Playing catch-up and thinking about the next generation
Bookworm on Feb 21 2010 at 3:26 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
Ah! I’m finally back home, which is always the place I like best. I’ve been trying to catch up on a week’s worth of missed political reading and am finding that it just can’t be done. I’m starting afresh, as if the past week never happened. I know bits and pieces, of course (the Dems are going for “Night of the Living Dead Health Care Bill”; Yoo and Bybee were cleared, appropriately, of wrongdoing in examining the applicable law on information extraction, circa 2001; Iran is on the verge of getting the bomb, unless Israel is able to save the world; the U.S. is doing well at the most boring Olympics in the history of increasingly boring Olympics; etc), but I don’t have any story neatly tucked away under my belt. My brain is a kaleidoscope — lovely to l0ok at, I’m sure, but not much use in the way of analytics and narrative.
My promise to you, though, is that barring some unforeseen emergency, this coming week will be a blogging week. I have work to do (last year was a slow recession year, this year is proving to be a busy recovery year), but not so much that I can read and write about my favorite topics.
I will leave you with a thought, ’cause I always love what you all do with my random ideas. I have a theory that kids nowadays are much more boring than we were. When I was young, I was a child of many interests. Already back then I was a confirmed bookworm, but I didn’t just read to read. I loved history, I collected antiques, I did Israeli folk dancing, etc. I was a fairly interesting young person because I was an interested young person. Nor was I unique. My friends also had their passions — their collections and obsessions.
This current generation, though, seems to lack passion. The kids in my house and community are uniformly nice, athletic, and good to great students. But they are fundamentally uninteresting. When they’re not on their relentless schedule of suburban activities, they play on the computer. They have their iTouches, their Nintendoes, their Wiis, their X-Boxes, etc. Even when they get together, they engage in precisely the same parallel play as toddlers, with each head bent over an individual computer screen. The world does not interest them. There are no hobbies, other than excelling in sports, that excite them. Their knowledge is invariably shallow, as they learn only what is necessary to get a good grade in school, and no more.
I find what I see disheartening, but also inevitable. I cannot turn back time and, unless I want to turn my children into social pariahs, I cannot remove them from the world of computer generated parallel play. We’re seeing a brave new world of good, but boring and shallow children. The real question, in the long term, is whether these children can make constructive lives. Also, one wonders if, given their slender knowledge base and their shallow analytical abilities, they will be prey for every demagogue that comes along. I also suspect that they’ll be much more inclined towards big government, since they are remarkably passive.
What do you think? Am I making too much of my own little community, or am I describing a broader trend in America?
Related posts:
- Playing catch-up at the Watcher’s Council
- Losing another one from the greatest generation
- This is why they’re called the Greatest Generation
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“Even when they get together, they engage in precisely the same parallel play as toddlers, with each head bent over an individual computer screen. The world does not interest them. There are no hobbies, other than excelling in sports, that excite them. Their knowledge is invariably shallow, as they learn only what is necessary to get a good grade in school, and no more.”
In some ways, Book, your description echoes one that C.S. Lewis offered when he was discussing what is the final goal of progressives’ war on human nature: the creation of “trousered apes.”
(When I rarely do go to the zoo, I find the apes to be incredibly boring. Although they have occasional flashes of curiosity, they have no desire to pursue it or apply to anything beyond the next banana.)
I think there are electronic media that can convey the same ethic, value, and training of traditional methods, in a different format.
For example, we know that Hollywood and American television does not exactly convey a certain set of consistent values. Even if you think something is true, it is not necessarily so that the producers or writers were thinking the same thing. Yet many Americans do find modern media lacking. Well, the answer to that was the same as the answer to a faulty economy: diversify. If you can’t find what you want in one market, go and find a competitor and see if they can provide it. In this sense, we come to Japanese anime, which provides much of the ulterior entertainment drama and channels that American media cannot or will not provide.
On the issue of games, some games are gateways to a greater understanding. WWII games, for example, familiarize people with events that they may never have learned about, in an interesting and interactive fashion. Combined with the internet, this allows them to read about such events without a high cost investment. Rome Total War, for example, provided me a hands on ability to grasp military tactics as well as ancient military history. Various historical user mods also gave background on the various factions, units, battles, politics, and so forth behind the cultures of the time. Obviously this won’t spark interest in a pacifist, but to those that are interested, it gives them a more in depth introduction to a field that is not popularly considered appropriate or popular. That alone should interest the inquisitive teenager.
