The High-School Picture

No, no, you have it all wrong, Gox. Back in the 80s we never cared about socializing, it was all about hitting the books, man. We had to beat the Soviets. And now look what’s happened: because of social networking, things is gettin’ all crazy again. Much of the time, I think MB’s blog ought to be retitled, “Oh, these %@&* kids today!” Spot on, esp. about warehousing. They know it and hate it when they see it.

Took a look at what I could access of The American Freshman reports. Lots of warnings, a la NFL games on view in sports bars, about what one can and cannot legally do with the data. Accompanied by insufferable PowerPoint slides, the attempted concretization by wonks with zero percent imagination and the visceral human empathy of salamnaders shuffling their insufferable survey results. They probably think Anna Karenina is meaningless because it doesn’t contain a survey of upper-class Russian women’s attitudes about adultery. Housed at some heartland flatland featureless university where they still listen to Prairie Home Companion, I could understand. But UCLA, on the Pacific Rim, on the hip side of L.A., where life looks to the future and contains other things than doughy semesters? Yeesh. But I digress.Couldn’t find a stat about “leisure reading,” and so would appreciate Prof. Bauerelin’s ending the suspense. Presume LR went down. But does reading e-mails and blog-hopping count as LR, or is LR exclusively ink-on-paper “complex texts,” perferably between tooled leather hardcovers?As to “reasons for going to school,” there didn’t seem to be much of a change. Making more money crept up closer to “learning things that interest me” (now there’s an elastic category! maybe those things interested freshman because they seemed instrumental to making more money) as numero uno. And MM$ should be right in Prof. Bauerlein’s libertarian sweet spot. Isn’t making as much money as one possibly can and doing with it exactly what one wants without Big Government restricting its use or taking more than a token in taxes the bedrock of libertarianism? Finalement, exactly how long did that 51 percent of 1930s students attend high school? What percentage attended only up to age 16, the common age to be able to leave school to work, and then left?

At last, at last, at last! A rebuttal stat! Prof. Bauerlein must be over the moon to have located one.But…uh, does that ten percent rise in seventeen years meana) More students are bored because they’re not teaching that really galvanizing “domain knowledge” anymore and they’re at sea in class not having read the Iliad in the eighth grade?b) Students are reading too much from a screen and not enough from printed paper pages?c) Students who know they’re not going on to college and that there are no good jobs for somebody with only a high-school diploma in this free-trade, globalized country, also know that they’re being warehoused and sullenly resent it?d) Reality shows, video games, and other entertainment produced by our lowest-common-denominator commercial culture await at the 3 o’clock bell?e) Teaching-to-the-test has taken all the fun and charm out of high school?f) Teachers unions’ obstructing getting rid of bad teachers is at the bottom of it all?At the risk of getting a little ad hominem, this and the subsequent “hiring” post are a tad lazy. Trolling for stats, and excerpting them without at least a few paragraphs of prose opining about what they mean don’t contribute much to the discussion. Prof. Bauerlein’s respondents are doing too much of the heavy lifting. And the “hiring” post is outright duplicated by the CHE itself in a news story. C’mon.

The LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) strategy is a cause for boredom for some above the median. The pace of teaching is so slow and so repetitive. This was true in a middle-class elementary school in the 60′s and a middle-class, academic, high school in the 70′s. I am guessing that things are worse now in most schools. I realized at one point that in my grade we were adding 2 numbers together, while the next grade they were learning to add 3 numbers and I thought that was ridiculously slow. I think I was bored in high school every day. Fortunately, in some high school subjects, the teacher would let the good students do what they wanted (as long as we were quiet) while spending the other 40 minutes with the rest of the class.In one class, I remember reading the textbook, when I got bored, instead of listening to the teacher.Other teachers would help us prep for academic contests or let us out of class to work on equipment to demonstrate famous experiments. So there was an attempt to help the good students do more productive things.I remember regularly yawning, watching the clock and thinking “when will this end” in high school German class. I can’t remember why. Maybe I didn’t like Max Frisch? And yet, I did get the prize for being the best student. And I did learn the word “ausgezeichnet”, because it appeared on some of my test papers.

In post 8, when I was writing about adding numbers, I was writing about doing it using your mind, not a calculator, not an adding machine, not a computer. We did arithmetic with our minds, pencil (later pen)and paper. We memorized the “times” table. We used bottle caps to understand the decimal system. Later we had elements of the infamous “New Math”, but I think that was something like 5th or 6th grade. We learned superficially: Venn Diagrams and things like the Associative, Commutative and Distributive Laws.Just providing a little context, since today caculation is so much easier with calculators, computers and spreadsheets.

@ goxewu, post 6(a) “…not having read the Iliad in the eighth grade?”. I don’t know about 8th graders, but Michael Wood’s 1985 documentary TV mini-series “In Search of the Trojan War” would probably be good, for a series of history class, for certain student segments. As an adult, I greatly enjoyed the sensationalist cinematic techniques, with stirring music, spectacular lighting and exciting voice-overs as we see the ancient artefacts. Especially good was Schliemann’s discovery of the “Death Mask of Agamemnon” and then the discussion that it really isn’t Agamemnon’s. A major theme of the series was that each set of scientists interpreted their findings in the context of their society or their beliefs. The result was different interpretations. This is a very important lesson for children. The series also nicely illustrates that repeatedly, throughout history; the vast majority of academics (before the recent past) have been wrong and have slowed the expansion of knowledge. I never read the Iliad, but as a child I learned that the businessman Schliemann ignored the all the profs, who all said there was no Troy. They said it was a myth. Schliemann ignored the profs and paid attention to Homer. The result was a string of spectacular finds. Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Einstein and maybe soon a postdoc working in obscurity somewhere, illustrate in physics how often the non-prof has been needed to overturn the orthodoxy of the profs. It also illustrates again, that nearly all profs have been wrong, before the recent past. Children need to know that they could be the next to overturn the orthodoxy, the paradigm or stagnation.The Trojan War story provides the non-physical science student segments with their own set of examples. There might be better examples, but this is the one that comes to mind.Plus, everyone gets to study how the TV series manipulates the emotions, expectations and thoughts of the viewer. This is a useful skill.It probably isn’t for everyone, but it is probably great for some segments.

