Although they are exposed to more information than any other generation, thanks to the internet and cable television, survey after survey finds that young people’s knowledge and understanding about the world is declining at a rapid rate. Survey after survey during the past five years has shocked observers by revealing just how illiterate recent college graduates are. A December 2005 report called
The National Assessment of Adult Literacy
issued by the federal Department of Education found that only 25 percent of recent college graduates scored high enough to be considered proficient in the use of printed and written information to function in a society.
86
Doug Hesse, head of the honors program at Illinois State University, said the problem was that the media barraged Americans with flashes and bits of material, sound bites, and factoids, but no one helps them put the facts together and teaches them how to understand them and process them. Colleges tend to do the same thing by asking professors to make their classes more fun, focusing on interesting facts and anecdotes, cut up into easy-to-digest diversions without teaching them to do the hard work: fitting all of this information into real knowledge about the world. Even his honor students, the cream of the crop at American colleges, were assigned an average of fewer than fifty pages of reading per week. “Students seem to spend a lot of time on Facebook, and when you think about the literate practices involved in Facebook, that’s probably not contributing a lot to the scores on something like this literacy test.”
87
A generation ago, college upperclassmen were able to read Shakespeare in the original Elizabethan English, understand the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and explain the basics of geology, astronomy, and chemistry. Today, students who study Shakespeare can’t understand the plays themselves so they watch movies with Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet, Mickey Rooney as Puck, and Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo. Few of them have any idea who Plato and Aristotle were or what country or era they were from.
In the years since the literacy survey results were announced in 2005, additional surveys of college seniors tried to narrow down the problem, but the results only got worse. A November 2007 report from the National Endowment for the Arts found that only 22 percent of seventeen-year-olds read anything at all on a given day, down from 31 percent in 1984. It also found that fifteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds spent just seven to ten minutes a day voluntarily reading anything at all.
88
Many educators have begun warning that the literacy decline of America’s college graduates has become a national security issue. How will the United States compete in the world when its college graduates, the leaders of tomorrow, can only read and understand information at an elementary school level? Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA, in describing the results of the survey, warned that the future economic viability of the United States seemed to be at risk as an illiterate generation took over the reins of power.
89
Experts agree that the decline has nothing to do with the IQs of young people. Tests show they are just as smart as ever. The problems have to do with attitudes, motivation, and engagement. Many young people today seem to have lost their motivation to learn and are not afraid of going though life without knowing the basics of how their world, their government, or their economy works. The majority of students seem to have none of the curiosity and eagerness to learn that was once the hallmark of incoming college students. They seem to be immune from Aristotle’s statement at the beginning of his
Metaphysics
that “all human beings by nature desire to know.”
“We are doing a better job of teaching kids to read in elementary school,” said one national expert. “But once they enter adolescence, they fall victim to a general culture which does not encourage or reinforce reading. Because these people then read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they do more poorly in school, in the job market and in civic life . . . This is not a study about literary reading. It’s a study about reading of
any
sort and what the consequences of doing it well or doing it badly are. In an increasingly competitive world, the consequences of doing it badly include economic decline. . . . What are the consequences if America becomes a nation in which reading is a minority activity?”
90
In January 2006, the American Institutes for Research released the results of a survey of 1,827 soon-to-graduate college seniors chosen from eighty colleges around the country. The results, in many ways, were more alarming than the NEA study. It found that most college seniors were unable to understand documents that people encounter every day, such as comparing credit card statements and opposing newspaper editorials. They were unable to compare the cost of food per ounce or interpret the data on a comparison table about exercise and blood pressure. About 20 percent of college seniors had such low levels of quantitative understanding that they could not calculate if a car had enough gas to get to a gas station.
91
A survey of seniors at the top fifty-five colleges found that only 29 percent knew what “Reconstruction” referred to in American history and only a third could name the American general at the battle of Yorktown. A 1999 survey of teenagers by the National Constitution Center found that only 41 percent could name the three branches of government, even though 59 percent could identify the Three Stooges by name. In a 2003 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, only one in fifty students could name the first right guaranteed by the First Amendment and one out of four could not name any freedom protected by it. Other studies found that only 28 percent could name the chief justice of the United States, only 75 percent could name the vice president, only 26 percent could name the secretary of state, and a majority of students could not name the fifty states on an outline map of the country.
92
Child psychologist Laurence Steinberg, author and critic of public education, has called young people’s attitude towards education the “glorification of stupidity.” For them, ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of. Students avoid trying too hard because it is a ticket to the land of outcasts and nerds. Without rewards for excellence, anyone who strives to excel begins to look suspect and is shunned by the majority, who are comfortable reveling in the morass of mediocrity. The underachievers are proud of their average status and resist any efforts to push them to try harder.
