Read The Dumbest Generation Online
Authors: Mark Bauerlein
The Dumbest Generation (4 page)
In civics, too, higher education doesn’t guarantee any improvement. In September 2006, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute presented a report entitled
The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education’s Failure to Teach America’s History and Institutions.
The project tested more than 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges across the country in American history, government, foreign relations, and the market economy, with questions on topics such as separation of church and state, federalism, women’s suffrage, the Bill of Rights, and Martin Luther King. Once again, the numbers were discouraging. The respondents came from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford as well as lesser-known institutions such as West Georgia College, Eastern Kentucky, and Appalachian State. The average score for a freshman was an F—51.7 percent. And how much did seniors add to the score? A measly 1.5 percentage points—still an F. With both class levels measured, the ISI study also allowed for assessments of how much progress students made at each institution. At Harvard, freshmen scored 67.8 percent, seniors 69.7 percent, a minuscule gain after $200,000 in tuition fees. At Berkeley, the students actually regressed, going from 60.4 percent in their first year to 54.8 in their last year.
The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education’s Failure to Teach America’s History and Institutions.
The project tested more than 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges across the country in American history, government, foreign relations, and the market economy, with questions on topics such as separation of church and state, federalism, women’s suffrage, the Bill of Rights, and Martin Luther King. Once again, the numbers were discouraging. The respondents came from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford as well as lesser-known institutions such as West Georgia College, Eastern Kentucky, and Appalachian State. The average score for a freshman was an F—51.7 percent. And how much did seniors add to the score? A measly 1.5 percentage points—still an F. With both class levels measured, the ISI study also allowed for assessments of how much progress students made at each institution. At Harvard, freshmen scored 67.8 percent, seniors 69.7 percent, a minuscule gain after $200,000 in tuition fees. At Berkeley, the students actually regressed, going from 60.4 percent in their first year to 54.8 in their last year.
Given the dilution of college curricula and the attitudes expressed in the
Citizenship
study, we shouldn’t be surprised that college students score so feebly and tread water during their time on campus. A statistic from the
American Freshman Survey,
an annual project of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA (sample size, approximately 250,000), echoes the civic apathy. In 1966, the survey tabulated 60 percent of first-year students who considered it “very important” to keep up with political affairs. In 2005, that figure plummeted to 36 percent, notwithstanding 9/11, the Iraq war, and the upcoming election. No wonder the Executive Summary of the State Legislatures report opened with a blunt indictment: “This public opinion survey shows that young people do not understand the ideals of citizenship, they are disengaged from the political process, they lack the knowledge necessary for effective self-government, and their appreciation and support of American democracy is limited.”
Citizenship
study, we shouldn’t be surprised that college students score so feebly and tread water during their time on campus. A statistic from the
American Freshman Survey,
an annual project of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA (sample size, approximately 250,000), echoes the civic apathy. In 1966, the survey tabulated 60 percent of first-year students who considered it “very important” to keep up with political affairs. In 2005, that figure plummeted to 36 percent, notwithstanding 9/11, the Iraq war, and the upcoming election. No wonder the Executive Summary of the State Legislatures report opened with a blunt indictment: “This public opinion survey shows that young people do not understand the ideals of citizenship, they are disengaged from the political process, they lack the knowledge necessary for effective self-government, and their appreciation and support of American democracy is limited.”
Math/Science/Technology.
“The United States is in a fierce contest with other nations to remain the world’s scientific leader.” That’s the opening sentence of
Tapping America’s Potential: The Education for Innovation Initiative,
a 2005 report by the Business Roundtable. The premise appears regularly in discussions of the future of U.S. competitiveness in the international arena, and so does a corollary to it: to preserve its economic and military superiority in the world, America must sustain a flowing pipeline of able math, science, and engineering graduates. Politicians are quick to respond. In his 2006 State of the State address, New York governor George Pataki called for more magnet schools focused on math and science, and for free tuition at SUNY and CUNY campuses for students majoring in those subjects. In May 2006, the U.S. House Committee on Science introduced three bills designed to bolster math and science education, with Chairman Sherwood Boehlert asserting, “As a nation, we must do everything possible to remain competitive, and that starts with ensuring that we have the best scientists and engineers in the world.”