In post 12, I have Einstein in my list. He was eventually a professor, but originally he was a Swiss patent clerk, a job he got through a friend. He was still a clerk when he published his famous journal papers in 1905. These papers included Special Relativity. He continued to be a clerk for a few years afterwards. Eventually he became a professor. When he became famous enough, he could avoid most university teaching. He published General Relativity while he was a professor.Based on my examples in post 10, I reduce my premise to physics and parts of archaeology/history, leaving open the question of whether the premise is true for other fields. Kuhn, Popper, their followers and detractors, probably have had something to say about the topic.

Agreed, bcmath, that kids aren’t “dumber” these days–not at all. Instead, they are devoting more attention to dumb things (texting . . .).

@goxewu, post 17, regarding your footnote (I am not defending the book). I remember when a telegram was a herald of death. I only remember telegrams being sent to my family to provide notifications of deaths in the family. In movies, I remember the telegrams delivering the news of death in war, to families. The Zimmermann Telegram, the Pearl Harbor related telegrams (“Tora! Tora! Tora!”) and the stock ticker in 1929, sent the messages of war, death and loss. Telegraphese, cablese: the language of diplomats, soldiers and tycoons. The cleverest of this genre was the one word telegram “Peccavi”.Telegrams were traditionally expensive and about very serious things. Whereas, texting and tweeting are stereotyped as being about the trivial and the superficial. I find a major part of the humor in Roland Burton Hedley, III’s tweets is the transference of the character’s cartoon superficialty, to a new medium.You don’t expect tweets with: “Sturm and Drang”, “Drang nach Osten”, Zen koan, “Ich bin ein Berliner” or haiku.I am I displaying “domain knowledge” in my words above? If so, it shows that at least some “domain knowledge” is probably a hindrance in “functioning in the real world”. It is “dumb” to let most people know that you know or care about these things.

@goxewu, post 17, point e, this time, a mild defense of the book. I support your raising your various points, since they help clarify my own thinking. I think discussion is productive. I am interested in the responses.The title communicated to me, personally, that it was likely to be: polemic, sarcastic, mocking, exaggerated, sensationalist, parodic and/or selective in its use of evidence. It seemed like it would be another entry in the battle over education, technology and kids.I would have guessed less than 1% of the population cares enough about these issues to actually read just one book of those in this contest. Not an Oprah book. It is currently ranked 35,008 at Amazon.com (but it is possible that its target audience doesn’t use Amazon (nasty digital technology ;-) )). I feel it doesn’t meet the “scale” requirement.It looked like a counter-balance to books (and parents), who seek to proclaim that: technology, kids or kids with technology are wonderful. In general, all these types of books tend to be selective in their use of evidence and sometimes use suspect logic. I expect: sophistry, bias, error and deception in all books that seek to modify or sustain policy.I didn’t think of it as “literary”. I don’t think of it as a “fraud”, especially since it specifically excludes the striver kids.

I meant, in post 18: “Sturm und Drang”.Ich habe alles vergessen! It isn’t literally true. It is self-contradictory, but it does try to communicate frustration with loss. I might use it as a book title or chapter heading without meaning to deceive.Ich spreche nur ein bisschen Deutsch.This is closer to the truth.

Professor Bauerlein, thanks for your response.I wrote that I expected that it would be: “…sarcastic, mocking, exaggerated, sensationalist, parodic…”, exactly because I thought “Dumbest” was a parody of Brokaw’s title and the subtitle contained a parody of “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30″ (a line which I most enjoyed when Charlton Heston delivered it in the 1968 “Planet of the Apes” (at least the generations so far have succeeded in avoiding nuclear destruction)). I must admit, I thought I had exactly the expectations that you hoped to set with such a title/subtitle, which also includes “How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future”. This is further reinforced by my learning, through you, of the direct Roth quotation (which might have been in the book, but my memory of it has faded, was Roth quoted in the book?). Was I mistaken? What was your intention? Sadly, I am ignorant of Roth’s work since my high school reading of his Kafka tribute: “The Breast”. The information about the number of printings doesn’t tell me if you have exceeded the 1% mark of the US population. It doesn’t tell me if it totals the volume of an Oprah book or reached Frey. Each printing, could be of say 5,000 books or 100,000. It does suggest that it has had at least moderate and sustained sales success and may have been read by more people than 90% (99%? 99.9%?) of the books written by professors.The low cost of texting does not preclude its use for the transmission of an appropriate: koan, haiku, aphorism, epigram or quotation. Whether new, original or parody, the tweet is not forced to be trivial. For all I know, 0.0001% of tweets might be up there with “Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach” (a line I loved in high school, without knowing that Shaw was the source). My advice, unlike Heston’s, is don’t trust anyone’s book, regardless of age, who is trying to sell you an idea, and who isn’t?

In post 25, I should have positioned “Roth later on had more to write about certain professorial proclivities.” so that it referred to “The Breast”. Those interested in the Roth-Prof nexus, might start with the “The Gnomes of Academe: Philip Roth and the University” by Eric Solomon. It is part of the 1989 collection, “The American Writer and the University”, edited by Ben Siegel. Its discussion of “The Breast” shows just how superficial and ignorant a reader I was in high school.