“Thinking historically” is one of those higher-order cognitive operations that educators favor. Here, it means the framing and narrating of factual content in historical ways. But the very “high”-ness of the task discounts it. Perhaps at Harvard the notion of students “thinking historically” without first studying the concrete facts of time and circumstance makes some sense, but step outside that tiny haven and enter classrooms in the rest of America, and you find so many barriers to historical understanding that blithe expressions of “the life process of learning to think historically” signify nothing. To speak of teenagers “gleaning” ideas from museums and historic sites may flatter curators and historians, but it overlooks the fact that most young Americans never enter those places at all.
Moreover, this division of basic facts from higher-order thinking runs against common sense. How middle schoolers may apprehend “historical thinking” without learning about Napoleon, the Renaissance, slavery . . . in a word, without delving into the factual details of another time and place far from their own, is a mystery. Newspaper reporters realize better than professors the simple truth. If you don’t know which rights are enumerated in the First Amendment, you can’t do very much “critical thinking” about rights in the United States. If you don’t know which countries border Israel, you can’t ascertain the grounds of the Middle East conflict. Such facts are not an end in themselves, to be sure, but they are an indispensable starting point for deeper insight, and the ignorance of them is a fair gauge of deeper deficiencies.
Another response to the knowledge surveys by academics is more a deflection than a denial. It says that young Americans have always been ignorant of civics and history, and to downplay contemporary reports, it cites earlier surveys in the twentieth century that produced similar findings of ignorance among the kids and outcries among the intelligentsia. Responding to the ISI study of civic literacy, Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg grumbled in the
Chronicle of Higher Education,
“If anything, test results across the last century point to a peculiar American neurosis: each generation’s obsession with testing its young only to discover—and rediscover— their ‘shameful’ ignorance” (see Gravois). The response shifts the judgment from the test takers to the test givers, from the ignorance of the students to the “neurosis” of the researchers. The older crowd, Wineburg and others imply, gangs up on the juniors, berating them for the same deficits that the elders suffered when they were young. These periodic surveys, the argument goes, merely rehearse an enduring generational conflict, and we shouldn’t take particular renditions too seriously.
It’s a strange reaction for an educator to have, and a quibbling one. In truth, several reports demonstrate signs of decline. In 2002, when the National Association of Scholars administered a test to college seniors whose questions came from a Gallup survey of high school students in 1955, it found that the former scored no better than the latter. The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that the literacy of college graduates fell significantly during the 1990s. While 40 percent of grads reached “proficiency” in 1992, only 31 percent did so in 2003. And according to the 2005 NAEP reading report, the percentage of twelfth-graders performing at “below basic” jumped from 20 percent in 1992 to 27 percent in 2005. Furthermore, cultural habits that build knowledge and skills, too, have tapered off, as we saw in the Fine Arts section on pages 23-26, and as I show in the next chapter. Another distressing trend emerges from the age groupings, the fact that on national tests younger students show modest improvement, but middle and high school kids barely budge. In the NAEP 2006 civics report, one header summarized: “
Civics knowledge increasing for fourth-graders, but not for older students
.” Why didn’t the higher grades sustain the same improvement? Why is it that the older American students get, the worse they perform?
Even if we grant the point that on some measures today’s teenagers and 20-year-olds perform no worse than yesterday’s, the implication critics make seems like a concession to inferiority. Just because sophomores 50 years ago couldn’t explain the Monroe Doctrine or identify a play by Sophocles any more than today’s sophomores doesn’t mean that today’s shouldn’t do better, far better. Past performances do provide one standard of comparison, but with such drastic changes in U.S. culture and education in the last half-century, a simple ideal provides a firmer standard—“What must individuals know in order to act as responsible citizens and discerning consumers? ” No matter what former results show, that a nation as prosperous and powerful as the United States allows young citizens to understand so little about its past and present conditions, to regard its operative laws and values so carelessly, and to patronize the best of its culture so rarely is a sad and ominous condition. To compile data on the problem isn’t an “obsession.” It’s a duty, and we need more data, not less. The knowledge bar is low enough in the leisure worlds of students, and for educators to minimize findings of ignorance is to betray their charge as the stewards of learning.
It is also to let stand a strange and critical situation. For the comparison of present to past under-30-year-olds does sway how we interpret recent results, but the comparison is cause for worry, not calm. On one crucial measure, the current generation has a distinct advantage. It enjoys access to first-rate culture and vital facts that earlier cohorts couldn’t even imagine. Consider how many more opportunities youth today have for compiling knowledge, elevating taste, and cultivating skills.
First of all, they spend more time in school. According to the U.S. Department of Education, college enrollment rose 17 percent from 1984 to 1994, and in the following 10 years it jumped 21 percent (14.3 million to 17.3 million). In 1994, 20 percent of adults had earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, and in 2005 the number increased to 27.6 percent (see Department of Education,
Digest of Education Statistics, 2005
).
Second, in terms of the number of cultural institutions available to young Americans, the milieu has flourished. The American Library Association counts 117,341 libraries in the United States, 9,200 of them public libraries. Eight years earlier, there were 300 fewer public libraries. More museums are open now, too, and more galleries and bookstores with the spread of Borders and Barnes & Noble. More community arts programs are available as well, with, for example, the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts leaping from 60 members in 1979 to 307 in 2004. To follow the news, young adults in every city can find free papers with a clear under-30-year-old appeal (
LA Weekly,
etc.), or they can turn their eyes to screens perched in restaurants, airport gates, gyms, waiting rooms, and lobbies, all of them broadcasting the latest updates on CNN. And this is not to mention the Internet, which provides anyone with a user password, library card, or student ID a gateway to out-of-copyright books, periodicals, public documents, art images, maps, and the rising generation’s favorite info source,
Wikipedia.
