How Dumb Can You Get?
Is the young book reader going extinct? Does it matter?
'Camped in the desert'?
- The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future [Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30]
- Tarcher/Penguin (2008)
I'm a feet-on-the-ground kind of guy, so I seldom have visions. But a year or so ago, while I was in the library of the little university where I teach, something odd happened. At first, I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. Downstairs, the students were busily at the computer terminals, looking up stuff on Wikipedia or checking their Facebook "wall" or doing whatever it is students do on the library computers.
I went upstairs to the stacks, where the library's collection of books is housed, and where, off to the side, are the carrels, filled with students in various states of study and/or slumber. Clutching the slip of paper on which I'd scribbled the call number of a book that I was looking for -- a book written in the 1930s by literary scholar Edmund Wilson -- I slipped into the forest-like rows of bookshelves. Maybe it was the odd silence that engulfed me as I browsed in the stacks, or maybe it was something else, but a moment or two later when I arrived at the shelf where Edmund Wilson's books are kept and reached up for the one I wanted, I was hit by a multiple realization.
First, I was the only person browsing in the stacks. There were lots of people around, but none of them was browsing in the book stacks. I was all alone in the forest of books. Second, it became clear to me why, whenever I looked for a book in the school library, it was almost always there: because the students seldom took out books to read. The collection was pretty much intact. Finally, as I began glancing at the spines of the books on the nearby shelves, which often included the year of their publication, I realized that very few of the books there had been published or purchased in the last 10 years. That's because the library, I immediately understood, had bought very few books in recent years. Obviously, the "acquisitions budget," as it's called, had been diverted to buy the computers.
That's when I had my little vision. The spines of the books, instead of reminding me of trees in a forest, as they often do, suddenly began to look like tombstones. Each date on a book spine recorded the death of a book. I was standing in the middle of The Dead Library. Book readng was over.
The vision lasted about five or 10 seconds. Then I snapped back to my ordinary pedestrian existence, skipped down the stairs, passed the students crowded around the computer terminals, checked out my book at the checkout counter, and went off to read a few pages of Edmund Wilson.
The library is still a fairly busy place, filled with students and librarians and computers and places to study, but the students cheerfully ignore the collection. The Dead Library is up there, silent, like an unexplored forest or an unvisited old graveyard.
'Rapping out e-mails' amidst the books
Like most visions, my vision of The Dead Library isn't exactly true. There are still book readers, and books are still being borrowed from school libraries. But I notice that Mark Bauerlein, in his new book, The Dumbest Generation, has also noticed this moment of biblio-desolation. "At every university library I've entered in recent years," says Bauerlein, who's a professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, "a cheery or intent sophomore sits at each computer station rapping out e-mails in a machine-gun rhythm. Upstairs, the stacks stand deserted and silent," he adds, reassuring me that I'm not just imagining things.
In a front cover book-jacket blurb, the prominent literary scholar Harold Bloom -- who is sort of the Edmund Wilson of the present generation -- rightly calls Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation "an urgent... book on the very dark topic of the virtual end of reading among the young." That's true. But there's more.
Bauerlein suggests that young people are suffering not only a decline in reading, but also significant "knowledge deficits" about history, geography, science and art, and an ignorance of civic life that poses a threat to democratic society. However, if Bauerlein accurately alerts us to an important problem, it's equally the case that his Dumbest Generation is a polemic that suffers from serious defects (which I'll get to in a moment).
When he isn't being an English prof, Bauerlein works in research and analysis for the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). He's a report writer and reader, quite a good one, and in The Dumbest Generation, he provides a painstaking and persuasive summation of a raft of recent reports. The reports reveal that young people in the U.S. have more schooling, more disposable income, more leisure time and more access to news and information than at any time in the recent past. What do they do with all that time and money? They download, upload, post, chat and network (nine of their top 10 sites are for social networking), and they watch television and play video games two to four hours per day.