93
When anti-intellectual high school graduates with poor reading skills come to college, they bring their “life is only a party” attitudes with them. The difference, of course, is that at college the playground set up by Diplomas Inc. is much larger and more expensive and there are no parents to set any limits. Although there are still dedicated and engaged students who attend college—even party schools—the students who fail to measure up academically often devalue education and believe that what they are learning is essentially worthless. Students in my classes repeatedly expressed this anti-intellectual attitude. They told me that they already knew everything they needed to know and were not interested in learning what I was supposed to teach them. They felt there was absolutely no connection between learning and success, no matter how much I tried to explain it to them.
“Most students feel compelled to stay in school, but there is also a widespread sense that much of what goes on there is irrelevant to their futures,” wrote sociologists Côté and Allahar. “Young people now have many more interesting and pleasurable distractions, against which book learning does not stand a chance except among a few outstanding students dismissed by the student culture as nerds or brains. . . . Some students increasingly act like self-entitled consumers demanding satisfaction,” they said.
94
“These anti-intellectual behaviors and attitudes are now so rife on college campuses that motivated and engaged students are being squelched by them,” said Paul Trout, an English professor at Montana State University. Obsessed with their hair, their clothes, their cars, their boyfriends and girlfriends, and how many friends they have on Facebook, they have little that could be recognized as an intellectual life.
95
While there have always been students who were bored with college, Trout said, “What has changed is the
number
of students who exhibit these attitudes.” Although no one has actually counted them, the number seems to be growing and they have reached a critical mass where they refuse to read the material for class and many of them even fail to show up. “If colleges and universities wind up providing comfortable environments for more and more slackers and screw-offs,” Trout said, colleges “will likely surrender whatever is left of their academic integrity and social credibility. Faced with growing numbers of high school graduates who resent and resist the rigors, demands, and pleasures of higher education, colleges and universities have lowered standards to keep students happy and enrollments up.”
96
The Tragedy of the 10 Percent
During my twelve years as a college instructor, there was only one small group of students who ever complained about the decline in academic standards: the smart, fully engaged students who expected to be intellectually stimulated in college and were extremely disappointed at what they were getting for their money. There were consistently two to four of these students in each of my classes and nearly all of them were miserable. The skimpy reading assignments, the low level of classroom discussion, the time wasted taking attendance, and going over the same material time and again all irritated them.
Instead of making comments or asking questions in class, which was frowned on by other students, they would often show up in my office after class to talk about what should have been discussed in class. In the strange world of Diplomas Inc., intellectual discussions must be conducted in secret, out of the way of the general party school climate.
It’s these students, the ones who went to college because they were intellectual, curious, and interested in learning about the world, who are being most cheated. Many of them transfer to more demanding colleges during freshman year. They chose the party school or subprime college, they said, because it was close to home or because the tuition was lower, but it was not providing them with what they needed and wanted. They were appalled by the lack of intellectual stimulation and any kind of rigor or challenge. They hated the easy grading policies that made them feel like chumps for working hard. They complained about the lack of any clearly defined goals. They complained that the A that they received was made worthless by the high grades that the slackers received. “Why should I work hard if someone else does nearly nothing and gets the same grade?” they asked.
The two or three students in each class who were enthusiastic about journalism and wanted to be crusading reporters who exposed evil-doers and celebrated unknown heroes felt cheated. These students didn’t need a course in third-grade grammar. They were talented writers who worked on their high school newspapers and wanted to take their writing skills to the next level. They wanted to learn how to conduct interviews, how to improve their writing and reporting, and how to write the best leads. They were the kinds of students I expected to teach when I first accepted the job.
This always created a dilemma for me, as it did for hundreds of other professors I have spoken with around the country. Did you teach the class at a high level for the few enthusiastic and engaged students who really wanted to learn or did you dumb it down for the majority who were not the least bit interested in listening to what you had to say? If you dumbed down the class and invented games and told jokes to entertain the disengaged students, the engaged students rightfully complained that the class was aimed too low. If you aimed higher, the disengaged students simply tuned you out.
When I was appointed advisor for some of these students with high expectations, my advice was that they transfer to a better college where they would not have to deal with such anti-intellectual harassment.
During my last year at the college, a new honors program was established to deal with this dilemma. The upper 10 percent of the students would be culled from the rest of the population and enrolled in special programs with special classes. The idea was that these students, many of whom probably chose to attend a party school by mistake and could have gone somewhere more demanding, could be taught at a higher level, something approximating the college level of a generation ago.
The unintended consequence, as was pointed out during discussions of this plan, was that the remaining vast majority of students enrolled at the college would be taught at the elementary school level. They’d learn how to read a single 150-page book in English class. They’d learn to do long division in math and how to find the United States on a world map in geography class. It would be all remediation all the time.
For most of the professors I spoke with, the upper 10 percent students were the only satisfying part of their jobs. They felt like someone was actually listening and learning. These students were the ones who went out and got good jobs in their fields and came back to thank us for teaching them. They were a source of pride.