Much of modern Leftist indoctrination concerns decoupling utility and usefulness from abstract knowledge. By connecting the emotional impact of, say poverty, with the Leftist abstract of social justice and Utopia, they can overpower the traditional values of history, logic, and ethics. By decoupling usefulness and validity to traditional concepts, people become disinterested in the entire field of traditional institutions and background work. Instead emotion becomes the primary tool of the generations. This conveniently allows the Left to set the political agenda, of course. Because they will have been the only ones that have offered a legitimate and useful solution to the poverty world view they instigated to connect abstract conditions with concrete value through emotions such as guilt. This has made it so that traditional values are no longer as useful. They are already partially obsolete due to the times, but the phase out wasn’t just something that happened. It was engineered by the Left to happen, rather than a natural consequence.
Marriage, for example, is deemed obsolete because of the New World Order. Logic is deemed obsolete and useless to learn because of the Dialectic adopted by the Left to replace facts. History is deemed unimportant because the Left simply rewrites events as they please and those that encountered history is like those that have encountered root canals: something they will now avoid by instinct while arguing that they have a reason to do so. They don’t have a reason, they just have a fear, not exactly the same thing.
Autonomous will, known as free will and liberty, is also deemed obsolete. Replaced by the New World Utopia, universal medical care or Global Warming fixes. If that requires the sacrifice of liberty, then those that have never valued liberty won’t find it too troublesome to discard free will. They were never convinced that such things were important because they started off being told that such things were obsolete and invalid.
The converse is also true. If the Left can turn patriots into enemies of America, I can turn enemies of America into patriots.
The process is a two way street, after all. The enemy can get us but we can also get the enemy. There are traitors in our midst but there are traitors amongst the enemy as well who will join us.
This is partially a numbers game, as the demographics conquest of Europe by Muslims are, but it is also a tactical and strategic war game. Ever changing factors and variables can decide the course of the war with greater impact than demographics. Having a lot of dumb college students on your side may not be equivalent to the combat power of having a true message and an ability to propagate that message in order to acquire new adherents and recruits.
Greetings:
One of my experiences in life that I have been grateful for was my military service, including my all- expense-paid tour of Southeast Asia. I spent most of a year out in the jungle carrying all my amenities on my back. I often refer to that as my minimal existence period. Learning how to live in a mode similar to our ancestors was an eye-opening and character building experience. Toward the end of my tour, I actually preferred to be in the bush than in base camp. Learning to live comfortably in nature is a good way to keep in touch with our basic humanness.
As to your “parallel play” observation, I would add the stimulation level of computer-driven activities. There’s something insidious about how absorbed we can become when using computer tools and toys. I spent my work-life in the printing industry and I felt the changes from analog to digital on several levels. The one that stands out, though, is that, in a certain respect, using computers is like having a supervisor stand over you while you work, driving you onward. The rhythm of the craft was replaced by relentlessness. I often think about what humans were put on the earth to do and I don’t think that God or Mother Nature prepared us to use computers extensively. I think that there should be a certain pace to how we go about our lives and I think that computers overload the mental and under-utilize the physical.
Your description of the kids raised up a memory of one of the Star Trek episodes… something about a planet where all the adults were gone, and the youngsters – all of whom were teens, for some reason – were mesmerized by their movements as they held a line of some sort and moved to music – but it wasn’t exactly dancing. Of course, the intrepid Star Trekkers released them from their trance and set all back to normal, but oddly – I don’t remember the story or the ending. I just remember those teens staring sightlessly and moving constantly but aimlessly.
Shudder.
suek, your Star Trek memory called to mind “Childhood’s End,” a novel from the 1950s by the sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke. The story was Clarke’s attempt to get around the problem of God and individual human souls by having the “Overlords,” a benign race of aliens, appear above the earth one day as teachers who will lead us to the next step in our evolution.
Eventually the day comes when we’re ready for that step. All of the children on earth enter into some sort of trance, dancing in conga-like lines hundreds of miles long that snake across the continents. As they do so, they begin to transform the planet itself, moving mountains and, Obama-like, affecting the level of the seas.
Thus humanity’s childhood ends and the species is reborn as a kind of hive mind that is in direct contact with the Overlords’ master, the Overmind.
I was 11 or 12 when I read the novel and remember being disgusted by Clarke’s inept response to how his atheism had left him longing for transcendence. (I believe my 11 year old’s thoughts were a little more along the lines of “He can’t stand God, so he invents this stupid ‘Overmind’ to take his place.”) Hippies in Eden. Wow. I guess Clarke really gave God what for!
Amazing, Charles, I first read that book when I was in my early teens and I didn’t like it back then either.
My daughter and I were just discussing this very thing today about her nieces and nephew (my step-grandchildren). They spend a lot of time at our house, and two of them (boy 12, girl 9) are often bored, while the 10-year-old girl is almost constantly finding things to do, whether it’s asking me how to make deviled eggs or making a tent in the living room out of the chairs and blankets or reading Nancy Drew. The younger girl is like an addict — when a TV is on in her vicinity she gets riveted on it and cannot tear herself away, no matter what is on the screen. The boy has some interests and will read books, but if he had his druthers he’d spend his days playing video games.