What don't they do? They don't read, even online, and two-thirds of them are not proficient in reading. They don't follow or engage in politics, notwithstanding the hopeful Obama-boom/blip among the young; they don't vote regularly (nearly half of them can't comprehend a ballot); and they can't find Iraq on a map. They know who the current "American Idol" is, but they've no idea that Nancy Pelosi is the first woman speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
'Perilous momentum downward'
Bauerlein's book intentionally doesn't attempt to assess behaviours and values of under-30-year-olds. "It sticks to one thing," Bauerlein says, "the intellectual condition of young Americans, and describes it with empirical evidence, recording something... insidious happening inside their heads." It charts, he says, "a consistent and perilous momentum downward."
Bauerlein is aware that his pessimistic findings may be dismissed "as yet another curmudgeonly riff. Older people have complained forever about the derelictions of youth, and the 'old fogy' tag puts them on the defensive."
But the 49-year-old Bauerlein insists that the facts are the fact. Despite the "information age," the "digital revolution," and all the other slogans about access to knowledge, "young Americans today are no more learned or skilful than their predecessors, no more knowledgeable, fluent, up-to-date or inquisitive, except in the material of youth culture." The last is a point Bauerlein reiterates throughout his book. What the young are knowledgeable about is confined to their own rather narrow, narcissistic milieu.
Further, "they don't know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events. They read less on their own, both books and newspapers, and you would have to canvas a lot of college English instructors and employers before you found one who said they compose better paragraphs." The wellsprings of knowledge are everywhere, "but the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, picture, tunes and texts back and forth, living off the thrill of peer attention."
Benchmarks of failure
Bauerlein documents this ignorance in the desert by examining a dozen or more recent, major, reputable, mass surveys of the intellectual condition of young people, including one he directed for the NEA. The whole story is almost too depressing, so just a sampler:
"On the 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress history exam, the majority of high school seniors, 57 per cent, scored 'below basic.'" That's a polite way of saying they failed. "Only one per cent reached 'advanced.' ...Two-thirds of high-school seniors couldn't explain a photo of a theatre whose portal reads 'Coloured Entrance.'"
In a 2003 National Conference of State Legislatures citizenship study, "While 64 per cent knew the name of the latest 'American Idol,' only 10 per cent could identify the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives." Less than half knew which party controlled the American Congress; a 2004 National Election Study found that barely over a quarter could correctly identify the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; a 2006 Pew Research report learned that only a quarter of 18- to 29-year-olds knew that Condoleeza Rice was U.S. secretary of state while a mere 15 per cent knew that Vladimir Putin was the president of Russia.
And so it goes, in every field surveyed, from math and science, to fine arts participation to geography, where the 2006 Geographic Literacy Survey found that 63 per cent of test takers "could not identify Iraq on a map." Maybe that's why GPS devices are a hot shopping item. But marketing aside, not only is there a knowledge deficit. When you ask the young to interpret some bit of the world in terms of what it means, things only get worse.
What about the Net?
Beyond Bauerlein's discussion of "Knowledge Deficits," his chapters on "The New Bibliophobes," "Screen Time" and "Online Learning and Non-Learning," make what amounts to a pretty irrefutable case about what is and isn't on the minds of the present generation. If you aren't convinced by the tidbits presented here, you're invited to check out the text itself.
The standard rebuttal of Bauerlein's case, which usually appears under a rock-song heading that declares "The Kids Are Alright," claims that while book reading may have, well, changed, the young are reading more than ever, via the Internet. One review of The Dumbest Generation published by Canada's most influential book review section, The Globe and Mail ("Are the Kids All Right? Depends Upon Whom You Ask," July 19, 2008), is a case in point.
The reviewer, Don Tapscott, chairman of nGenera Insight (a business consulting firm) and the author of a forthcoming tract, Grown Up Digital, claims that the young are "reading plenty of non-fiction on the Internet," which, he assures us, "can be just as intellectually challenging as reading a book." Well, if they were reading an article from the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or any of a dozen first-rate magazines and newspapers available online, that might be true. But as Bauerlein documents, that's not what they're reading. They're reading each other's post-it notes on Facebook, and viewing pop star gossip on YouTube (or YouPorn or PornTube). Predictably, the deniers and would-be refuters of Bauerlein's thesis have little to offer beyond bromides about the wonders of technology.
