I was going to say a few things about this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was going to mention, for one, that it's really not surprising to find out that today's college students are very aware of their peer group status and their spending power, yet can be astonishingly uninformed when it comes to American history, American government, the hard sciences, the fine arts, and so on. In an age when middle-schoolers whine about too much homework, but make time for sports, fun activities, and shopping at Victoria's Secret on the weekends, I think it's safe to say that we should expect more and more well-dressed dodos to be flooding our college campuses every day.
But everything I was going to say about how this seems to be less a reflection of our Informational Age, than a reflection of the fact-free, self-esteem-is-all-that-matters "progressive" education theories so pervasive in our schools? Dave of Garfield Ridge has already said it, and better than I ever could:
While specifics vary from country to country, you can't tell me that students in Japan aren't just as distracted by their cel phones, or that French students don't also email their friends. Yet by most objective standards of measurement, students in developed nations perform better than American students. Why is that, if not for some explanation that extends beyond technological distractions?...Posted by kswygert at January 5, 2006 06:55 PMSelf-esteem gurus constantly tell our children that they're unique, and special, and they've earned the right to stand up as equals to their elders. Unfortunately, our educational system-- not to mention America's increasingly brittle social fabric, from the family to the village square-- no longer provides these students with either the tools to acquire, or even the desire to acquire the tools necessary to back up this otherwise healthy skepticism with facts, let alone achieve higher-order reasoning...
Humility is important...it affords us the opportunity to know when we *don't* know what we are talking about. Often, it's less important to know the answer than to know when you don't know the answer, yet few educators-- and fewer parents-- bother to instill this basic lesson in children. And if you don't learn it as a child, you won't learn it as an adult.