Mark Bauerlein is a tenured humanities professor at Emory University, and he has just published a new book, The Dumbest Generation. In a podcast interview, conducted by Texas educator, Tim Holt, for Intended Consequences, Bauerlein said that the thesis of his book is simple, that,
..teenagers and young adults, in America today, are drowning in a tidal wave of teen, youth, stuff, delivered through digital tools, and the adult realities of history, civics, foreign affairs, politics, and fine arts can’t break through.
I couldn’t agree more, though I don’t blame the technology. The author, himself, says,
When we talk about the Internet, we have to acknowledge that this is a miraculous resource. It contains knowledge and art, works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, old documents, maps, definitions, Wikipedia, historical sources. It’s all there, and we can access it in ways we never could before.
He continues, though, that this is not where the teenagers are going. Referencing a Neilsen survey, Mark said that 9 of the top 10 web sites that kids go to are for social networking — contacting each other. Well, no surprise here, as both Bauerlein and Holt mention. Kids are going to access what kids are interested in. What’s happened is that, through technology, kids are able to immerse themselves in the social experience, in bedrooms that are often a multimedia center.
I don’t think the answer, though, is to not bring the technology into the classroom, as Bauerlein implies. According to Thinkronize, makers of the NetTrekker child-safe Internet search engine reportedly used in 20,000 schools world wide, the top five search terms entered by students in school are games, dogs, animals, Civil War, and George Washington. ((“Index Reveals What Kids are Searching for Online.” eSchool News 16 May 2008 20 May 2008 <http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=53830;_hbguid=084225dc-6d5d-4c92-8323-0a7aefe1f9bb>.)) See the right for the top 15 searched terms. Again, the fault is not the technology.
Certainly when he and I were young (Mark’s only a half-dozen years younger than me), we played in the neighborhood with friends until dark, then came home where we read books, did homework, spent time with parents, watched a little TV, etc. Aside from spending more time with parents, I don’t really see the difference. I knew kids back then who spent hours on their Princess phones, and I remember educators complaining about the junk kids were reading.
Bauerlein is painting a picture designed to envoke fear and provoke caution. It’s not that different from the stories that I tell to envoke fear and provoke investment in modernizing classrooms. If I were to challenge him when he says, that bringing blogging and podcasts into the classroom is a strategic mistake, he’d acknowledged, as he does several times in the interview, that there is huge potential. I’m often challenged, “Are you saying that we should throw out this, that, and the other?” No! Our enthusiasm reaches a boil, and we all have to work hard to temper it.
Bauerlein questions all of the claims about jobs becoming obsolete, and I have to agree that we’re taking statistics and twisting them to support our arguments. I recently researched the “10.2 jobs before you turn 38” claim, and found that it was based on citizens born between 1957 and 1964, and that half of those jobs happened before we turn 22. Before I graduated from college, I’d worked as a short order cook, played in bands, washed cars, waited on tables, played guitar in coffee houses for tips, loaded freight cars, and worked in a machine shop. Nothing new!
I questioned the 55th among IT using industries claim in a blog entry the other day (Another “Aha!” Video).
Yet, I still believe that we are preparing children for a future that we can not clearly describe that being a lifelong learner is perhaps the most important skill we should be teaching today … learning-literacy.
Finally, I continue to question the research complaint, that there is no research to show that technology improves achievent. First of all, there is. But that’s beside the point. I don’t think that we should be investing (much) more in providing convenient access to digital, networked, and abundant information to students and teachers to improve test scores. I think we should be doing it because today’s information environment is digital, networked, and abundant. Computers and the Internet are the pencil and paper of our time — and insisting that our children can learned to be ready for their future by scratching and stamping text on paper and reading published textbooks, is like saying that children could learn with clay tablets, long after paper was widely used. Computers and the Internet have changed how information works and how we work it. Kids can’t learn this in five-year-old textbooks and spiral notebooks.
Nobody guaranteed that we’re going to learn how to make this work in one year, ten years, or even twenty-five. It’s going to take time, freedom, inventiveness, collaboration, caution, and time time time.
By the way, I learned about the podcast over Twitter. 😉
Great post. I guess I see the internet like a car. It is up to adults to teach children and teens how to use it appropriately and where to “drive” it. Just like a car, it can go to inappropriate places as well as appropriate places. It can go to casinos, ball parks, arcades but it can also go to museums, librarys, stores etc. It all depends on the individual’s personal interests and desires.