The problem is not with Bauerlein's "empirical" account of the decline of reading and much else. That rings true, at least to quite a few of us in the teaching profession. What doesn't ring true is the book's "packaging," its skewed explanation of the source of the deficit in reading, knowledge and civics, and ultimately, its sense of the big picture.
The dumbest title?
The first problem, which may be caused by Bauerlein's publisher rather than by Bauerlein himself, is the over-hyped packaging of the book. Calling the book The Dumbest Generation, a phrase plucked rather out of context from Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000), a satirical novel about the excesses of "political correctness" in the 1990s, simply invites pointless challenges. Since Bauerlein isn't offering an in-depth historical account of knowledge levels over several generations, or even any comparisons with other cultures, the use of "dumbest" is needlessly provocative. And while Bauerlein makes clear in his text that he's using "dumb" to mean "ignorant" rather than "stupid," it's bound to cause confusion of the "who-are-you-calling-stupid?" variety.
To make matters worse, there's a glibly earnest sub-title, "How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future" that also over-hypes the problem, and sounds like a publicity department's efforts to make sure that all the right hot buttons are pressed. And just in case potential readers still don't get it, there's even a sub-sub-title, "Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30," a play on a 1960s over-the-top admonition about not trusting people over 30. I guess it wouldn't have been sexy enough to more modestly call the book An Ignorant Generation: The Decline of Reading, Knowledge, and Citizenship Among Young People Today.
Blame the '60s, per usual
A far more serious defect mars the book when Bauerlein departs from his sound empirical findings and attempts to identify the source of the present decline. In the latter third of the book, under chapters headed "The Betrayal of the Mentors" (a play on the title of Julian Benda's 1920s critique, The Treason of the Intellectuals), and "No More Cultural Warriors," Bauerlein decides that the decline of reading was initiated by the youth culture of the 1960s, and especially by the "indulgence" of their mentors, who should have known better.
"Spend some hours in school zones," Bauerlein advises, "and you see that the indulgent attitude toward youth, along with the downplaying of tradition, has reached the point of dogma." Adds Bauerlein, "Like so many dominant cultural attitudes today, the final ennobling of youth motives and attribution of youth authenticity derive from the revolutionary heat of the 1960s." Soon, we're into a full-blown case of "blaming it on the '60s," as Susan Jacoby calls this particular affliction in her recent book, The Age of American Unreason (2008).
"The benighted mental condition of American youth today," Bauerlein tells us, "results from many causes, but one of them is precisely a particular culture-war outcome, the war over the status of youth fought four decades ago. From roughly 1955 to 1975, youth movements waged culture warfare... and the mentors who should have fought back surrendered." Bauerlein's portrait of the 1960s is simplistic, shallow and skewed beyond caricature. In his version of the 1960s, there's no civil-rights movement, no resistance to an American imperialist war in Vietnam, no feminist or gay movements, no birth of modern environmentalism. There's barely a Bob Dylan song blowin' in the wind.
Not only is this a shabby intellectual account, it also thoroughly vitiates a lot of the hard work Bauerlein has done in empirically demonstrating the decline of reading and knowledge. It isn't at all clear why Bauerlein doesn't blame the obvious culprits: the present-day manufacturers and advertisers of devices and especially trivial content who relentlessly push their wares upon young customers, and convince them that it's cool.
Isn't the aggressive marketing of the panoply of digital distractions something like the recent Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) fiasco? There, manufacturers and advertisers created a "need" for SUVs where none existed, and in North America brainwashed half the driving public into purchasing gas-guzzling, unsafe, "off-road" vehicles that 90 per cent of them weren't going to drive off-road, unless you count the Wal-Mart parking lot as an off-road adventure.