“The United States is in a fierce contest with other nations to remain the world’s scientific leader.” That’s the opening sentence of
Tapping America’s Potential: The Education for Innovation Initiative,
a 2005 report by the Business Roundtable. The premise appears regularly in discussions of the future of U.S. competitiveness in the international arena, and so does a corollary to it: to preserve its economic and military superiority in the world, America must sustain a flowing pipeline of able math, science, and engineering graduates. Politicians are quick to respond. In his 2006 State of the State address, New York governor George Pataki called for more magnet schools focused on math and science, and for free tuition at SUNY and CUNY campuses for students majoring in those subjects. In May 2006, the U.S. House Committee on Science introduced three bills designed to bolster math and science education, with Chairman Sherwood Boehlert asserting, “As a nation, we must do everything possible to remain competitive, and that starts with ensuring that we have the best scientists and engineers in the world.”
Young Americans haven’t answered the call, though. According to the National Science Board, engineering degrees awarded in the United States have dropped 20 percent since 1985. Of the more than 1.1 million high school seniors in the class of 2002 who took the ACT test, less than 6 percent planned to study engineering, a steep drop from the nearly 9 percent who declared an engineering major a decade earlier. The 2006
American Freshman Survey
found that only 0.5 percent of first-year students intended to major in physics, 0.8 percent in math, and 1.2 percent in chemistry, although engineering improved to 8 percent.
American Freshman Survey
found that only 0.5 percent of first-year students intended to major in physics, 0.8 percent in math, and 1.2 percent in chemistry, although engineering improved to 8 percent.
Set alongside rival nations, the numbers look worse. While six million Chinese students tried to win a place in the Intel Science and Engineering Fair, only 65,000 U.S. students did, a ratio of 92 to 1. American universities still have the best engineering programs in the world, but more than 50 percent of the doctorates they grant go to foreign students. At the going rate, in a few years 90 percent of all scientists and engineers in the world will reside in Asia.
The low interest students have in math and science is reflected in their knowledge and skills. On the 2005 NAEP science exam for twelfth-graders, the average score was 147, a drop of three points since 1996. Nearly half of the test takers—46 percent—didn’t reach the “basic” threshold, and only 2 percent reached “advanced.” Math scores were better, but not by much. NAEP results from 2004 showed that fourth-graders improved significantly over the previous decades, but twelfth-graders made no gains at all, even though the number of them taking calculus nearly tripled from 1978 to 2004 and the number taking second-year algebra rose from 37 percent to 53 percent. Indeed, from 1978 to 2004 the percentage of students reporting doing math homework “often” jumped from 59 percent to 73 percent, but still, no improvement happened.
Again, international comparisons darken the picture. Two major ongoing projects provide the data, the
Trends in International Math and Science Study
(TIMSS) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The TIMSS exam tests nine- and 13-year-olds on their curricular knowledge (geometry and algebra, for example). In 2003, with 51 countries participating, nine-year-olds did well, ranking eighth among countries tested. Likewise, 13-year-olds beat the international average, but they slid down the rankings six slots to #14, falling behind Lithuania, Latvia, and the Russian Federation. The PISA findings were worse. In 2003, PISA tested 15-year-olds in 42 countries in math and science (sample size: 4,500-10,000 per country), emphasizing the application of concepts to real-life problems. Fully 26 nations scored significantly higher than the United States, including not only the expected ones (Hong Kong, Finland, and Korea topped the list), but Canada, the Slovak Republic, Poland, and Australia, too. Given the general NAEP findings that show twelfth-graders sliding down the achievement scale, we may assume that if TIMSS and PISA tested older teens, the United States would appear even worse in international comparisons.
