in 2001. I think the most vehement parts are toward the middle:
Ours is an age besotted with graphic entertainments. And in an increasingly infantilized society, whose moral philosophy is reducible to a celebration of "choice," adults are decreasingly distinguishable from children in their absorption in entertainments and the kinds of entertainments they are absorbed in -- video games, computer games, hand-held games, movies on their computers and so on. This is progress: more sophisticated delivery of stupidity.
An optimistic premise of our society, in which "choice" is the ideal that trumps all others, is that competition improves things, burning away the dross and leaving the gold. This often works with commodities like cars but not with mass culture.
There competition corrupts. America, determined to amuse itself into inanition, is becoming increasingly desensitized. So entertainment seeking a mass audience is ratcheting up the violence, sexuality and degradation, becoming increasingly coarse and trying to be -- its largest challenge -- shocking in an unshockable society.Granted, I think the nature of entertainment has changed significantly since 2001. These days, when less-established people are less likely to own televisions, and instead of watching whatever happens to be on television at the moment, they will look on Netflix or Youtube or a television channel's website for precisely the right show to suit their desires at the moment. With this method there are much fewer ads imposed on the viewer, the viewer can choose something intellectually challenging (such as TED) if he or she prefers, and more generally the viewer has access to a much broader variety of entertainment. There are other indications that the notion of "mass culture" is becoming less relevant. What are the pop artists today, or rock singers and bands, or rappers? Some belong to mass-mass culture: during the year that I spent in China as an English teacher, I would learn that the expression "oh my Lady Gaga" is well-known, perhaps almost universally known, among college students. But beyond pop music, I can't think of a single person or group that's especially prominent on the music scene, and I think the reason is a pluralization of our culture.
In Christian Lander's book, the instant classic Stuff White People Like, he writes that young white people are typically disinclined to even want a television. However, many people do still watch television in the "traditional" fashion. Moreover, even those who only watch television from their computers are likely to watch current popular television shows. Personally I'm not really qualified to talk about the quality of television or movies over the past ten years, because I withdrew from watching either. And ten years ago, a lot of tv shows and movies were terrible. Also, it might be that what Will is reacting to has become more the case over the past eleven years, perhaps more by a large measure. In fact, according to a report by the Kaiser Foundation, children ages 8-18 in 2009 spent 7 hours and 38 minutes per day using "entertainment media," as opposed to 6 hours and 21 minutes in 2004. The report also indicates very clearly that these kids are getting worse grades as a result. I certainly see no need for this constant media absorption, in fact I think this problem is horrendous. I don't know what to suggest. I think regulation would cause everyone too much trouble. I would also guess that just about all schools have a no-headphones policy, although I doubt it's enforced rigorously in high schools. Some contributing factors have more to do with broader societal trends, such as decreasing family solidity resulting from male disloyalty and increasingly long work days. I really don't know what the solution is. However, we seem to be plowing on regardless (I discuss education in a later paragraph, and in another blog post I discuss it from a different angle).
In relation to education, though I want to make another quick note: it's not true of all our young people that their educational achievements absolve them from criticism regarding the effect of entertainment on their minds. Many young people are not doing well at all. It seems like the number of kids in this category might be shrinking, however there are signs that some of the most hard-off in our society are doing increasingly more poorly. I attended a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Education by the former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had been active for more than a decade in his own NGO, America's Promise, intent on helping disadvantaged students. Powell, who had previously served as a general in the decades during and after the Vietnam War, told us that at present the military is no longer a reliable back-up plan for uneducated youths, partly because some might have become too uneducated. He cited a statistic that approximately 75 percent of military-aged youths would not be permitted into the military. Based on a Google search, the main reason seems to be obesity. However, Powell also told us that many youths cannot serve because they left high school at an illegal age, or because they cannot pass the basic math and (English) literacy tests required for enlistment. Of course, many youths might be accepted if not for inadequate English language abilities. Is it possible, then, that educational outcomes would increasing among all segments of our society if not for shortfalls in English language ability among first- and second-generation immigrants? And that brings us to another point: if Americans don't know about Herbert Hoover or the Battle of Tippecanoe, is it because they know about the Guerra Grande or the Kingdom of Ayutthaya instead? Granted, that's no excuse for lacking the basic knowledge that characterizes a genuine citizen. However, the children of immigrants are hardly averse to Americanizing, and they know they cannot succeed easily unless they do well in school. Also, these immigrant groups have knowledge that that blue-blooded Americans don't have, and we can only benefit from being more cosmopolitan.
