Spring Break
The cost of ignorance
By: Justyn Dillingham
Issue date: 7/9/08 Section: Opinions
The smarter our gadgets get, the dumber we get. That's the paradox at the heart of American life, according to a score of recent commentators who view the growing disconnect between what we should know and what we don't know with profound unease.
Ted Gup, a journalism professor who writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, recently expressed awe that his students - who came to class equipped with laptops, who were living in an alleged "Information Age" - knew virtually nothing of the world around them, knew nothing of history, and know precious little about their own country.
As anyone who's seen one of Jay Leno's interviews with random students knows all too well, this isn't surprising. The glut of information that came with the Internet should, in theory, have spawned a savvy and alert generation, one better informed than any generation in history. Instead, it caused an entire generation to take information for granted to the point where they stopped caring about learning.
I remember in 2000, when Ralph Nader was running for the presidency, I got a book about him from the library. I had a friend who expressed sincere amazement that I would try to learn something from a book. "Couldn't you just look him up online?" she asked. "Wouldn't that be a lot faster?"
Today's teenagers, snorts Mark Bauerlein in his new book "The Dumbest Generation," have "a brazen disregard of books and reading." It's sad but true. When polls for the "best books ever" are taken among the public, they're invariably stocked with books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" that are most widely read in high school, because most Americans quit reading books after high school. (Those are the better polls; the worse ones are crammed with right-wing crackpot Ayn Rand and con-artist hack L. Ron Hubbard.)
In place of traditional learning, young people have wasted their minds on ever more elaborate social lives, packed with increasingly stilted and trivial interactions. Facebook and MySpace, declares Bauerlein, not unjustly, speak "the discourse of the lunchroom and keg party."
Ted Gup, a journalism professor who writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, recently expressed awe that his students - who came to class equipped with laptops, who were living in an alleged "Information Age" - knew virtually nothing of the world around them, knew nothing of history, and know precious little about their own country.
As anyone who's seen one of Jay Leno's interviews with random students knows all too well, this isn't surprising. The glut of information that came with the Internet should, in theory, have spawned a savvy and alert generation, one better informed than any generation in history. Instead, it caused an entire generation to take information for granted to the point where they stopped caring about learning.
I remember in 2000, when Ralph Nader was running for the presidency, I got a book about him from the library. I had a friend who expressed sincere amazement that I would try to learn something from a book. "Couldn't you just look him up online?" she asked. "Wouldn't that be a lot faster?"
Today's teenagers, snorts Mark Bauerlein in his new book "The Dumbest Generation," have "a brazen disregard of books and reading." It's sad but true. When polls for the "best books ever" are taken among the public, they're invariably stocked with books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" that are most widely read in high school, because most Americans quit reading books after high school. (Those are the better polls; the worse ones are crammed with right-wing crackpot Ayn Rand and con-artist hack L. Ron Hubbard.)
In place of traditional learning, young people have wasted their minds on ever more elaborate social lives, packed with increasingly stilted and trivial interactions. Facebook and MySpace, declares Bauerlein, not unjustly, speak "the discourse of the lunchroom and keg party."
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Viewing Comments 1 - 2 of 2
Tom da Silva
posted 7/09/08 @ 10:36 AM PST
Dillingham resorts to ad-hominem in dispensing with Ayn Rand is unfortunate as the article otherwise is not too bad. Bad philosophy is what caused this mess, Ayn Rand is the solution: only the rebirth of Reason can counter the trends of ignorance, dependency, and sacrifice which is rotting our culture. (Continued…)
Kathryn O
posted 7/09/08 @ 11:17 PM PST
As Tom da Silva has pointed out above, the only philosophy that affirms a principled use of reason -- using one's mind to correctly understand reality and use that knowledge to improve ones life -- is that of Ayn Rand. (Continued…)
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