Added to that, young Americans have more money to make use of it all. Not many 20-year-olds in 1965 had a credit card, but according to Nellie Mae, by 2002 83 percent of college students carried at least one, and for 18- to 24-year-olds in general, the balances owed on them jumped from $1,461 in 1992 to $2,985 in 2001 (see Draut). According to a 2003 Harris Interactive poll, Generation Y spends $172 billion per year and saves $39 billion. Several years ago, in 1999, a cover story in
BusinessWeek
appraised it as “the biggest thing to hit the American scene since the 72 million baby boomers,” and warned that marketers had better be ready for it. This time, it forecast, the young will set their own standards: “As the leading edge of this huge new group elbows its way into the marketplace, its members are making it clear that companies hoping to win their hearts and wallets will have to learn to think like they do.” And if some of them work long hours to pay for their consumption, most of them still maintain long hours of freedom. The 2005
American Time Use Survey
put the leisure time of 15- to 24-year-olds at five and a half hours per day.
By contrast, what did the average teen in the 1950s have? A World Almanac at home, a radio or TV set in the living room (with parents picking the channel), a daily newspaper, an encyclopedia in the school library, and a rare field trip to a downtown museum.
This is the paradox of the Dumbest Generation. For the young American, life has never been so yielding, goods so plentiful, schooling so accessible, diversion so easy, and liberties so copious. The material gains are clear, and each year the traits of worldliness and autonomy seem to trickle down into ever-younger age groups. But it’s a shallow advent. As the survey research shows, knowledge and skills haven’t kept pace, and the intellectual habits that complement them are slipping. The advantages of twenty-first-century teen life keep expanding, the eighties and nineties economy and the digital revolution providing miraculously quick and effortless contact with information, wares, amusements, and friends. The mind should profit alongside the youthful ego, the thirst for knowledge satisfied as much as the craving for fun and status. But the enlightenment hasn’t happened. Young Americans have much more access and education than their parents did, but in the 2007 Pew survey on “What Americans Know: 1989-2007,” 56 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds possessed low knowledge levels, while only 22 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds did. In other words, the advantages don’t show up in intellectual outcomes. The mental equipment of the young falls short of their media, money, e-gadgets, and career plans. The 18-year-old may have a Visa card, cell phone,
MySpace
page, part-time job, PlayStation 2, and an admissions letter from State U., but ask this wired and on-the -go high school senior a few intellectual questions and the façade of in-the-know-ness crumbles.
I don’t mean to judge the social deportment, moral outlook, religious beliefs, or overall health of members of the Dumbest Generation. Nor should we question their native intelligence. I’m speaking of intellectual habits and repositories of knowledge, not anything else. Other factors such as illegitimacy, church attendance, and IQ display different rates and trends, and some of them correlate to knowledge measures, some don’t. Intellectual outcomes are distinct, and the
trends
they show don’t always follow the same pattern as other features such as race and income. To take an example: students from low-income households perform worse on reading tests than do middle- and upper-income students, and one might assume that as the economy has benefited upper and middle tiers more than the lower ones the reading gap would have increased. In fact, though, the test gap has remained constant. In 1998, the spread between eighth-graders eligible for free/reduced-price school lunch and those not eligible was 24 points. In 2005, it was 23 points—an insignificant change. The pattern suggests that something besides money, race and ethnicity, region, gender, religion, and education is at work, and as we interpret intellectual outcomes we need to invoke other variables, in particular, we shall see, youth leisure choices such as video game playing and television time.
Observe how often test scores and survey results are converted into the standard demographics of race, gender, and income, however, and you realize how hard this is to do. The contrary patterns we see in intellectual areas (income and access going up, knowledge staying down), along with the isolated and specialized sites in which they unfold (the classroom, the survey result) make the problem easy to overlook. With so much intellectual matter circulating in the media and on the Internet, teachers, writers, journalists, and other “knowledge workers” don’t realize how thoroughly young adults and teens tune it out. Most knowledge workers reside in one domain, in a single discipline, field, school, laboratory, or organization, and the young people who enter their domain already care about the subject (or pretend to). A biology professor doesn’t notice the benighted attitude. Her students want to apply to med school, and they work extra hard to outdo each other. An eighth-grade social studies teacher might register the civic ignorance of the kids, but he won’t generalize about it. He gets too close to them as the weeks pass, and as a professional duty he envisions greater possibilities for them, not the knowledge deficits that will never go away. A newspaper editor knows that circulation is dropping in part because 20-year-olds don’t subscribe at nearly the rate of Baby Boomers, but what can he do about it? He has to prepare tomorrow’s page, and he worries more about Internet competition than age groups.
Knowledge has become so specialized and niche-oriented that knowledge purveyors don’t notice a decline of general knowledge among large population segments. Besides, who wants to chastise the young? People who do notice a spreading dumbness and proclaim it run the risk of being labeled a curmudgeon and a reactionary. Ever since the ancients, writers have made sport of men and women who resent their juniors as stupid or calculating, and in the wake of the 1960s youth movements the casting has only become more rigid and farcical. For every knowledge person who rebukes the young and is admired for it—such as Jaime Escalante, hero of the 1988 film
Stand and Deliver
—there are two dozen caricatured portraits such as the outwitted principal in
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
and the bullying monitor in
The Breakfast Club.
In a 2004 article in
The Weekly Standard,
Joseph Epstein regretted what he called the “perpetual adolescent”— the extension of adolescent demeanors and interests well into adulthood. For every lament like Epstein’s, though, we have countless efforts to understand, to reach out, to explore without judgment the adolescent temper.