David; I really enjoyed the second last paragraph of this post. I believe we often look at technology in classrooms for the wrong reasons. It is not meant to improve achievement on standardized tests and assessments. It is meant to give access to the world, to authentic voices and people. To allow creative voice. I my mind, technology is an added value to classrooms. While it may not provide for dramatic improvements in reading and math scores, it will allow our students to achieve some deeper sense of connection and global understandings. AS you have said in the past: “global cooperation and not just global competition.”
I listened to this yesterday and will listen to it three more times in my technology classes and my advisory class. After one listen I have two take aways.
Like Pat said above, it is the adults that drive the car, so what children do with their time is comprised of an environment created by adults. The second take away is his overwhelming negativity, I am suspect of this negativity and believe that it could be a marketing ploy to get more attention for the book. (Which is subversive because in the interview Dr. Bauerlein blames the media for causing this stupidity in this generation)
I twitted and pownced this interview yesterday because I was curious how educational technology people would react to this derogatory attack on today’s youth. Thanks David for this lens.
It is all fine and good to talk about a problem but what is anyone doing to fix it. What is the plan?
David, thanks for keeping the conversation going.
I try very hard on my podcasts to seek out diverse points of view so that we all in the Web 2.0 connected world can see that our viewpoint is not always the most common.
Sometimes I am successful, sometimes not. However, I remember some quote a long time ago about “knowing thy enemy” or some such..
It is always good to hear what others are saying, and Dr. Bauerlein is getting quite a bit of press for this book.
Tim Holt
El Paso
Yeah, and if you listened to the Beatles White album you heard a message from Satan. It’s the same argument our parents had against rock and roll. I spent 3 days last week helping 6th graders create multimedia projects based on poems they had written. Sure, there were a few about playing basketball and one girl wrote about shoes, but most of them were thoughtful pieces about their lives and several were about war. Most of the students I work with are immersed in teen stuff but that doesn’t mean they aren’t paying attention to anything else.
Does Bauerlein argue that before the internet, children would spend their time learning “the adult realities of history, civics, foreign affairs, politics, and fine arts”? I think his reality is divorced from mine.
Seriously, technology should be considered tools to use. We aren’t reinventing learning, we are simply equipping our students with something they can use to learn in a “hopefully” more authentic way.
A great post, and some great comments. Take home quote:
“Computers and the Internet have changed how information works and how we work it.” Nice turn of a phrase.
The problem–and the interest–in this debate is that, of course, it never really goes out of style. Larry Cuban has been making similar arguments for quite some time now, and I’m sure similar debates accompanied many ed tech adoptions (“Ye Hornbook: Vital Implemente or Pointlesse Distracktion?”)
Both sides can trot out research showing their point. That’s not just because a lot of the research on this topic is badly done (though unfortunately that is the case; see Bernard et al. [2004] for a well-supported indictment); it’s because “does technology (or blogs, or Twitter,or whatev) improve learning” is just too broad a question.
How could you say that blogs improve education any more than that books, or desks, or paper improves education? How you use these tools is what matters. And I think that most folks on both side of the debate can agree with that. Pat, I think your car metaphor sums this up well.
“Bauerlein is painting a picture designed to envoke fear and provoke caution.”
Probably right, David, but my guess is he is painting a picture designed to envoke fear and provoke caution in order to sell his book, just as Andrew Keen did before him from a slightly different perspective.
Neither act in good faith.
Why is it that every generation claims the newest generation is worse off? So much negativity and fear. I see a tremendous amount of potential with our children being connected to one another in a global sense. It is impressive to see. I don’t find it to be scary.
David:
Princess phones, eh?
The only phone left in my house that doesn’t have an electric plug socket is a princess phone we bought in the 1980s… still works. 🙂
You’ve hit the nail the head when you mention that the tech shouldn’t be for improving test scores (alone). But in too many cases, that’s what teachers are asked to do.
Despite Dr. Bauerlein’s book, we today are in schools disconnected from a central, core vision. 21st skills ought to be developed with 21st century tools and also assessed with 21st century instruments. Too many times, the bubblesheets aren’t relevant to our students’ lives in their eyes–but the tech certainly is.
Boy did I relate to the Sisyphean reference. But one thing I always remember is a thing my professor Gregory L. Ulmer (inventor of the concept of “electracy”) told us: it was a pep talk about “working within the institution” for change. This was the only way to make change happens.
And I often find myself thinking about this as I push that big boulder up the hill…
By the way, I learned about this blog post from your twitter feed….