On the other hand, they often play, as well as I ever did, or my daughter. The girls play elaborate imagination games together just as I used to in my childhood — playing office or farm or something else, sometimes wearing clothes from our dress-up chest and babbling away at each other just as little girls have always done. They also play together all three, making things of legos or blocks or playmobiles. We’ve kept most of my daughter’s toys and books so they have plenty of things to play with. Part of the problem with some kids may be the kind of toys they have — mechanical and not encouraging imaginary play. I am grateful to my mother who even in our fairly poor state managed to get us great toys that we used for years.
I was the kind of child you were, Bookworm, a great reader with lots of hobbies and interests. But most of the kids I knew were not like that. They were boring then, just as many kids are boring now. Most didn’t have hobbies or passions, but because TV wasn’t pervasive they had to create their own entertainment. (I was born in 1943, so I grew up in what some people think of as the good old days.) Nowadays kids are overstimulated in some ways and severely deprived in others. They’re not taught the great stories of history any more, and their books are impoverished through political correctness. TV is something to watch, not something to stimulate an interest in something. There isn’t much in their heads. I find that when I read the kids a good book I often find them playing at being the characters.
Boys have particular problems. Much of the kind of play boys like is prohibited or discouraged. Risk is discouraged. All-boy activities are discouraged. They don’t learn war stories in school, and most heroes are female. (Columbus is out; Harriet Tubman is in.) Shop classes are obsolete. Many do not have fathers around to teach them male things. Even if they do, there is much less opportunity for the kind of physical engagement with the world — making things, taking things apart, and so forth — than there used to be. What is there to get excited about?
Book, when you were a kid were you in the same geographical area / economic class / social group that you are now? Because if these have changed, they might account for some of the changes you see in kid behavior…
I found, I raised three kids in San Francisco, that the life we adults saw, no matter how much time we spent with the kids, did not represent the real life of the kids. Most children live lives with other kids and they don’t expose that secret world to adults, including their parents. Especially including their parents. Some kids are boring, some are not. The proportion is no different for 12 year olds than for 45 year olds.
Judy Warner…you might be interested in Shannon’s post at Chicago Boyz…Makers versus Talkers:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/11650.html
…also my post at the same blog….Faux Manufacturing Nostalgia:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/11680.html
Suek: You might be thinking of this Star Trek episode.
Judy: Interesting observation about the fact that boys are being shut out of more and more games. In our neighborhood, the boys do play rough and tumble, but the opportunities at school are increasingly limited.
David: I was definitely poorer, but mostly it’s a middle class thing now as it was then. The issue isn’t money, it’s access to endless entertainment with minimal effort.
Phillips: I know kids have their own world, but I do see that it’s one built around electronic entertainment. That’s why I find today’s kids dull.
A little music to wash it down – circa 1963 Bye Bye Birdie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wCXr_6wgns&feature=related
David Foster, thanks very much for those two links. I read both of them. Yours especially is very interesting. I wanted to comment, but if I get started on any more blogs I won’t get anything in my life done. I’ll just say here that that grandson I mentioned is quite talented at figuring out mechanical things, and he likes it. His father is an auto mechanic and is ashamed because he considers that an inferior career to one where you don’t get your hands dirty. So from the time the boy was little he talked about how he should become a lawyer because he likes to argue. It took me a long time but now I’ve got him talking about how the boy should become an engineer.
David #11,
I highly recommend “Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matthew Crawford. Full of fascinating “hands on” observations about the cognitive and moral rewards of manual work vs. the amorphous nature of cubicle world. Specifically about the author’s PhD. education and his work on motorcycles and other engines (n.b. the book is not at all like “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”). Crawford quit his job at a think tank when he realized that there was more thinking going on in his bike shop. I am not one to romanticize manual labor, particularly the unskilled kind–given my own history of mechanically inept stints with a shovel and on an assembly line–but this book rings true.
The tie-in to this thread is fourfold: (a) the value of handling actual things in a playful and inquisitive manner as a vital part of an education, (b) more specifically, the book shows how “the modern personality is being reorganized on a predicate of passive consumption…early in life” (Charles’ point at #1), (c) as a corroborative reference to David’s excellent links at chicagoboyz, and last but not least (d) as a political shot against our dear leader, President Zero, who does not know what he does not know, namely that physical things are remarkably resistant to his post-modern rhetoric. Obama hasn’t *done* anything.
