[Infowarrior] - Can U Read Kant?

[Richard Forno]

(Something I discussed as well in 2003's  'Weapons of Mass Delusion',  
I might add........rf)


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121063808679386853.html?mod=2_1167_1

Can U Read Kant?
By DAVID ROBINSON
May 13, 2008; Page A15

The Dumbest Generation
By Mark Bauerlein
(Tarcher/Penguin, 264 pages, $24.95)

It would seem that technology and culture both make the present a good  
time to be young. The digital tools that are reshaping our economy  
make more sense to young "digital natives" than to members of older  
generation, an imbalance of abilities that tips the economic and  
political scales in favor of young people. Meanwhile, aging boomer  
parents, rather than pass down a fixed, canonical culture to their  
kids, encourage a modern-day version of their own rebellion, inviting  
younger voices to disrupt stodgy cultural continuities.

To Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, the  
present is a good time to be young only if you don't mind a tendency  
toward empty-headedness. In "The Dumbest Generation," he argues that  
cultural and technological forces, far from opening up an exciting new  
world of learning and thinking, have conspired to create a level of  
public ignorance so high as to threaten our democracy.
[Can U Read Kant?]

Adults are so busy imagining the ways that technology can improve  
classroom learning or improve the public debate that they've blinded  
themselves to the collective dumbing down that is actually taking  
place. The kids are using their technological advantage to immerse  
themselves in a trivial, solipsistic, distracting online world at the  
expense of more enriching activities – like opening a book or writing  
complete sentences.

Mr. Bauerlein presents a wealth of data to show that young people,  
with the aid of digital media, are intensely focusing on themselves,  
their peers and the present moment. YouTube and MySpace, he says, are  
revealingly named: These and other top Web destinations are "peer to  
peer" environments in the sense that their juvenile users have  
populated them with predictably juvenile content. The sites where  
students spend most of their time "harden adolescent styles and  
thoughts, amplifying the discourse of the lunchroom and keg party, not  
spreading the works of the Old Masters."

If the new hours in front of the computer were subtracting from  
television time, there might be something encouraging to say about the  
increasingly interactive quality of youthful diversions. The facts, at  
least as Mr. Bauerlein marshals them, show otherwise: TV viewing is  
constant. The printed word has paid a price – from 1981 to 2003, the  
leisure reading of 15- to 17-year-olds fell to seven minutes a day  
from 18. But the real action has been in multitasking. By 2003,  
children were cramming an average of 8½ hours of media consumption a  
day into just 6½ hours – watching TV while surfing the Web, reading  
while listening to music, composing text messages while watching a  
movie.

This daily media binge isn't making students smarter. The National  
Assessment of Educational Progress has pegged 46% of 12th-graders  
below the "basic" level of proficiency in science, while only 2% are  
qualified as "advanced." Likewise in the political arena:  
Participatory Web sites may give young people a "voice," but their  
command of the facts is shaky. Forty-six percent of high-school  
seniors say it's " 'very important' to be an active and informed  
citizen," but only 26% are rated as proficient in civics. Between 1992  
and 2005, the NAEP reported, 12th-grade reading skills dropped  
dramatically. (As for writing, Naomi Baron, in her recent book,  
"Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World," cites the NAEP to  
note that "only 24% of twelfth-graders are 'capable of composing  
organized, coherent prose in clear language with correct spelling and  
grammar.' ") Conversation is affected, too. Mr. Bauerlein sums up part  
of the problem: "The verbal values of adulthood and adolescence clash,  
and to enter adult conditions, individuals must leave the verbal mores  
of high school behind. The screen blocks the ascent."

What frustrates Mr. Bauerlein is not these deficits themselves – it's  
the way a blind celebration of youth, and an ill-informed optimism  
about technology, have led the public to ignore them. "Over and over,"  
he writes, "commentators stress the mental advance, the learning side  
over the fun and fantasy side." Steven Johnson, in his best-selling  
"Everything Bad Is Good for You," describes videogames as "a kind of  
cognitive workout." Jonathan Fanton of the MacArthur Foundation writes  
that children have created "communities the size of nations" where  
they explore "new techniques for personal expression." Such  
assessments, Mr. Bauerlein argues, are far too charitable.

Mr. Bauerlein contrasts such "evidence-lite enthusiasm" for digital  
technologies with a weightier learning tradition. He eulogizes New  
York's City College in the mid-20th century, a book-centered, debate- 
fostering place where a generation of intellectuals rejected the  
"sovereignty of youth" in favor of the concerted study of canonical  
texts and big ideas.

Is there any way of recovering this lost world? Probably not. But the  
future may be brighter than Mr. Bauerlein allows. No matter how  
frivolously young people may use digital technology now, a  
schoolchild's taste for play tells us little about what the next  
generation of intellectual leaders will do with technology's tools.  
There are glimmers: The new Amazon book reader may bring the best of  
predigital life forward into the present, and any number of  
institutions are (gradually) exploring ways to harness the new  
communications environment for scholarship, innovation and profit  
rather than idle enjoyment. In short, the children of future years  
will learn from their elders how to make the most of digital life just  
as soon as there are elders in place to offer instruction. The  
"elders" now don't seem to have a clue.

Mr. Robinson is associate director of Princeton University's Center  
for Information Technology Policy, a research center for the study of  
digital technologies and public life.