Trends in International Math and Science Study
(TIMSS) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The TIMSS exam tests nine- and 13-year-olds on their curricular knowledge (geometry and algebra, for example). In 2003, with 51 countries participating, nine-year-olds did well, ranking eighth among countries tested. Likewise, 13-year-olds beat the international average, but they slid down the rankings six slots to #14, falling behind Lithuania, Latvia, and the Russian Federation. The PISA findings were worse. In 2003, PISA tested 15-year-olds in 42 countries in math and science (sample size: 4,500-10,000 per country), emphasizing the application of concepts to real-life problems. Fully 26 nations scored significantly higher than the United States, including not only the expected ones (Hong Kong, Finland, and Korea topped the list), but Canada, the Slovak Republic, Poland, and Australia, too. Given the general NAEP findings that show twelfth-graders sliding down the achievement scale, we may assume that if TIMSS and PISA tested older teens, the United States would appear even worse in international comparisons.
Fine Arts.
It is hard to compile data on how much teens and young adults know about the fine arts, but we can determine their attraction to different art forms. The 2002
Survey of Public Participation in the Arts
(National Endowment for the Arts) charted several exposures over the preceding 12 months to record the bare presence of the fine arts in individuals’ lives. Except for people 75 and older, 18- to 24-year -olds emerged with the lowest rates of all age groups. Only one in 10 attended a jazz performance, and one in 12 attended a classical music performance. Only 2.6 percent of them saw a ballet, 11.4 percent a play. Less than one in four (23.7 percent) stepped inside a museum or gallery during the previous year, one in 40 played a classical music instrument, and one in 20 sang in a choir. Compared with findings from 1982 and 1992, the 2002 results showed performing arts attendance by 18- to 24-year-olds dropping in every art form included. The decline took place, moreover, at the same time that the opportunity to experience the arts rose. According to the Census Bureau, the number of museums in the United States jumped from 3,600 in Year 2000 to 4,700 in 2003, and performance arts companies went from 19,300 to 27,400. Nevertheless, the younger audiences shrank.
It is hard to compile data on how much teens and young adults know about the fine arts, but we can determine their attraction to different art forms. The 2002
Survey of Public Participation in the Arts
(National Endowment for the Arts) charted several exposures over the preceding 12 months to record the bare presence of the fine arts in individuals’ lives. Except for people 75 and older, 18- to 24-year -olds emerged with the lowest rates of all age groups. Only one in 10 attended a jazz performance, and one in 12 attended a classical music performance. Only 2.6 percent of them saw a ballet, 11.4 percent a play. Less than one in four (23.7 percent) stepped inside a museum or gallery during the previous year, one in 40 played a classical music instrument, and one in 20 sang in a choir. Compared with findings from 1982 and 1992, the 2002 results showed performing arts attendance by 18- to 24-year-olds dropping in every art form included. The decline took place, moreover, at the same time that the opportunity to experience the arts rose. According to the Census Bureau, the number of museums in the United States jumped from 3,600 in Year 2000 to 4,700 in 2003, and performance arts companies went from 19,300 to 27,400. Nevertheless, the younger audiences shrank.
It wasn’t because young adults didn’t have time to enjoy the arts. According to the 2005
Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance
(Centers for Disease Control), 37 percent of high school students watch three or more hours of television per day. For college students the numbers may be higher. In 2005, Nielsen Media Research reported that the average college student watches 3 hours, 41 minutes of television each day. “It was a little more than I expected,” a Nielsen executive stated, and a little more than professors care to see. Clearly, students love entertainment, but not of the fine arts kind. The 2006
National Survey of Student Engagement
(Indiana University) reported that fully 27 percent of first-year students “never” attended an art exhibit, gallery, play, dance, or other theater performance, and 45 percent only “sometimes.” The rate for seniors, who had three extra years on campus to cultivate their tastes: 45 percent “sometimes,” the same as the freshmen, but the “never” rate actually rose a dismaying four points.
Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance
(Centers for Disease Control), 37 percent of high school students watch three or more hours of television per day. For college students the numbers may be higher. In 2005, Nielsen Media Research reported that the average college student watches 3 hours, 41 minutes of television each day. “It was a little more than I expected,” a Nielsen executive stated, and a little more than professors care to see. Clearly, students love entertainment, but not of the fine arts kind. The 2006
National Survey of Student Engagement
(Indiana University) reported that fully 27 percent of first-year students “never” attended an art exhibit, gallery, play, dance, or other theater performance, and 45 percent only “sometimes.” The rate for seniors, who had three extra years on campus to cultivate their tastes: 45 percent “sometimes,” the same as the freshmen, but the “never” rate actually rose a dismaying four points.
These figures apply to leisure time, not to the classroom, where many older adults acquired their initial thirst for non-pop music and the arts. In school, however, we find the same flagging interests, this time on the part of the educators. Partly because of the pressure of No Child Left Behind, which tests reading and math, and partly because of an emphasis on job-skills development, the public school curriculum devotes an ever smaller share of class time to music and the other arts. A recent study sponsored by the Fordham Foundation counted average instructional minutes required for different subject areas in five states. In the early grades, while reading garnered around 40 percent and math 18 percent of the school week, music and other arts combined received only 8 percent. Other developed nations in the world averaged 14 percent on the arts in early grades, which means that foreign students in elementary school spend around 55 more hours on the arts than U.S. students do each year (see Benavot).
With voluntary (or parent-ordered) involvement in the fine arts so subdued among teens and young adults, for many of them the classroom is the only place they will ever encounter Michelangelo, Mozart, Grandma Moses, and Thelonious Monk. Little in their homes and among their friends exposes them to artistic works that have stood the test of time and inspired their forbears, and so, if they don’t become attuned to the fine arts in school, they probably never will. Consider the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2007, Dana Gioia, who credits his escape from the high-crime, low-education streets of Hawthorne, California, to two things: the public library and the piano lessons his mother forced him to take. They quickened his imagination to a fate other than that of his classmates—aimlessness, odd jobs, and prison. Rarely will such transformations reach today’s youth, and school trends aren’t helping. In effect, the curriculum cedes the aesthetic field to mass culture. Young adults end up with detailed awareness of adolescent fare, and draw a blank with the great traditions of opera, Impressionism, bebop, Restoration comedy . . . In
Losing America’s Memory,
cited on page 18, while only 22 percent of college seniors recognized a line from the Gettysburg Address, 99 percent of them identified Beavis and Butt-Head, and 98 percent Snoop Doggy Dogg.
Losing America’s Memory,
cited on page 18, while only 22 percent of college seniors recognized a line from the Gettysburg Address, 99 percent of them identified Beavis and Butt-Head, and 98 percent Snoop Doggy Dogg.
Year after year, the findings pour in. The 2006
Geographic Literacy Survey
(National Geographic Society) opens, “Americans are far from alone in the world, but from the perspective of many young Americans, we might as well be.” What else could they conclude when 63 percent of test takers could not identify Iraq on a map, and 30 percent of them selected U.S./Mexico as the most fortified border in the world? We could add knowledge deficits in foreign languages, world religions, and politics, filling out a portrait of vigorous, indiscriminate ignorance. Together they justify a label coined by Philip Roth in his 2000 novel
The Human Stain:
“The Dumbest Generation.” Too large a segment of young Americans enter adulthood and proceed to middle age with other concerns, the contents of liberal arts learning and civic awareness receding into a dim memory of social studies class or activated fleetingly by a movie about World War II. Whatever good news these surveys impart—high rates of volunteering, for instance—is eclipsed by the steady pileup of apathy and incognizance. Each time a grand initiative comes along to reinvigorate the curriculum—a new math pedagogy, a laptop for every student, etc.—test scores two years later dash the hopes of the innovators. Every majestic forecast of today’s youth as the most savvy, wired, adept, and informed cohort ever—“They’re young, smart, brash,” opens a 2005
USA Today
story on Generation Y (see Armour)—is exploded by the following week’s educational data. The outcomes have become so consistently poor that researchers and educators collect them with diminishing expectations, tempering the scores with sparse notices of promise in one measure or another.