No, it's not the makers of Grand Theft Auto or the latest Batman superhero entertainment who are responsible for the dumbing down of the young, it's a band of youthful radicals from a half-century ago, according to Bauerlein.
Brain numbing for dollars
Bauerlein conveys almost no sense of the market-driven, mindless -- okay, let's say it -- capitalist, cultural context driving the present era. There's good data, but no big picture. Lately, when I review books that delineate contemporary social problems, Tyee readers often say that they get it, but then go on to ask that famous political question, "What is to be done?"
Bauerlein doesn't attempt to discuss any solutions, apart from a few hand-waving gestures. In a sense, the answers are obvious: to reverse the decline in reading, knowledge and democracy, we have to overthrow capitalist culture, and much of capitalism. In an equally obvious sense, the problem is too big: nobody knows how to overthrow, transform or even slightly change globalized capitalism and its cultural productions. People who are asking, "What is to be done?" are asking for a comprehensive political program, and those of us who have read history know how often "total" programs have turned into "totalitarian" regimes. For the moment, perhaps the most we can hope for is Obama's "change we can believe in."
And, of course, when the teaching season starts up again next month, I'll try to persuade my students to enter The Dead Library and discover that it's a living, magic forest.
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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- Bill Rees' Last Lecture
- Economist Calls Gateway Pipeline an Inflationary 'Threat'
- Too Much Energy Used to Mine, Move Bitumen Says BC Firm
- Is Canada Ignoring Signs of a Coming Economic Collapse?
- Harper in China
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- BC, You Love You
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- Who Pays Huge Power Bills for Clark's Gas Plants?
- Make It the Canadian Webcasting Corporation
- Harper in China
- When the Prize Is a Chance to Toil on BC's Farms
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- Would You Buy a Used Car from These Libs?
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- Foreign Trade Zones Eyed for Vancouver, Prince Rupert, Prince George
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RickW
3 years ago
"Dumbing Down" Began Long Before Computers
It began when language was formalized and written down, rather than passed orally from generation to generation. Even then, the recipient was "forced" to accept the nuances imbedded by the provider. Then came radio, and television, each of which in their own ways compelled the listener/viewer to accept someone else's interpretations. Computers have merely accelerated the pace by which we park our "memories" (and imaginations) elsewhere:
http://www.cbc.ca/radiosummer/thelateshow/guide.html
(Florence Carpeter - Language Keeper)
dorothy
3 years ago
To do or not to do...
What's to be done? is the wrong question. We have indeed, as they say, done quite enough. Try to check out Miguel Ruiz's blistering chapter in his 'Four Agreements' book, on attention-hooking. That is what we do, and must stop doing. Children left to themselves under the wings of active, enterprising adults, free to watch and ask, will never stop learning. They will ask their myriad questions, never to be answered with 'we'll get to that later'. When the child asks, he wants to know now. We do not teach children how to learn, that is their own drive. When they reach school age and can't be bothered, that's our doing. Think what incredible tenacity they show in wanting to walk and talk! Logic ought to tell us that would be the same for all other learning, if we hadn't interfered/held back/usurped and 'managed' to suit our own convenience. Yes, they are dumbed down, and it's our fault. Never mind digital. I know one young man, who only mobilized his capacity for literacy, when he became enthused about digital photography and image manipulations; now he zips through technical literature as well as politics and philosophy with dizzying speed. This was not the school's doing; it only happened after he got out from under its attempts at mind management and heel-and-toe clipping to 'make him fit'. We are sooo lazy.
Fiat lux
3 years ago
Have to admit that I was a
Have to admit that I was a lousy student, back in the old ages, barely scraped through exams, but at the same time devouring books on a great variety, non-school subjects, by the dozens and hundreds. The total number is around 3,000 and still have about 1,500 on stock.