The author makes no reference to Obama, so I am taking liberties with the following direct quote:
“Constantly seeking self-affirmation, the narcissist views everything as an extension of his will, and therefore has only a tenuous grasp on the world of objects as something independent. He is prone to magical thinking and delusions of omnipotence. A repairman, on the other hand, puts himself in the service of others, and fixes the things they depend on.”
Judy, our posts crossed in cyberspace. Get the book I mentioned. Your grandson has talent and his father has pursued a noble calling as a mechanic. Aside from the intrinsic satisfaction of doing skilled work, your grandson’s economic future will surely be more secure as an engineer than as a lawyer. Matthew Crawford cites economists to point out that in the future the relevant distinction may not be between “white collar” and “blue collar” work, but rather between those types of work that are deliverable via a wire, or not. Local vs. global. E.g., radiology and programming have been off-shored; general practitioners have not. Another economist (Frank Levy from MIT) draws the dividing line between work that is capable of being fully “rules based” or not, for example tax preparation (turbo tax) and various expert systems.
“A repairman, on the other hand, puts himself in the service of others, and fixes the things they depend on.”
How wonderfully put. Would that there were more repairmen in the world.
@Ymar: You wrote:
“I think there are electronic media that can convey the same ethic, value, and training of traditional methods, in a different format.”
I haven’t read all the comments (yet), but this is wrong, Wrong, WRONG!
If “the medium is (at least part of) the message” (and we have abundant evidence that this is true, plus it is relentlessly logical) then what is “conveyed” via electronic media CANNOT be “the same” as what is conveyed verbally, or by example, and/or by reading a book.
It may look similar, but it will be a simulacrum, not the same thing at all. Not understanding this is a big part of why our kids today are so different from BW’s youth, not to speak of mine……. The road back to societal health cannot be found unless the search is grounded in this great truth.
comment #15
Your post reminded me of a fellow from my h.s. class, who decided not to go to college. To be honest, a good many of us were in shock. WHAT and ARE YOU KIDDING reverberated around the neighborhood.
Seven years later, he bought a rather nice home for cash in a very upscale neighborhood. That fellow decided to become a certified electrician and certified plumber. The college grads who were still trying to make ends meet while renting an apartment or still at home saving were once again saying..WHAT and ARE YOU KIDDING in hushed tones.
To be sure, you can only become a very rich tradesman in Western nations because of the crazy level of OSHC laws and labour laws and whatnot.
My airconditioning repairman worked for about 5 hours; him and a colleague, servicing about 5 air conditioners (full chemical cleaning, gas refill, etc). Total cost RM300. And two cans of Coke.
Not something you can get away with in the USA, or Australia, I don’t think.
As to whether or not the next generation is boring… well, it would depend on your tastes, I imagine. I keep myself updated on Jihadism, American politics, some level of local (Malaysian) politics, IT-related stuff, Christianity, food, F&SF, Chinese culture and history, to some extent mythology. My general knowledge is fairly broad, and not all that shallow, so I can come up with a semi-intelligent comment for most topics.
But if you ask me to go do something physical, then I would indeed be most boring.
gpc31, I was thinking of mentioning “Shopcraft as Soulcraft.” I read the excerpt in the New York Times magazine and liked it so much that I got the book out of the library on audio. But I got bored with it after a couple of chapters in which he went into his theories about the economy, which were not that interesting. Maybe after that it gets better.
“then what is “conveyed” via electronic media CANNOT be “the same” as what is conveyed verbally, or by example, and/or by reading a book.”
By that logic, Mein Kampf and Leni Riefenstalh’s videos would be very very different in terms of the message and what is conveyed. In reality, not so much. What’s different were the authors, the medium only represents a slight change by itself. Neither literature nor movies are necessarily evil byproducts of master minds nor generated brainwashing programs. Some are and some are not. What is conveyed depends more on the skill of the author than it depends upon the medium. The medium is simply the method by which ideas and knowledge gets transfered through human perception. It does not change objective reality. It does not change the smell of a rose nor does it change the nature of love or transcendental goals.
Ymar…thought experiment: Imagine that in late-1920s and early-1930s Germany there had been no movies, no radio, and no electronic public-address system amplifiers..so that Hitler’s pursuit of power would have been limited to what he could do with printed media and with oratory within the range of his own voice. Would he have ever become Chancellor?
Of course he would have. That’s a bad hypothetical question, you know. Because Hitler’s fame at the time wasn’t democratic, meaning it was neither super majority nor majority. It was initially backroom deals, and those were predicated upon power politics, which is the same whether we speak of the Reichstag/Wehrmach Republic or the Roman Senate. Julius Caesar also did not need mass media to get popular approval or Senatorial disapproval. But on the topic of Hitler, his Chancellorship came due to inside power politics and only later became solidified by thugocracy, so the question of popular approval wasn’t even on the table because it wasn’t necessary.
