My initial thoughts:
On Bauerlein:
There is a part of me that does not want to like Bauerlein's train of thought. He seems to be cut from the E.D. Hirsch, Jr. school of thought, that you have to know certain canonical or core subjects and texts in order to be literate. I just think that leads to a sort of snobbery. Do you really need to read The Federalist Papers in order to be a productive citizen? (I haven't). Or several plays of Shakespeare? (I have). Do we all need to have certain shared cultural knowledge in order to relate, interact, and be successful? I am not sure. If anything, it seems to me that there is so much knowledge right now that it is difficult to ascertain just which parts are most important to know. Sure, some seem to get you into more clubs, like honor societies and colleges, but how much of that is living in the past or looking at a set of skills and knowledge that are becoming less relevant every day?
I do take his point that we do not know the repercussions of what all this peer-to-peer networking will be in the long run, and I do wonder about the disconnections that can be occurring that may short circuit traditional mentor/mentee relationships.
On Howe:
I wonder: Are millenials smarter than everyone who came before them - or do they think differently and have access to way more data that ever before?
The measures he cites seem to be random and maybe unhelpful: IQ scores? homework hours? TV-watching hours? I am not sure if these things and the behaviors he mentions mean that students in the past were worse off or better off now. Just because tests scores range up may mean that teachers are doing a better job preparing their teachers for the tests.
I do like his point about how we are constantly measuring the youth of today according to the past, when we have no way to measure those past youth to today's standards. There is a part of me that suspects strongly that there are no really big differences between youth then or now, and that the differences lay in the technologies and affordances we have. Of course children in the 1950s read more. TVs were scarce; there were no video games, and if you wanted entertainment you had to go out to the movies or hang out with your friends. Nowadays you can log on and hang out as much as you want (or are allowed) and see all kinds of sites worth of games and entertainments (videos and music, etc).
On this entire debate:
I also feel there is a danger of trying to characterize an entire generation. How alike or cohensive can they be? Are there outliers who excel (e.g. the spelling bee and science fair winners and Ivy League students) and skew things up? Is Howe cherry-picking these examples, like Bauerlein implied? I do not know if the examples he cites are representative on the whole. Likewise, I do not know if the basic skills and general cultural knowledge Bauerlein seems to want would be all that helpful in the end either.
I feel the answer lies somewhere between these two authors and their books. Students have access to more information and texts and technology but that does not necessarily mean they are smarter or dumber. They actually have to do something with all the (dis)advantages they have. And the jury is still out there. What I take from this debate is that we have to do school differently and take into account this current generation, which has to deal with transformational change way more than anyone else has had to. But then we are all in that boat, only we have not necessarily always been in it at the same time until now...
Are they smarter or just different?
One last thing that gets my goat:
Lots of people like to cite this 2004 NEA study that cites how much people are not reading any more. What about this 2008 NEA study done a couple of years later that says exactly the opposite? Is it chopped liver?
Sterg, I have to agree about some of Howe's data being kind of irrelevant if you will. I wasn't really sure how an IQ test can really prove anything in terms of behavior changes because of technological advances. I also thought his points of watching TV were a bit irrelevant ... I know many people who watch TV for a couple hours a day and literally all they watch is the news so they are getting an educational experience. I agreed a lot with Howe's argument but as he was talking and I was taking notes I did find some of his points not really useful in terms of relating to his other data.
ReplyDeleteI agree on the "snobbery" of Bauerlein. Could he possibly have mentioned any more canonical texts in one debate? My favorite part was when he mentioned Oedipus in the context of the moral complexity it provides. Really?! I find no complexity in debating whether or not someone should sleep with their mother. I think we are pretty much all clear on that being a bad idea. I, on the other hand, have read The Federalist Papers. Thus, using Bauerlein's argument, I possess more intelligence than you. ;)
ReplyDeleteClearly, I am an incomplete citizen :p
ReplyDeleteI wonder what Bauerlein and Howe would say about the launch of the iPad? Sterg, don't feel bad. I haven't read the Federalist Papers in their entirety, and I don't think that makes me unpatriotic or less intelligent. ;)
ReplyDeleteI agree that one does not need to read the “classics” in order to be considered literate. I haven’t read The Federalist Papers either, nor do I have any desire to do so. I have a colleague that insists on teaching The Scarlet Letter, as well as many other classics that the students hate. Honors students came to me complaining about what they were reading, some of which were failing because they didn’t understand the text, and the teacher was doing the traditional: read and/or listen to the CD during class, then quiz. No frontloading, no interesting conversations…. I had absolutely no qualms about showing those students the Sparknotes.com No Fear link where they can read the side-by-side translation of the text, as well as analyses of themes, motifs, and characters. Several English teachers would gasp if they knew I had done that, but I don’t care. If the teacher insists on examining the fossils of our literary past without tying it to the students’ lives in some way and without offering any sort of scaffold besides listening to someone read the text on a CD, I feel that I need to show the students how they can use technology so they can conquer the text in spite of the teacher’s lack of teaching. The students were reading online, and they were certainly doing more productive thinking about the text once they understood it. GASP!
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