The ignorance of the present generations, which includes people in their middle ages, with all kinds of so called education and diplomas on their walls, is staggering. All they can repeat is propaganda cliches they pick up from the corporately controlled and censored media. Their biggest concern is "jobs", to buy, buy and buy things and to "travel". No matter where, but to be on a plane going somewhere, but seeing nothing and understanding nothing.
The classic example and pattern of societies heading under dictatorship and self destruction, while their masters are rubbing their hands with glee, planning to sell the idea of microchips to future generations, when they'll be able to become skilled and educated without long years of training and studies.
What a beautiful future, we old timers have missed. And thank God we did.....
Ed Deak.
Van Isle
3 years ago
I thought that the post
I thought that the post secondary institutions were suppose to educate people on how to think; question everything, ask intellegent questions, try and see things from a different angle. What has really been produced is a bunch of educated idiots who understand nothing and basically accept the status quo. This isn't a new, it's rampant with baby-boomers too. My own son borrows a quote from Mark Twain; "I don't want schooling to get in the way of my education" Over the years some of the dumbest people I've met have a university education. One of the most intellegent persons I've met had a grade 3 education, and his gift was that he had the power to observe.
G West
3 years ago
Edmund Wilson
I hope it was 'Axel's Castle' you were looking for, and not one of Wilson's appallingly self-absorbed books of essays about his own disordered and narcissistic life.
Reading his mewling account of how badly he felt he'd been done by when his second wife, Margaret Canby, did him the unforgiveable slight of falling down a flight of stairs and dying pretty much put me off Wilson and the rest of the American isolationists of that era. As for his observations about Soviet communism and the ‘beauty’ of Lenin’s face…the less said the better.
Other than that, your point about the demise of reading amongst the young is undoubtedly well taken - I'd wager not one in fifty graduates in the liberal arts even know who Edmund Wilson was…although I do think of him as more of a ‘critic’ than a scholar….and one who was frequently drunk at that.
DJ MacKinnnon
3 years ago
House of cards
I remember when I was working as a librarian at UBC a few years ago and thinking about the kind of information students were acquiring from various online sources. In using many internet resources instead of peer revieiwed journals and books I wondered if their research would gradually lose its credibility and legitimacy because it was bult on a house of cards as it were. Information piled up on information but not necessarily in a cohesive or factual manner. Short bursts of opinion interspersed with obscure information without a cohesive argument to substantiate it. And would this kind of information simply collapse one day because of the inconsistencies and leave us with no knowledge at all - or at least without having built on the knowledge previously establshed?
Booker
3 years ago
You get what you pay for
I would ask educators how students without a broad-based knowledge in history, literature, and civics are passing their courses. Surely it is possible to test the student's knowledge. Are are educational institutions being too undemanding? Looking in from the outside it appears to me that colleges and universities are treating students (and parents) as if they are customers. They are competing for the student's (and parent's) dollar. The customer is always right. They shall get the degree they paid for and not be inconvenienced by such things as failure.
Christopher Robin
3 years ago
I can get quite dumb....
Blame the 60s?! Blame the music that passes as music nowadays! With lollipops and candy wrapper songs polluting the airwaves, where's the intelligence and soul?! We need more music like the ones on the The Hotel Cafe now that's music! Luckily it's free too!
don quixote
3 years ago
As someone very
As someone very well-acquainted with someone closely connected with the public education system, I have to disagree with your general hypothesis, Mr. Persky. My acquaintance assures me that, in his grade 8 English class, many students cheered when given an 'independent novel study' assignment (the current designation for what was called in your day a book report). He also tells me has a substantial number of students who, if they finish their in-class work ahead of the other students, will pull out a book to read.
The librarian at his school spends a great deal of time trying to recover books that students have borrowed. Ironically, this is a good thing, since it indicates that students are, indeed, borrowing books!
I also have to question the statistics used to justify the hypothesis. You and I are about the same age, I believe (I remember you running for Chancellor, I think it was, at UBC, ever so many years ago). When you were in high school, how many of your peers were aiming for post secondary education? At my school, it was less than 20%. The rest were going directly into the workforce. How many of that 80% do you think were looking for books by Edmund Wilson? Not many, I suspect. I consider myself fairly well educated, but I haven't read anything by him recently. Yet my own children are familiar books written by Chomsky and Foucault.