Also, people may not know this, but the best Nazi propaganda were actually the cult like mass rallies they held at night, like mini KKK get togethers, complete with burning torches, choreographed movementes, and very lively and lovely marching/singing.
Ymar…(torchlight parades, etc) also, one thing that tends not to get emphasized is the degree to which Naziism was a *youth movement*, as can be understood from some of the songs.
Although Hitler didn’t have a majority at the time he was named Chancellor, I don’t think it wouldn’t have happened unless he had a very strong popular support base, which seems to have been about 20% committed Nazis and another 20% hangers-on. His rhetorical skills were surely one important element in building this bse, and without any form of electronic application could not have reached as many people as he in fact did.
Television surely made *appearance* more important in American Presidential candidates; it seems likely that radio/amplification did the same for speaking.
Regarding what Book has written, I am reminded of what my father said over 40 years ago. He said as a consequence of increasing academic achievement in elementary and high schools , individual initiative was squelched. No longer having the time to follow individual interests, students were instead doing heavier amounts of schoolwork. Overall higher achievers but with less initiative and less passion. As my father turned his hobby into his profession, and did rather well at it- because he loved what he was doing- he knew what he was talking about.
You cannot become passionate doing what others tell you do do. Obedience and compliance are not passionate.
The helicopter parents who supervise all those activities for their children perhaps have forgotten that in the final analysis, when a child becomes an adult pursuing a profession, that the former child will do best at something when he/she owns it, not doing something because the parents want the child to do it.
Gringo..couldn’t agree more. So many parents are obsessed with skills and credentials for their children that they totally lose the importance of meta-skills, or what used to be called “character.”
Just about everyone I’ve ever seen fail in a management or executive position (other than sheer bad luck) was mainly due to a metaskill/chairacter issue: pointless feuds with other people, lack of courage, inability to admit that they could be wrong, refusal to acknowledge legitimate boundaries on their scope of action, etc.
Judy, your comment about your grandson put me to mind of this post/comment I saw a while ago:
Bringing Law to the Masses | Snowflakes in Hell
Turns out a mechanic/engineering background can be far more useful for law than a liberal arts degree. So dad may want to build up the boy’s mechanical skills, perhaps encourage engineering in undergraduate but all of that will be useful in law if life goes that way. Kind of win, win, win.
As for the boring kids? It’s an insidious combination. You have the seductively ease of technology that allows them to distract themselves (plus keep the content changed up). The built in culture of not being curious (lest they challenge a teacher’s indoctrination). Along with the “safe” culture that punishes risk. Not to mention, we and they are way to comfortable these days. Necessity really is the mother of invention. I’m not sure that having everything scripted and controlled by some adult isn’t a big part. The online world is about the only place a kid can escape adult “help” these days.
A few years ago my state delegate asked me to judge applications for state scholarships. High-school students applied to get the several small scholarships each Maryland representative got to dole out. I read a whole pile of them — students who were high achievers, with good grades and decent SAT scores. I live in a rural county that hasn’t been noted for educational achievement, but in the past generation most of the good blue-collar jobs have gone, and parents now push their kids to go to college.
The thing that struck me most about the applications was that nobody seemed to read. The kids’ lives were packed with activities. Everybody did loads of volunteer work – excuse me, “community service” — the more motivated having founded their own little charities. They were in all the honor societies they could be. They obviously studied hard. Some played musical instruments. But not one application out of several dozen mentioned reading anything. And every single one had a higher SAT score in math than in verbal, girls and boys alike. Very few had idiosyncratic interests, either. They seemed to be programmed to grow up in certain paths that were supposed to lead to success, and so far that had worked for them. The most interesting thing to me was that several of them were in 4-H, had grown up on farms, and liked that life. Of course, the emphasis had to be on all the prizes won, but at least they were learning hands-0n skills in the course of acquiring the prizes. Their lack of reading showed in their essays, which were for the most part competent enough, probably having been edited, but without spark or imaginative use of language.
Ymar and Earl, # 18:
Ymar said,
> “I think there are electronic media that can convey the same ethic, value, and training of traditional methods, in a different format.”
and Earl responded:
> If “the medium is (at least part of) the message” (and we have abundant evidence that this is true, plus it is relentlessly logical) then what is “conveyed” via electronic media CANNOT be “the same” as what is conveyed verbally, or by example, and/or by reading a book.
I think both of you are onto something. The extensive use of electronic media, and its replacement of books, seems in many ways to depress imaginative activity, especially when it is non-interactive, such as watching TV.
