Last week an AP poll of the general population about education yielded some low scores for the school system. (Go here for the poll, and here for a USA Today summary.) The USA Today headline broadcast the prevailing opinion: “Poll: Schools not properly preparing kids.”

When asked, “Do you think the quality of schools in the United States is better, worse, or about the same as it was 20 YEARS ago?,” 20 percent answered “Much worse” and 42 percent “Somewhat worse.” Only five percent stated “Much better” and 16 percent “Somewhat better.”

The USA Today story related the opinion to college and workplace readiness problems: “The views of the general population echo concerns from business and college leaders, who say they have to spend a lot of time and money on remedial education for people who completed high school but don’t have the skills to succeed at work or in higher education.”

But in making comparisons between rates of readiness 20 years ago and rates of readiness today, we shouldn’t focus only on the schools. We should examine the leisure hours of teenagers as well, for here we see a sweeping shift in leisure habits that have a direct bearing upon their academic performance. Put simply, it is the steady shift from books to screens in young people’s lives. Leisure reading hours are down, and so is leisure reading enjoyment. Or rather, kids still read, but in a different way. Instead of reading a book without interruption for an hour at night, they read and write online. They blog, IM, chat, post and comment, upload and download, and the daily minutes pile up into the hundreds. Web 2.0 is more interactive than book reading, and it brings teens into contact with one another, not with characters and events from long ago.

Unfortunately, the mental and verbal habits they develop online don’t serve them well in the classroom or the workplace. In spite of all the texting students do, only six percent of college teachers polled by The Chronicle think that students come into class “very well prepared in writing.” We have a gigantic education-technology industry at work convincing teachers and parents that uniting the kids’ interest in tools to various software and laptop programs is the pathway to academic achievement. But technology means something else to teens: nonstop peer-to-peer gossip, grousing, support, friendship, vanity, anxiety, . . . The Web is a great enabler, and what digital tools have done is enable one of our society’s most powerful forces, the collective will of kids, to express and indulge itself.

So, when the Associated Press polls adults on problems facing the schools, as it did here, it should add to the list that now includes “Overcrowding,” “Getting and keeping good teachers,” student discipline, violence, facilities, bad textbooks, and low expectations another factor: kids over-connected after school.

(Image from photobucket.com)

Comments

1. …and should we also add to the list “Colleges Accepting Record Number of Students”? Colleges are accepting more and more students who simply do not belong in and/or deserve to go to college. High schools have always graduated legions of ill-prepared kids, but historically these have gone straight into the workforce. Now, they’ve got guidance counselors leading them to believe that they can succeed in college if they try…WRONG. And it won’t be too long until everyone is “entitled” to go to college simply for breathing, regardless of their academic ability.

   — GhostRider · Jul 1, 08:31 AM · #

2. It’s education creep. Once a college degree meant higher, as opposed to merely longer, education. Now, the baseline is an undergraduate degree and the real higher education is some sort of grad school or professional school after the undergraduate years. Maybe in 30 years, the baseline will be a doctorate.

   This insanity results in some appalling labor practices (legions of adjuncts) and questionable teaching and learning.

   — EleventyHundreds · Jul 1, 09:06 AM · #

3. GhostRider wrote:
   “. . . historically these have gone straight into the workforce. Now, they’ve got guidance counselors leading them to believe that they can succeed in college if they try.”

   Some would explain the situation in a different way:

   High education’s primary function as a social institution is to serve as a buffer pool for the economy. Colleges and universities absorb surplus labor and keep those people involved in a structured activity that does not disturb the social and economic orders.
   According to this explanation, higher education is legitimized by a promise of maximizing the future potential of its students, while it channels their present (here and now) energies into harmless activities until the economy may at some time be able to use their labor.
   Furthermore, the legitimization story is so effective that it motivates the surplus labor pool members to borrow money to inject into the economy in the form of tuition payments.
   If and when the surplus members become needed by the economy, they will use the wages of their labor to repay the debt they incurred while they were being held in the benign limbo of higher education.