Let's face it. The vast majority of people never have, and never will, be reading such material. This is not something that has changed significantly over the last forty or fifty years.
Yes, the Internet has changed the way we gather information (after all, I am reading this on-line), and yes, students do spend a lot of time socializing electronically (in our day they passed notes or talked on the phone), but really, do you think that our peers, as a group, were any more well-informed or knowledgeable about world affairs than today's kids?
I doubt it. In fact, given the wealth of information so readily available to young people these days, and the ease with which they interact with that information, I think the future is fairly bright.
Cheers.
slim
3 years ago
Lack of participation by young people
Don Quixote made some great points, especially about the lower percentage of young people pursuing higher education years ago compared to now.
In today's federal politics, I don't see a role for young people to participate other than to hammmer signs into lawns and deliver pamphlets for candidates. Within political parties, polices are essentially determined by political party leaders and their close advisors. For example, when Harper presents his new five-point plan for the next election, every candidate and campaign supporter will need to be on script. There is no opportunity to add a youthful interpretation of campaign priorities into the mix. What role is there for a young person to play within a political party that invites critical and creative thinking? There is none that I can think of.
Why do young people know more about American Idol than who the speaker of the US House of Representatives? Young people get to vote and exchange thoughts online about the different Idol singers. There is empowerment in exercising an American or Canadian Idol vote. Young people have practically no say over matter that take place in the US Congress or Canadian parliament. I'm middle aged. Even I have no voice. I already know who will win in my riding in the next federal election. Why should I bother to participate in the election process when there is already a de-facto winner in my riding?
I think one reason young people don't appear to know as much about common things is that they have many more opportunities to branch out and pursue different reading interests. I may not know the name of my local member of parliament; I do know more about the politics of the Chinese languages and dialects. My friends may know more about the Norwegian elkhound or the significance of the Estonian Song Festival than I do. We don't all read the same books or same online materials. We don't all watch the same television programs. We don't all play the same sports anymore. We don't join Scouts or Guides together. It doesn't mean we are dumb. It doesn't mean young people are dumber than the previous generation. We just have divergent interests that makes us appear dumb when we are together.
G West
3 years ago
Participation rates
I'm not sure the fact that more young people graduate from high school - attend or graduate from University or college really means much. If, as seems to be the case, entrance standards are being lowered it's hardly indicative of much.
As for possessing the skills to write a decent research essay that hadn't been cribbed from a selection of easily-identifiable web resources - I can assure you that a very small percentage of university students produce decent and independent work - far fewer than was the case 20 years ago.
We know from several studies that grade inflation is a fact and BC is in the process of eliminating virtually all grade XII examinations anyway.
An increasing number of universities, colleges and technical schools are considering only class marks only when making admission decisions.
A recent report to the SFU senate said:
“Presently, almost all B.C. Grade 12 students admitted to SFU are given admission offers prior to writing provincial exams, based on self-reported or interim grades.
“B.C. Transfer students from the colleges and university-colleges are admitted based on their college grades. Most colleges eliminated the requirement for optional B.C.12 exams last year.
“Students from other provinces are admitted without the equivalents of B.C. Grade 12 examinations.
“B.C.12 final grades arrive in August, making it all but impossible to effectively use the grades in our present admission process.”
If a prospective student does write optional Grade 12 exams the results would be used by SFU only if they increased the student's admission average.
ME2
3 years ago
Books ain't where its at, Stan
Persky, finding himself alone amid stacks of 10+ yr-old books, agonises over computers and TV displacing the reading of books.
But like it or not, Stan, the days when books were the primary sources of authoritative knowledge are long gone. In too many cases, books - esp 10 yr-old books - become repositories of misinformation, useful only to historians and others interested in the ongoing development of ideas.