But I am interested in the interactive possibilities of electronic media. Video games, in particular, have been directed at boys via shoot-em-ups and goal-oriented quests that *could* become quite imaginative and interesting and worthwhile. I think its clear that a great deal of “training to be a soldier” could be learned through such games. Tactics and strategy at all levels, including team assault on objectives; the use of a variety of weapons and machines, even helicopters and planes. Imaginatively constructed IEDs that have to be defused, and whose construction follows physical principles. Making such games more and more worthwhile as interactive experiences is something that cannot be substituted FOR by any book or other medium.
Having been a high school math teacher, I see similar possibilities in interactive training for secondary-level math (Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus, etc). If you suppose that the teacher presents the material for each day to the students, there always comes a time where the student has to practice the new skills. Why should every student have to work problems 1-40, all, when it could be clear that Sam has fully grasped the material by working only 15 of them, with the computer quickly jumping him to the hardest of the problems as he shows quick mastery of easier problems? But Robert is struggling with #s 3,4 and 5, and so the computer takes an alternate path and Robert has to work through twenty such problems at that level, in ten minutes, before getting to harder ones; something that Sam reached in only 40 seconds.
Even the teaching of the material can occur interactively via a computer. A math book is limited by space and linearity of flow. Explanations and examples build up the lessons at a “pace” geared to the average student. Too much time and space for some; not enough information and examples for others. The written page is limited that way. But computers (programs) can take a variety of paths based on how the student is solving problems as he or she goes; concepts can be re-introduced in different ways if the first explanation didn’t take. It could be extraordinarily dynamic and effective. I haven’t seen such sophistication yet in interactively educational programs, but I believe it’s coming.
The same principles could apply to learning foreign languages interactively on the computer, especially if voice recognition software gets better. So I think the interactive capabilities of computer education software could someday give them a value that would far outweigh that of books.
Mike…
I agree with you on the possibility of computer programs. I see it in the future as a specialization assistance technique. The teacher presents new concepts, and directs his/her efforts toward the median majority. The slow learners and the fast learners are urged to use their computers to fill out their needs. Slow learners get a program that allows them to repeat an exercise 20-30 times with a computer that never gets rushed, never gets agitated, never says “Johnny, we just _did_ that one…we have to move on to the next”, or never tires of saying “Ta da TA DA!!! EXCELLENT JOB, JOHNNY!!!” …whatever Johnny needs to move on. Some kids get satisfaction from the right answer, some need a lot of pats on the back. In fact, if the teacher then has a way of reviewing the computer activity, s/he gets an idea of the child’s specific needs…( “aha! Johnny repeated the right answer solution with the TADA response 20 times. Johnny needs _lots_ of praise when he succeeds. Fred only did it the TADA way once – he just likes getting the right answer”)
I love the concept – but I don’t think the software is out there yet. And I think there are lots of teachers who aren’t computer savvy enough to make optimum use of them in any case. The teachers I’ve had experience with are very computer resistant. Most of them were older, but my son, who is a teacher, has become their IT in house person. They depend on him to solve problems they have with their computers up to the point at which outside help is required. He says he can’t get teachers – even younger ones – to do _anything_ with the computers beyond using them. In other words, they want to drive them, but they won’t even change the oil – much less anything more complicated than that. I find that discouraging.
College professors and the Civic Literacy Report tie-in to the thread and Book’s question.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/61703
You can click and listen to the 40 minutes on C-Span
http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/
Mike at #31 and suek at #32,
You might be interested in a great piece of reporting at:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2008/0811.carey.html
Excerpt:
This is a classic unsustainable trend. Higher education prices cannot grow faster than inflation and family income forever. If colleges use productivity gains from technology to restrain prices, they’ll continue to thrive in a world that values their product more than ever. If they don’t, they’ll be hammered simultaneously by a frustrated public and new competitors eager to steal their customers. To avoid that fate, colleges will need to do more than just teach better for less. They’ll also need to compete in a whole new way.
o see just how much technology is changing undergraduate education, drive to Virginia Tech University, nestled in the mountains of southwest Virginia about four hours from Washington, D.C.—and then just a little farther, a few blocks from where the campus ends. To the mall.
Walk down to the poorly lit atrium, take a left, and you’ll find the Virginia Tech Math Emporium in 60,000 square feet of gray, windowless space that used to house a five-and-dime. There are 700 late-model iMac computers arranged in pods of six, row upon row. Arrive at ten p.m. on a weekday and you’ll find hundreds of students, some solving math problems on the computers, others reading textbooks or chatting quietly in study groups while teaching assistants help undergrads with sticky problems in differential calculus and vector geometry. It’s everything you’d expect from a traditional four-year university—except for professors, and classes.
