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About the Author
Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001). His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, TLS, Yale Review, Partisan Review, Reason Magazine, and many other national periodicals. Topics he will cover include the ideological climate of the campus, knowledge and skill levels of U.S. students, and technology in the classroom.
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Recent Posts
How Adjunct-ing Helps--and Harms--the Humanities Profs | Comment [9]
Against Adjuncting | Comment [28]
Chronicle Almanac Data | Comment [3]
The Labor Problem | Comment [52]
Web Reactionaries | Comment [26]
Featured Articles By the Author
How to Make Students Learn
Last weekend, The Boston Globe ran a series of slides based on The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30 (Tarcher/Penguin), which came out yesterday. (The slides, a follow-up story, and the Web chat can be reached here).
The slides were provocative and whimsical and, inevitably, simplistic, but the response from the teens and twenty-somethings was voluminous. More than 500 comments came in, and some of them ran several paragraphs refuting the “dumb” allegation. The denial was sometimes furious, and so were the emails I received.
“You’re wrong. And in all the wrong ways, too. Take care where you tread,” one said.
“Now you and your big English Proffesor ego was probably nit-picking at my entire email. Great,” went another.
And another: “I’m writing to tell you that you’re an ass.”
Another: “I wish to thank you for showing me who the dumbest generation is: yours.”
Another wrote on his blog, “The older you get, the more you think it’s okay to call other people dumb. Don’t get old, like Bauerlein. The jerk.”
And more of the same.
Most of these messages and posts contained substantive criticisms of the slides, however, and it seemed like a teachable moment was at hand. I responded to the messages solely on substantive grounds, conceding a few points about the slide show and providing links to research supporting the thesis. The next stage was encouraging. Most of them wrote back in an altogether different attitude, still critical of the thesis but dropping the rancor and sometimes apologizing. In fact, they went out and did some research of their own to find evidence of intelligence among their peers. And they promised to send further materials as the debate over youth and technology unfolded.
I take that as a lesson in teaching approach. Obviously, these correspondents resented the “dumb” tag, understandably, even though it clearly didn’t apply to them. Their pique is a good sign in that it means they care enough about intellectual values to worry about not meeting them.
But it’s also a bad sign in that it means they don’t hear it often enough. For an elder to chastise them for not reading enough, studying enough, caring enough about history and civics, acquiring knowledge as part of their maturity — those criticisms they should hear all the time. The standards of adulthood should be an abiding rebuke to the dispositions of adolescence. But it seems that too many of the kids rarely hear it, and so when they encounter it, it sounds hostile and degrading, destructive criticism instead of constructive criticism. They should understand that genuine concern for the intellectual welfare of students yields judgment as well as encouragement, blame as well as praise.
Posted at 08:30:30 AM on May 16, 2008 | All postings by Mark BauerleinComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
This is the part that is perfect, Mark, and compliments to you for it: “I responded to the messages…, conceding a few points about the slide show and providing links to research…. The next stage was encouraging. Most of them wrote back in an altogether different attitude, still critical of the thesis but dropping the rancor and sometimes apologizing. In fact, they went out and did some research of their own….”
What students need most from us is engagement. I am far less concerned with getting them to agree with me than I am with getting them to take me on in a constructive way. This is one of the reasons I believe it is so important to bring the faculty back into the center of campus life, and into the center of campus residential life in particular, where the absence of intelligent engagement is nearly universal. In an earlier essay I wrote:
“[Students must be made to] feel that they are part of something larger than themselves, a tradition that has come before them, and that will go on after them, and to which they can make important contributions. And to those who reflexively assert that traditions are stifling and prejudiced, I reply that no one is more in need of strong traditions in their education than the radicals and subversives of the future, because they more than anyone need something challenging to push against. They need ‘teachers of athletes’ who will show them respect by arguing with them and making them strong, not spineless educationists who will tell them ‘whatever you want to believe is fine‘—a disrespectful and self-serving excuse for a lack of real engagement.”
— R.J. O'Hara · May 16, 01:59 PM · #
Indeed, to intersect the posting with the preceding comment, it is difficult to engage students with any criticism at all when you must worry about their judgment of your course in “student evaluations” lest you lose your job.
The adjunctification of the university has, indeed, contributed to this decrease in the experience of “constructive criticism” for far too many of the nation’s higher education students.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 16, 05:34 PM · #
Mark, let me get this straight.
You write a book that tries to be provocative by calling kids names: “The Dumbest Generation.”