   Does this alternative narrative have some explanatory value?

   — Tnachtrab · Jul 1, 01:02 PM · #

4. Or more simply put, higher education used to be for the privileged who had gotten a privileged secondary education, but LBJ changed that. Once working class people started making it through higher ed., society’s privileged complained, and higher ed. had to figure out a way to maintain its role as “gatekeeper” to keep the best for the privileged and a great career for themselves. So education creep began, and business began to use degrees to slow the progression of workers to the higher levels. Now our culture is to the point where the populous demands access to both higher education and the boardrooms. Consequently, higher education is having a hard time maintaining that gatekeeping role. We complain about the students and whether they are prepared or not, when what we’d really like is to revert back to when higher education was for the privileged few who had the money and could take the time to learn all the classical knowledge, and then they could go off and do with it what they wanted and we could continue to do what we wanted. However, now we have to figure out how to teach the masses for a world that is changing so fast that we cannot keep up with it, and it has become much more complicated, and our role as gatekeeper is threatened. That scares us because if we aren’t gatekeepers, what happens to our privilege? I suggest we see this as challenge and enjoy the work, try to learn from every student you have, and finally, quit blaming the students, their former teachers, or the culture. The energy spent figuring out whom to blame and why would be better spent learning and teaching. Have a wonderful day…

   — Lynn · Jul 2, 06:14 AM · #

5. Lynn, Well ‘said!’
   I think I will paste the final 3 sentences of your comment on my office wall.

   — Tnachtrab · Jul 2, 06:31 AM · #

6. God, I feel petty, but: “populace.”

   — dan · Jul 2, 07:57 AM · #

7. Anything that interests kids and that they are good at is a hindrance to good education in schools. This probably has always been so. That is because the teachers of all school, just about, are a generation or two, or three out of date from the entoolment situation of the students they teach. And such teachers, as they near death, complain, more and more, about how students are NOT learning the essential skills, that is, the skills useful with the entoolment environment the TEACHERS grew up with decades earlier.

   This is just more old people whining about how young people are different—whine whine whine. It is neither convincing as argument nor seemly. It degrades all respect for old people generally and is a dispicable pettiness of character more than a valid route to improving schools. With such dunderhead attitudes on the part of “teachers” one can only be happy the teachers are less connected than their students are. More connection with such albatross-like dunderheads would not in any way, other than regional history, be enlightening.

   — Richard Tabor Greene · Jul 2, 08:40 AM · #

8. Richard Tabor Greene, perhaps you should spend more time working on your own spelling and grammar before denigrating “dunderhead” teachers. I’m only 15 years into teaching and I see a marked decline in the past 5. We can try to meet students where they “are,” but what about stretching their capacities beyond that?

   — Beth · Jul 2, 09:23 AM · #

9. Maybe some of us college teachers should try to reach students where they are — in digital media — rather than lamenting how they’re out of touch with print literacy.

   — Joel Wingard · Jul 2, 10:05 AM · #

10. This discussion is really about multiculturalism, Western/Eastern values, access to higher education for the masses or bastion of the privileged, classism, racism, sexism, and accessibility in general. Of course the privileged dominated the quad in prior decades but predictably the pursuit of profit relocated the boundaries of acceptability for admissions officers, and presidents who want press, and legislators who want black ink at the bottom of university ledgers. Students, all students, any students (even those “unqualified) are great conduits of cash. We are all caught up in this mass system of credit-card meritocracy: Administrators, prestige professors and slime-bucket adjuncts (academic shims as I call myself) all muddle about in this welfare-as-higher-education game. The stratification system is clear: Owners/managers/and prols like myself, and then there are, of course, the so-called students who serve as raw material for the ideologically driven (pissed off) Marxists such as myself. And I know I am not alone given the criticism of faculty such as myself who pack the halls of universities trying to destroy the pretty little “natures” of our children.
    I say give the students the best shot at life by telling them how rife with B.S. the educational system is and that they should seek their answers elsewhere if they want something approaching truth.