The Math Emporium was born out of a financial problem. Since being founded as a land-grant institution in 1872, Virginia Tech has developed a reputation as a first-rate engineering school and has become an increasingly popular destination for students in Virginia and beyond. By the mid-1990s, the growth was causing strain. Engineers need to learn math: more than a thousand students take linear algebra every semester. But even as the number of students wanting to take such courses was going up, internal budget cuts to the math department were reducing the number of professors available to teach them. This kind of fiscal irrationality is typical in higher education, where departmental budgets often have little relationship with costs, revenues, or demand.
For the math department, all the conventional solutions seemed grim. Adding more course sections wasn’t easy; in addition to the professor shortage, the university was running out of space, and some courses were being taught in a basketball arena and an old movie theater. Capping enrollment in required courses would have forced students to stay in school longer, angering parents and state legislators. Increasing faculty workload would have driven more professors out of a department that was already short-staffed.
Fortunately, someone had a better way. After earning a PhD in applied math from NYU in 1976, Michael Williams moved to Blacksburg to teach….The math department budget crisis gave him an opportunity to put the two together, and bring the effort to scale.
In designing the Math Emporium, Williams started by rethinking the issue of space. Campus space is inevitably a scarce resource, subject to bloody administrative battles between professors and departments. But all Williams needed was someplace cheap that students could get to easily, with enough room for hundreds of computers and little else. He also wanted space that other academic departments wouldn’t want to steal. So he leased the vacant former home of Rose’s Department Store, a now-bankrupt regional discount chain, for the bargain price of three dollars per square foot.
Then Williams rethought the student learning experience from the ground up. Undergraduate education, particularly at big state universities, is often passive and regimented. Students sit and receive information in the form of lectures that occur at a time and place of someone else’s choosing. The Math Emporium courses that Williams designed—there are currently nine—work in a very different way. Each course is broken up into a series of “modules,” available on Emporium computers or the Internet, that students are required to complete within a certain amount of time. Each module outlines a specific set of mathematic principles and concepts. These are translated into specific examples to review and problems to solve.
Once the module materials are completed, students can take randomly generated practice tests that draw on a central bank of thousands of potential questions. If they get questions wrong, the computer refers them back to the appropriate materials, and there’s no limit to the number of practice tests they can take. When they decide they’re ready, students come to the Emporium to take an official, proctored test that’s generated in exactly the same way as the practice quizzes. Then they move to the next module. Instead of marking progress by time—the number of hours spent in proximity to a lecturer—Emporium courses measure advancement by evidence of learning.
Ten years ago, places like the Emporium were virtually unheard of. But over the last decade a wide array of colleges and universities have implemented similar reforms, under the auspices of a nonprofit organization called the National Center for Academic Transformation. In March 2008, more than 400 people from 145 colleges and universities gathered at a conference center in Orlando, Florida, for the second annual NCAT convention.
“Television surely made *appearance* more important in American Presidential candidates; it seems likely that radio/amplification did the same for speaking.”
Appearance was already important. What mass media did wasn’t change human qualities. What it changed was in making it easy for people to be conned, when they were already begging to be conned. Now amongst a statistical mass of people, there are always going to be weaklings and and hanger ons, but if no con man arrives to meet their needs, then they just setup whatever local dysfunction is available. With television, con men and charismatic tyrants were mass marketed, but the basic human weakness to such never did change.
Appearance did not become more important. It simply became more important not to fall to the fallacy of appearance, illusion, style over substance, form over function, etc. And the American people were deliberately trained not to elevate their own personal defenses as technology and personal power increased. Having someone be lacking in responsibility as their power ever increases cannot be a good trend, ever.
On another note, if a system, like the democratic system of Germany, is based upon popular favor, then the problem is the system, not particularly how popular favor can be manipulated. Popularity has been this way since the dawn of human existence. The means, such as hunter-gatherer, caveman, juju mysticism, science, Catholicism, and currently modern technology has ever changed and forced human behavior to adapt, but the basic elements of popularity, security, desire for food and mates, has not changed because basic human nature has not changed. We have neither become more fallible nor less fallible.. All our weaknesses have been the same, generally across the spectrum assuming individual variation, and all our strengths have stayed the same, with cases such as Thermopylae being a pointer.
If the media makes appearance and illusion more open ended and accessible, then what is the issue. Capitalism has made wealth and greed more accessible as well. Why is that not a problem on par with Leftist propaganda. If the system was designed correctly, to assume and take advantage of natural human desires such as greed, megalomania, and the desire to be popular, then human society can flourish despite the presence of such elements. Because it won’t matter how that greed is exploited, because the system handles such potential for abuse. But a democracy or even a representative republic, are not systems that are easily fortified against popular sentiment. This has been the case since a long time, i.e. Trial and Execution of Socrates. The Founding Fathers started off with a limited franchise, because they knew that not everyone was prepared to decide issues with wisdom and not just panic. We have replaced limited franchise with unlimited franchise, and soon even criminals will be able to vote and otherwise influence the election (for sure as hell terrorists are doing it now with Bill Ayers’ example). What have we replaced limited franchise with, that provides equal protection at the same time we indulge in our unlimited franchise?