Then the Boston Globe puts together a slide show full of caricaturing images and fragmented text which you admit was “whimsical and, inevitably, simplistic.” This slide show features information broken into bits, removed from context, unsupported by evidence, and often incoherent (MySpace readers make fun of good writers, so let’s take MySpace imagination and team it up with Wikipedia information! WTF?).
Then, in an anonymous comment box conversation, some people write stupid things in response to a simplistic, incoherent slide show.
Then, on a blog for academics, you use this as further proof of your initial provocations. (Look! No one gave an Aristotelian critique of an incoherent on-line PowerPoint version of my name-calling book! That’s proof that they’re dumb!)
Kettle, black, etc.
— Luther Blissett · May 16, 06:02 PM · #
Most students can’t handle criticism of any sort. Look at the vitriol they showed in this case! Imagine it in a classroom!
AHA hits the nail: Without job security, how can one properly bring students into the discourse [often forcefully] when you need to ensure they “like you” enough so that you feed and clothe yourself with a job when they’re gone?
— TM · May 16, 10:18 PM · #
You can make students learn by acknowledging their skills and knowledge, while leading them to task where their skills and knowledge are marginally insufficient.
On the other hand, most of the time it is not the job of the teacher who help those who want not to learn—they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Traditionally, a student asks a teacher to teach. A teacher does not ask a student to learn.
When a student come to class with no question—not even, “Teacher, what should I know next?”—then you don’t have the responsibility to teach anything.
It is unclear to me whether students who paid the tuition are paying for the knowledge or the opportunity to get the knowledge. If the students were paying for the opportunity, I don’t see anything wrong ethically for a teacher to dismiss a class meeting when the students cannot come up with a question.
— Edgar · May 17, 04:07 AM · #
On comment 5:
Check the Chronicle jobs blog to read about the professor who was fired for failing too many students who don’t want to learn.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 17, 09:09 AM · #
The United States has been generating generally low quality human beings for generations—people who steal anything not nailed down, people whose self-promotatory bombast makes grapes shrivel, people who betray and backbite instead of collaborating, elites who take no responsibility for the poorest 1/6 of their national population, parents of people like Baby Bush, me, etc. It should not surprise anyone that they continue to find new ways to generate poor quality people. However, I doubt that these new digital ways are in any way better at generating dumbness than the pre-WWII schools my father attended.
— Richard Tabor Greene · May 19, 05:45 AM · #
“Poor quality people.” I love it. Let’s start saying “PQP” for texting and just general efficiency. Billions of the goddamned things on the planet, too!
— LuckyJim · May 19, 07:42 AM · #
Re: Comment 3, evidently you didn’t read the entire article. The latter half consists of refutation of the charge with evidence provided by the student’s own engagement in the process. Try again after you’ve read the whole thing.
That noted, while I disgree that todays’ students are stupid, I have recently been quite disturbed to realize the degree to which the majority of my 20-something friends are severely unable to focus; they have difficulty concentrating on a single subject for more than five minutes at a time, and a card or dice game that lasts more than ten minutes leads to restless agitation. Several have gone through multiple jobs in a short period of time, and I’m thinking I am shortly going to have the older-sister sit-down talk with them about how their own inability to concentrate is probably impacting their success in these positions.
— bta · May 19, 10:27 AM · #
“The standards of adulthood should be an abiding rebuke to the dispositions of adolescence,” as professor B. intones. Who would disagree?
And where are these standards to be found? In the stumbling and uninspired speaking of our commander in chief? In the sophistry and lies of a regime that insults its citizens with “justifications” for war? In the F-bombs of a vice President who shows disrespect for the office and for his colleagues? One could go on, but the plain fact is that unless we find more and better examples of adult standards in leadership, higher education’s efforts to provide such “models” will be tragically stymied. Decades ago, Paul Goodman wrote GROWING UP ABSURD. It still resonates.
I suspect that the the usual mindless proposed remedy to such alleged “dumbness” will emerge yet again: test the little bastards.
— George K. · May 19, 11:15 AM · #
On Comment 9: Yes, isn’t it interesting that the attention span seems co-extensive with the length of program time between television commercials (at most 10-15 minutes). Years of training to overcome….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 19, 07:14 PM · #
No discussion of this topic is complete without attending to the 17-year-old rappers of Psikotik and their appreciation of The Economist:
“The style in which they write is simple and concise, how do they get their sentences so precise?” … ““Yes, they have a bias; it’s pro-democratic. And pro-free trade; they are very emphatic.”
http://chrisblattman.blogspot.com/2008/05/economist-gets-good-rap.html
— BenjaminL · Jun 2, 05:29 PM · #