Geographic Literacy Survey
(National Geographic Society) opens, “Americans are far from alone in the world, but from the perspective of many young Americans, we might as well be.” What else could they conclude when 63 percent of test takers could not identify Iraq on a map, and 30 percent of them selected U.S./Mexico as the most fortified border in the world? We could add knowledge deficits in foreign languages, world religions, and politics, filling out a portrait of vigorous, indiscriminate ignorance. Together they justify a label coined by Philip Roth in his 2000 novel
The Human Stain:
“The Dumbest Generation.” Too large a segment of young Americans enter adulthood and proceed to middle age with other concerns, the contents of liberal arts learning and civic awareness receding into a dim memory of social studies class or activated fleetingly by a movie about World War II. Whatever good news these surveys impart—high rates of volunteering, for instance—is eclipsed by the steady pileup of apathy and incognizance. Each time a grand initiative comes along to reinvigorate the curriculum—a new math pedagogy, a laptop for every student, etc.—test scores two years later dash the hopes of the innovators. Every majestic forecast of today’s youth as the most savvy, wired, adept, and informed cohort ever—“They’re young, smart, brash,” opens a 2005
USA Today
story on Generation Y (see Armour)—is exploded by the following week’s educational data. The outcomes have become so consistently poor that researchers and educators collect them with diminishing expectations, tempering the scores with sparse notices of promise in one measure or another.
One can understand their motives, and accept the intuition that things couldn’t be this bad, that young Americans must possess mental virtues underappreciated by the tests and surveys. Indeed, some academic commentators have gone further, opting to reject or dismiss the findings altogether. While public reactions usually offer blunt dismay over the results—
Washington Post
coverage of
Losing America’s Memory
began, “The best and brightest? I think not” (see Morin)—professors sometimes concoct crafty rationales to explain away their significance.
Washington Post
coverage of
Losing America’s Memory
began, “The best and brightest? I think not” (see Morin)—professors sometimes concoct crafty rationales to explain away their significance.
One of them has it that the assessments measure rote memory, asking respondents merely to cull from a storage of “decontextualized facts,” not to execute more sophisticated kinds of understanding. In truth, many of the history and civics tests do broach more than facts, including concepts such as separation of powers and dominant themes in important texts, and they ask for short-answer interpretations of historical and civic materials. Still, however, the complaint is a forceful one. Harvard education professor Howard Gardner expressed it well in a 2002 article in
Daedalus
when he regretted the fact-oriented, multiple-choice test approach to history teaching: “More often than not, history consists of lists and names and dates rather than the more challenging but more generative capacity to ‘do history’ and to ‘think historically.’ ” And in 2004, the president of the Organization of American Historians, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, repeated the point. “Using such surveys as a starting point for debate,” she said, “diverts us from the challenge at hand: how to use what students do know—the ideas and identities they glean from family stories, museums, historic sites, films, television, and the like—to engage them in the life process of learning to think historically.”
Daedalus
when he regretted the fact-oriented, multiple-choice test approach to history teaching: “More often than not, history consists of lists and names and dates rather than the more challenging but more generative capacity to ‘do history’ and to ‘think historically.’ ” And in 2004, the president of the Organization of American Historians, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, repeated the point. “Using such surveys as a starting point for debate,” she said, “diverts us from the challenge at hand: how to use what students do know—the ideas and identities they glean from family stories, museums, historic sites, films, television, and the like—to engage them in the life process of learning to think historically.”
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