Fix the system and the method of abuse won’t matter.
Mike: regarding your question about interactive computer instruction, which gpc31 answered very well, I will an add an anecdote about the GRE. I have taken the GRE twice, first in paper version and later in electronic version. My recollection of the electronic version was that the questions the test-taker got depended on what the previous answers were. If you got an answer correct, you got a harder question to follow, for example. And vice versa.
Television allowed a million people all at once to see the “deficiencies” in a politician’s appearance, and allow that to interfere with their hearing and analyzing his thoughts and aspirations as evidenced in his prose. Any number of historians say that Lincoln could never be elected today — it is unlikely that a million voters saw him in his lifetime!!
Unless you are willing to say that you can convey the same thoughts and habits of mind in sound bites and bumper stickers as you are able to in a one-, two-, or even three-hour speech, then it’s axiomatic that the medium of communication MUST change the message. You may argue that it doesn’t change it very much, and I would say you’re wrong. Nevertheless, whether a lot or a little, it DOES change it, and in societally important ways.
The absolute best book I know on this subject is Neil Postman’s — Amusing Ourselves to Death. It deals with every objection I’ve heard, and some that no one I’ve talked to has brought up. If you really do think that we can get across the same message regardless of the medium used to communicate it, you owe it to yourself to read Postman.
Great interesting info and anecdotes about the current state of software/education, thanks! I’m marking this and when work slows down again I’m going to dig.
On a slight side note to Book’s post here about the young generation, the Instawife had an interesting post on their expectations being out of alignment with handling economic downturns.
http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2010/02/youth-self-esteem-and-recession.html
“Television allowed a million people all at once to see the “deficiencies” in a politician’s appearance, and allow that to interfere with their hearing and analyzing his thoughts and aspirations as evidenced in his prose. ”
Millions of con men going about the towns and cities of the West needed no television to get their mark. Remember that.
Great link to Dr. Helen and the comments are worth reading as well [post 38]
“Unless you are willing to say that you can convey the same thoughts and habits of mind in sound bites and bumper stickers as you are able to in a one-, two-, or even three-hour speech”
That’s like saying firearms is something totally different swords, knives, blunt force instruments, because the bullet does physically impossible things that a sword or knife can’t do.
What does this have to do with the end result in any fashion, except to say that death is available through many paths.
Caring about the superficial appearance of a result does nothing to change the result one way or the other. The result is the result, no matter how it may have come about.
This is something of a mass population sentiment. To believe that any specific end result can only be achieved by perfecting the Form so that it looks Perfect. The truth is that form follows function, not the other way around. What things look like will be based upon what it is doing. This desire to make things look the same, as if this will harmonize the result, is unfounded.
“then it’s axiomatic that the medium of communication MUST change the message.”
It is not axiomatic that changing the appearance of something changes the core substantial, ideal form, or transcendental product. The human mind hasn’t changed and it cannot be changed by changing superficial forms.
@Ymar: You do not accept that the medium is part of the message. If you haven’t read Marshall McLuhan, I recommend that you do. I’m not an expert in this field, but I’ve read considerably on the subject and find the argument convincing. If you don’t buy it, then we are never going to agree. A newer and perhaps more accessible book than McLuhan is the one I believe I mentioned earlier – Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.
There is actually research that offers some support from the biological perspective, as well. It’s now well-known that when someone is watching TV, the brain goes into an alpha wave state, completely unlike its condition when someone is reading or listening to a speech. It doesn’t matter whether the program is cartoons, Oprah, a slasher movie, or the State of the Union – the brain wave pattern is the same. It is this revelation that led to the complete transformation of TV advertising – from factual and informational like in the ’50s to the associational and aspirational stuff that is used now. The advertisers know that there is no point trying to “teach” someone something via the tube….the education establishment (and apparently you) expect our kids will get a better education by watching a screen, and maybe there are a few things for which this will work. But I predict with confidence that there will be no substantial improvements in educational achievement using that means.
You don’t need to tell me I’m wrong again — we don’t agree, and mere assertions to the contrary are not going to outweigh what the scientists have shown us in the labs, or the results of the giant experiment being run in our government schools. The medium of communication DOES (strongly) influence the message that is received. If you have a substantial refutation, I’ll be happy to see it. False analogies, such as guns versus swords are not going to cut it.
I do not accept that tools determine by themselves the nature of the goals effected. No matter whether you call this ultimate objective a message or not.