    This whole circus is coming to an end anyway. I can see the elephants now.

    — Martin · Jul 2, 10:25 AM · #

11. #10: Dude, lighten up and have a drink to relax…it’s really not that bad.

    — EggsnHam · Jul 2, 12:03 PM · #

12. What’s up with all these Luddite attitudes on a BLOG?

    — ed · Jul 2, 03:39 PM · #

13. So, how is one to avoid seeming a luddite or a gee whizee uncritical idolator of the new technology as the answer to educators’ needs? (The latter attitude best expressed in what James Carey notes as “the rhetoric of the technological sublime,” an apt term for the bells and whistles adherents.)

    It’s tough to find a place to stand.

    I have seen marvelous 10 minute presentations by students using computer technology to discuss renaissance art or poetry in a final undergraduate project. I’ve also seen them bungle presentations because they think reading off a powerpoint is the same as engaging an audience. I’ve also seen how too much faith or dependence on computers disrespects the necessary hard work that writing center staff need to do in writing conferences with students.

    In short, there are judicious and injudicious uses of this technology. Recall, please, that Socrates saw print technology as a threat to the intelligence, while now the alleged loss of concentration of il- or aliterates is seen as a symptom of declining intelligence.

    Might it not be interesting to share some of these concerns with our students, helping them to distance themselves from the gadgetry of the present to view themselves in a historical context that might be instructive? Certainly professor B. makes a fair point about the many new commands upon our students’ attention, demands and, dare I say, temptations that were less prominent or enticing to the young than they were a few decades ago.

    — George K · Jul 2, 04:44 PM · #

14. I agree with comments #1 and #2. Unfortunately, it seems nowadays it is the norm for universities to accept anyone. As the first three paragraphs of this article mentions underprepared students and remedial education in universities, I will cross post a comment from Trachtenberg’s Diploma Mills article: “I suggest you write your local senators or the Senate for Higher Education Committee of your state. You and other concerned faculty should also write letters to Margaret Spellings (Secretary of Education) and Charles Miller (Chairman for the Commission on the Future of Higher Education). Secondly, universities/colleges should not be remedial schools. An article from the Chronicle of Education discussed that issue. It stated that:”federally financed study of Texas public-college students has found little evidence that remedial programs there improve underprepared students’ graduation chances or their performance in the labor market soon after college.” The CHE also had an interesting commentary from Richard Vedder regarding LENIENT ACCREDITATION PROCEDURES for universities. Many univerisities get away with not disclosing data to the public (ie:outcome measures that demonstrate actual student learning, graduation rates, admission rates of qualified prepared students, etc.). Higher Education needs to be more accountable to the public. In the end, taxpayers will be the ones shouldering the burden of the many underprepared students defaulting on their loans. The focus of higher education has shifted from providing actual education so that students can contribute to society, to one of a greedy corporation.”

    — Higher Ed Reform · Jul 3, 09:49 AM · #

15. To return to the original subject . . . my nieces live on their computers. They study hard for their classes and received first-rate high school educations, but when they are finished with their textbooks they turn to their laptops, not to other books. Computers are wonderful; I have three, but there are other, important ways to learn, and the advantages/shortcomings of each technology are clear. The question is, have we in ‘higher ed’ contributed to our current problem or are we ameliorating it?

    I believe that we should use technology whenever it is appropriate, but not rush to every new fad just because our students do so (or, more important, because we think that they would do so). We made an offer to an award-winning teacher and asked him the reason for his success. “I stopped using PowerPoint,” he said. “I spoke directly to the students and asked them to speak directly at me, rather than having all of us staring at a screen.” The trick is to know when technology enables and when it does not. In my experience the ‘support arms’ of the university often give technology far greater credence than the professoriate. Vast sums are invested in new fads and fashions and faculty are compelled to conform. For example, questions are placed on student evaluation instruments that, a priori, consider the utilization of technology an unvarnished good. Prizes are given for exemplary faculty ‘innovators’ and all of the tech elements of the university bureaucracy attempt to advance their cause by further embedding their ways and instruments as essential elements in the academic enterprise.