Or consider this: at one time people were bewildered by the profundity of The Twilight Zone. Now it just doesn't work anymore on young people. Everyone knows that beauty is subjective. Someone with "time enough at last" will have wound up in solitary confinement or a PhD program and feel miserable. If the weather is extraordinarily hot, then extraordinarily cold, then people will probably not be content with either. Don't get me wrong, I think the The Twilight Zone is very nicely produced, and I think its messages are portrayed very elegantly. But anyone who considers it profound will likely have difficulty with the first two paragraphs of Hegel's preface to his magnum opus, known in English as The Phenomenology of Spirit:
Φ 1. In the case of a philosophical work it seems not only superfluous, but, in view of the nature of philosophy, even inappropriate and misleading to begin, as writers usually do in a preface, by explaining the end the author had in mind, the circumstances which gave rise to the work, and the relation in which the writer takes it to stand to other treatises on the same subject, written by his predecessors or his contemporaries. For whatever it might be suitable to state about philosophy in a preface – say, an historical sketch of the main drift and point of view, the general content and results, a string of desultory assertions and assurances about the truth – this cannot be accepted as the form and manner in which to expound philosophical truth.
Φ 2. Moreover, because philosophy has its being essentially in the element of that universality which encloses the particular within it, the end or final result seems, in the case of philosophy more than in that of other sciences, to have absolutely expressed the complete fact itself in its very nature; contrasted with that the mere process of bringing it to light would seem, properly speaking, to have no essential significance. On the other hand, in the general idea of e.g. anatomy – the knowledge of the parts of the body regarded as lifeless – we are quite sure we do not possess the objective concrete fact, the actual content of the science, but must, over and above, be concerned with particulars. Further, in the case of such a collection of items of knowledge, which has no real right to the name of science, any talk about purpose and suchlike generalities is not commonly very different from the descriptive and superficial way in which the contents of the science these nerves and muscles, etc. – are themselves spoken of. In philosophy, on the other hand, it would at once be felt incongruous were such a method made use of and yet shown by philosophy itself to be incapable of grasping the truth.People claim that out television has become too offensive. Personally I'm not really prepared to comment, since I stopped watching television ten years ago. But a lot of it was pretty damn offensive back then. Of course, television always was offensive, as were all cultural products since the genesis of the human species. Take this commercial from, it seems, the 1970s or 80s. Gong back another two or three decades, it's not very hard to find racist material for the general public. However, it's not fair to criticize racism from that time period the same way we'd criticize television now, because at the time television was not considered improper. We've all seen statues and paintings from any era before the 18th century, in which people are portrayed in their full, unmitigated beauty. What's different, arguably, now is that we create and appreciate material that we know is offensive, and usually we laugh at it because it's offensive. And some people push the limit, just about as far as they can. There is one show that I still watch, it's Family Guy, certainly among the bolder shows out there. In this show's 100th Episode Special, the creator, Seth MacFarlane, interviews people who happen to loathe the show. One woman comments: "I wouldn't want people from other countries watching this and thinking all Americans are like this."
At one time education was about the Three R's: reading, riting and rithmatic. Now it's about differential equations, Kant, Habermas, a masters in this and a doctorate in that. According to a report by the National Center for Education Statistics, high school dropout rates have decreased consistently among Americans of all income levels and all ethnicities since 1972, and they have decreased starkly among the poorest, and among blacks and Hispanics. This report also tells us that the most graduation-challenged states are in the Deep South and the Southwest, in addition to Alaska. Based on another report by NCES, it is also very clear that high schools kids are increasingly likely to study calculus and statistics, they're increasingly less likely to work during high school, children younger than five are increasingly likely to be enrolled in "full-day preprimary programs" (where I learned all my Spanish), students were increasingly likely to be enrolled in public charter schools, and, of course, high school graduates were more likely by leaps and bounds to enroll in college. And, even more of course, enrollment in masters and doctoral programs almost as rapidly. I'm not qualified to say how accurate this report is, but it comes from a government agency, so at least it's "official." The very unsettling graphs on page 61, especially figure 22-2, are of grave concern to me both as a grad student and as someone with tentative plans to eventually work in academia. The economics of higher education, with more-than-rocketing prices that seem ready to crash soon, will probably facilitate the smartization of incoming undergraduates when it happens, but will not be helpful to existing academics or to recent graduates from all levels of higher education. But in the name of progress, someone always has to pay.