I've read that the sum total of our knowledge now doubles every two years. Often the old information/theory then becomes totally wrong overnight.
Given such a wealth of information, and the rapidity with which new information comes on stream, it would seem to me that once the student has grasped the basics, he/she would be well advised to source the Web to learn how developments are proceeding. Since papers by PhDs (often mutually contradictory) are readily available on the Web, students would do well - and perhaps learn more - by understanding their arguments.
This is necessary, I think, since the objective of study has long bypassed the "pursuit of truth", and has settled into the obtaining of a degree simply as a guarantor of a good income, and doing so demands only that the practitioner is "up-to-date" (wrong or not) in the eyes of her/his peers.
And as Booker notes, universities have been "profit centered" into becoming diploma factories, and so it is little wonder that a large proportion of their graduates are robotised, cloned technologists given more to providing tested formulas than to finding novel solutions for a problem.
And don't for a moment think that such isn't what the bean counters want - themselves totally reliant upon formulaic procedures.
We all know that as Dorothy posted above, attitudes to learning are set at an early age, and can be encouraged at school as well - although at a greater cost than we seem prepared to spend. Still, a student with an inquiring mind will learn regardless of the difficulties placed in his/her way.
I would suggest then, that the Web offers greater opportunity to learn than ever before. The problem, I think, lies with the attitudes we learn from TV and other media.
Persky suggests, correctly :
"Bauerlein conveys almost no sense of the market-driven, mindless -- okay, let's say it -- capitalist, cultural context driving the present era."
But in the end, I find myself in full agreement with Don Quixote, esp. :
"......given the wealth of information so readily available to young people these days, and the ease with which they interact with that information, I think the future is fairly bright."
Provided, of course, that we succeed in keeping the Web out of the clutches of the gov't and the corporations.
RickW
3 years ago
In China
The "old" China -- the one that conquered much of Asia at one time or another (and long before Gutenburg), it was not uncommon for an army of scribes to re-write the parchments and scrolls, to reflect "the new" history of a newly "liberated" region.
Such has been the history of man. ME2's comment:
is inevitable.
lynn
3 years ago
Falling trees
I liked Stan Persky's comparison of books to trees.
In the days when there was not so much money, less things but more real wealth, the small town that I grew up in had a library of the grandest proportions for an isolated place on the coast. Inside its doors it did feel much like an old growth forest, in the way that a forest often feels like a cathedral...mysterious.... silent and still but alive in a bristling kind of way....with that wondrous woody scent of old books that calls out to come explore.
The times I spent there as a young child galivanting down the aisles of books with my Dad are among my favourite memories.
Kids didn't have a lot of stuff then, not a lot of things, not a lot of distracting devices. We played more, and had to use our imagination. I think Dorothy made this point so well in her piece above.
That wonderful old library eventually fell to the new ....it was moved to the basement of the town's bland municipal hall, to a tight but economical space that held no mystery, with no room to roam about or lose yourself in. Somehow a decent library became a luxury the town could no longer afford.
My basic take is that the reading of books doesn't necessarily make a person intelligent, you certainly can learn things in many ways, including the internet.
But for me nothing replaces reading a book you love, it remains with you in a way not many things do.
Moonbug
3 years ago
we are not all illiterate
I love books; they are my single biggest non core expenditure. I am 25. There are lots of bibliophiles out there, and lots of us who actually DO read books online.
To be honest, I think copyright is part of the problem. If people stopped commodifying knowledge and made it free and available, then I think you would see many more youth getting into reading.
For example, I have modified my Nintendo Dual Screen portable gaming system to become a book reader. If gaming companies and companies that produced other portable electronic devices were to be encouraged to expand the capabilities of their devices to include text readers, I think it would encourage more young people to read. Especially if the books were free to download.
Reading has to be cast as cool, and older folks need to stop harping on younger folks. I feel like there is a total misunderstanding of what it means to be young today amoung the previous generation. There are plenty of hip, literate geeks in my generation who constantly get smushed into the "dumb kid" category.