David, I really enjoyed your post. I appreciate that you included netTrekker’s “Top 15 In-School Search Index,” as it does reveal what our digitally-native students are punching into their Internet browsers the most and in turn offers a real-time, school-based mirror into what our children are learning about, care about, and want to know more about. The current generation has grown up on the Internet and is playing a grand role in the transformation of education by demanding to be taught in the same way they receive the bulk of their daily information and entertainment–electronically. We all have the opportunity and, I believe, the responsibility to find solutions to bring high-quality digital content to every classroom so that every student can reach his or her full potential. The opportunity for change is directly in front of us.
One point I made when I indirectly blogged about this book (http://teacherbytes.edublogs.org/2008/05/16/another-look-at-digital-natives/) was that most parents and many teachers still don’t know how to effectively use the technology for academic purposes. I taught a course called Web Media Productions to sixth graders. At first they had a hard time adjusting to using the Internet for academic pursuits because nobody required it. Once they were instructed in how use different technologies properly their eyes open up to a new world of learning. Unfortunately, once they leave here they may find resistance to using their new skills by teachers who don’t understand the technology.
Back to my blog post, it was based on a blog post by CNET (http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9943653-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5) on how motivated teens are using technology to create businesses or charities. One point that struck me was their parents took the time to teach their kids how to use the technology properly and to its full potential.
David and Clarence–
I agree that evaluating the effectiveness of technology needs to go far beyond achievement scores. Clarence, nicely put, by the way.
That list of search terms from Thinkronize interests me–look how basic and fundamental most of those are. But in our library, that is not that dissimilar from what students would search for in the online catalog (or the card catalog). I do also wonder if it is skewed a little towards elementary because in our district we find Nettrekker to be used much more in the elementary grades than at the secondary level? But in any case, it’s an interesting analysis, and imagine students using those terms in Google and what they’d get.
I digress, however. I agree that we tend to discount each generations changing habits. Maybe we should just approach them with curiosity and willingness to learn?
Perhaps there is the need for a renewed assurance to teachers who feel threatened by all the technology. To work on the reminder to teachers (and to the kids) that although there is a huge focus on their lives, the “me me me” part which was called the indulgence by Bauerlein, needs a refocus. Kids have a responsibility to do well (not just on government standarized tests), to share, to work together because like all kids before them, it *is* their world as they grow and one day become the current group of *adults* raising another generation of kids who use (fill in the blank) for the majority of their entertainment and education. So, Bauerlein does speaks a philosophy that many people do currently believe – what’s the best way to show that there might not be as much to worry about as they think?
Follow up:
I have had quite a bit of feedback in the podcast, and have had some kids write in about what they thin about being called the Dumbest Generation.
Hope you can drop by and keep the conversation going.
Tim
Hmmmm, let’s see…
1. Bauerlein notes that kids aren’t immersing themselves in the worlds of ‘history, civics, foreign affairs, politics, and fine arts’ at home (duh)
2. He also recognizes that the Internet is a ‘miraculous resource’
and yet
3. He also wants to keep the Internet out of schools, the only other learning space that kids have?
Huh?
A little late to this party, I know, but has anyone in this comment thread actually read the book? On some ironic level, if the answer is no, we’re proving his thesis…
I just finished reading your post and thought you had a lot of great thoughts. As an educator, I feel that I am doing my students a diservice by not exposing them to a wide array of technological experiences. This day in age, students are engaged with technology and I think we could use that to our benefits. I would love to bring the idea of blogging into my classroom where students could leave their thoughts, opinions, responses etc and think that my students would really enjoy it. I could almost guarantee I would get better responses from letting them do it electronically than with paper and pencil. I particularly liked your comment on producing life long learners. That is one of our main jobs as educators. Without realizing that technology has a place (and ever-growing place) in the classroom isn’t giving your students all the tools they could have to be successful in the technology world we learn in. Information and knowledge is constantly changing and you are right, textbooks don’t reflect that. The internet however does.
Erin
David –
I just finished reading your post and thought you had a lot of great thoughts. As an educator, I feel that I am doing my students a diservice by not exposing them to a wide array of technological experiences. This day in age, students are engaged with technology and I think we could use that to our benefits. I would love to bring the idea of blogging into my classroom where students could leave their thoughts, opinions, responses etc and think that my students would really enjoy it. I could almost guarantee I would get better responses from letting them do it electronically than with paper and pencil. I particularly liked your comment on producing life long learners. That is one of our main jobs as educators. Without realizing that technology has a place (and ever-growing place) in the classroom isn’t giving your students all the tools they could have to be successful in the technology world we learn in. Information and knowledge is constantly changing and you are right, textbooks don’t reflect that. The internet however does.
Erin