    The trick is to know what works and what doesn’t. Our university forces us to use an electronic ‘accomplishment’ instrument (in effect an annual updating of our c.v.‘s) which is ‘one size fits all’ and a complete and utter waste of time. It was developed so that ‘reports could be generated’ on such things as the faculty’s collective book output per year. However, it is unable to draw significant distinctions between single author monographs, textbooks, journalistic popularizations, reprints, festschriften, and other forms of ‘books’ produced by the faculty. The hard-copy documents used by departments which utilize the specific discipline’s conventions, shorthands and styles are far, far more useful, but we are still compelled to waste thousands of hours annually in collective faculty time producing something which no one can actually read or use. At the same time, our class lists are now prepared electronically. They enable us to email all or some of our students and they even include student pictures. They’re great. The trick is to use technology when it is appropriate. In general it is my impression that we give technology the benefit of the doubt and ‘succumb’ to it uncritically, in part because it is believed that ‘this is the wave of the future’ or ‘this is what our students expect’ when this may simply not be the case. Some technologies that were the ‘wave of the future’ have disappeared and students cannot judge what is most useful if they are not aware of the choices at our disposal.

    Our students may spend ‘too much’ time on their computers, but they do not read book-length documents there, because the printed book is a great technology which has survived over time. Microfiche, e.g., were fine for rare materials that lacked a broad audience, but no one preferred them to the printed book.

    The modern shopping mall includes what at first appears to be an uncommonly large number of athletic shoe stores. That is because such shoes make a fashion statement, but it is also because we believe (and our students certainly believe) that different sorts of shoes are appropriate for different purposes and quite inappropriate for others. When support staff and administrators try to force the faculty into a procrustean technological bed we should inform them of the fact that they may be misreading both reality and our students’ minds.

    — Outside observer · Jul 4, 11:50 AM · #

16. It would seem that the problem isn’t the “kids over-connected after school” but the faculty “under-connected” at any time.

    Clearly, the word “over-connected” refers to a judgment made by comparison with a different standard. But is the standard one which stays “perfect” over time or is it something which evolves and twists and turns with the exigencies of time and life?

    In short, yes, students appear “over-connected” to those who are “under-connected”. Recall the grandfather who didn’t use the telephone to check if the store had what he wanted to buy, but just went there directly – because that was how he always did it before the telephone came into widespread and economical use.

    If one simply remembers that higher education is about the faculty-student relationship then one recognizes that both partners bring something to the table, so to speak. Just because the students’ habits and cultures are different doesn’t make them bad. It is only in the evaluative moment of the relationship that faculty are able to seriously guide the search for the truth of the matter.

    These “blame the students” tracts are all too facile and do not seriously address the issues at hand – precisely because they are so one-sided in their scope and judgment.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 5, 01:49 PM · #

17. This is precisely the problem. But it’s always amusing that the tech-savvy complain that those who criticize technology are Luddites or worse. Ostensibly, technology is the new education messiah and any criticism smacks of the anti-Christ. It simply cannot be, despite empirical studies to the contrary, that anything can be wrong with technology, how it works or how it presumably “teaches.” If it doesn’t work, it has to be the fault of the user, never the format. As I argue my Fool’s Gold, young people don’t simply prefer online access to print materials, they are print allergic, and inveterately so. Ask them to read anything over three pages with a few words they have to look up and you may as well have asked them to solve Riemann’s Hypothesis. This pons asinorum is beyond them and it is likely to be beyond all future generations as we go blithely along, ignoring what is increasing become fact: the first roadkill on the information superhighway is literacy.

    — MYHerring · Jul 7, 12:29 PM · #

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