It doesn't help that education is totally being squeezed by increased demands on health care budgets. Maybe some of you older folks could pay a little more into healthcare so that my school district could afford to have a five day school week? That might help.
I'm being a little tongue in cheek, but honestly, anyone who is over 50 should think about how expensive it is for young people to try to get educated these days, and how if they don't get educated they are squished into a dumb as dirt brainless job where they are forced to smile all day at semi-elderly english teachers ordering their lattes. I don't blame them for finding the idea of drinking a beer and playing video games more relaxing than reading War and Peace at the end of a day like that.
Also, I think that perhaps given the enormity of information available, these surveys of knowledge are doing a disservice to young people.
Maybe young people are cynical about government and don't give a damn about the civil war? Why should they? Maybe they prefer to research dadaism, and they actually know way more about early modern european rites of kingship than about Ms.Rice or the speaker of the house of whatever.
The fact that someone doesn't know about something you find important doesn't mean that they don't know anything at all. Is there any independent yard stick by which we can measure the importance of one type of information over another? Just because the older generation thinks it is important doesn't mean it is.
HawkEyes
3 years ago
In defense of books…
In my opinion, computers do not belong in a library, especially at the expense of its budget.
Nor are books dead.
A great book is a foundation of knowledge, a great book lives on to enlighten and move generations… Try finding or buying one that’s out of print.
anarcho
3 years ago
Some truth, but more questions
While it is perhaps true that most young people don't read - indeed, as someone pointed out when did they ever do so? - I must say that the young activists are certainly well read. In part this is due to the Internet. Books and articles that took me months to find back in the 1960's are available within seconds. Another question. Does this lack of reading apply just to the USA or the Western World in general? We know that the US corporate state has actively sought to dumb down its population in order to better control them.
ME2
3 years ago
Overheard some 6,000 yeas ago
"Hey Akmed, what do you think of this new papyrus idea?"
"It'll never replace clay, Haji, it's too brittle and the ink fades. And anyway, all the information we really need is already on clay"
......."The next thing you know, they'll be tearing down the official tablet storage rooms because people can keep papyrus anywhere. So how will we guarantee the accuracy of information when any fool can record it?"
bikechick
3 years ago
There is nothing original or
There is nothing original or even interesting in a new take on how the younger generation is less aware than an older generation. There is a reason why people call the "the good old days". We can get all misty-eyed thinking about the days when we used to laze around at the beach reading the literary greats, and when we were doing that we were playing kick-the-can and having tons of fun without corporate intervention. And while yes, corporations were only seeds of what they are now, kids still found wasteful ways to spend their time while still ingesting kernels of education and worldliness.
The blatant disregard for the ease of information and travel makes me wonder just how well-researched this book might be, as well as what its sources are.
On a different note, looking through the stacks is not an indication of library use. I personally never go through the stacks. When I'm reading about something, I generally automatically hit the VPL website, order it, and wait for my little library e-notice saying that it's in. I can then go pick it up, and maybe even grab a few charge-free videos while I'm at it.
Another note is in regards to the university libraries. When I was at UBC ten years ago, the charge for overdue books was 1$ per item per day. I would regularly walk away with 60$ fines. They had none of the handy reminders that the VPL does, and the staff there were generally unfriendly. I've always preferred the city library - they're just a little short on academic journals.
Mr. Beer N. Hockey
3 years ago
Last time I took a college
Last time I took a college class, maybe a decade ago, I piled up some books in the library's cubby hole zone and did my best to write a paper on the film Easy Rider near the end of term. I too was undisturbed by the shuffling of papers, the racket of books slamming shut and the ghastly stink of student farts other than my own.
That was before I got the first of my pair of computers. I do not use the libraries much now either. Except for reading the Racing Form my exposure to newspapers is scanty. To my surprise the computer has done some good for me. I write more and I write better. I do however still buy books and records, could not imagine life without them.
I do have a niggling feeling that being brought up with books has become a lost benefit. The lost benefit is perspective.