Or the 2004-05
State of Our Nation’s Youth
report by the Horatio Alger Association, in which 60 percent of teenage students logged five hours of homework per week or less.
The better students don’t improve with time, either. In the 2006
National Survey of Student Engagement,
a college counterpart to the
High School Survey of Student Engagement,
seniors in college logged some astonishingly low commitments to “Preparing for class.” Almost one out of five (18 percent) stood at one to five hours per week, and 26 percent at six to ten hours per week. College professors estimate that a successful semester requires about 25 hours of out-of-class study per week, but only 11 percent reached that mark. These young adults have graduated from high school, entered college, declared a major, and lasted seven semesters, but their in-class and out-of-class punch cards amount to fewer hours than a part-time job.
And as for the claim that leisure time is disappearing, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issues an annual
American Time Use Survey
that asks up to 21,000 people to record their activities during the day. The categories include work and school and child care, and also leisure hours. For 2005, 15- to 24-year-olds enjoyed a full five and a half hours of free time per day, more than two hours of which they passed in front of the TV.
The findings of these and many other large surveys refute the frantic and partial renditions of youth habits and achievement that all too often make headlines and fill talk shows. Savvier observers guard against the “we’re overworking the kids” alarm, people such as Jay Mathews, education reporter at the
Washington Post,
who called Robbins’s book a “spreading delusion,” and Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution, whose 2003 report on homework said of the “homework is destroying childhood” argument, “Almost everything in this story is wrong.” One correspondent’s encounter with a dozen elite students who hunt success can be vivid and touching, but it doesn’t jibe with mountains of data that tell contrary stories. The surveys, studies, tests, and testimonials reveal the opposite, that the vast majority of high school and college kids are far less accomplished and engaged, and the classroom pressures much less cumbersome, than popular versions put forth. These depressing accounts issue from government agencies with no ax to grind, from business leaders who just want competent workers, and from foundations that sympathize with the young. While they lack the human drama, they impart more reliable assessments, providing a better baseline for understanding the realities of the young American mentality and forcing us to stop upgrading the adolescent condition beyond its due.
THIS BOOK is an attempt to consolidate the best and broadest research into a different profile of the rising American mind. It doesn’t cover behaviors and values, only the intellect of under-30-year-olds. Their political leanings don’t matter, nor do their career ambitions. The manners, music, clothing, speech, sexuality, faith, diversity, depression, criminality, drug use, moral codes, and celebrities of the young spark many books, articles, research papers, and marketing strategies centered on Generation Y (or Generation DotNet, or the Millennials), but not this one. It sticks to one thing, the intellectual condition of young Americans, and describes it with empirical evidence, recording something hard to document but nonetheless insidious happening inside their heads. The information is scattered and underanalyzed, but once collected and compared, it charts a consistent and perilous momentum downward.
It sounds pessimistic, and many people sympathetic to youth pressures may class the chapters to follow as yet another curmudgeonly riff. Older people have complained forever about the derelictions of youth, and the “old fogy” tag puts them on the defensive. Perhaps, though, it is a healthy process in the life story of humanity for older generations to berate the younger, for young and old to relate in a vigorous competitive dialectic, with the energy and optimism of youth vying against the wisdom and realism of elders in a fruitful check of one another’s worst tendencies. That’s another issue, however. The conclusions here stem from a variety of completed and ongoing research projects, public and private organizations, and university professors and media centers, and they represent different cultural values and varying attitudes toward youth. It is remarkable, then, that they so often reach the same general conclusions. They disclose many trends and consequences in youth experience, but the intellectual one emerges again and again. It’s an outcome not as easily noticed as a carload of teens inching down the boulevard rattling store windows with the boom-boom of a hip-hop beat, and the effect runs deeper than brand-name clothing and speech patterns. It touches the core of a young person’s mind, the mental storehouse from which he draws when engaging the world. And what the sources reveal, one by one, is that a paradoxical and distressing situation is upon us.
The paradox may be put this way. We have entered the Information Age, traveled the Information Superhighway, spawned a Knowledge Economy, undergone the Digital Revolution, converted manual workers into knowledge workers, and promoted a Creative Class, and we anticipate a Conceptual Age to be. However overhyped those grand social metaphors, they signify a rising premium on knowledge and communications, and everyone from
Wired
magazine to Al Gore to Thomas Friedman to the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation echoes the change. When he announced the American Competitiveness Initiative in February 2006, President Bush directly linked the fate of the U.S. economy “to generating knowledge and tools upon which new technologies are developed.” In a
Washington Post
op-ed, Bill Gates asserted, “But if we are to remain competitive, we need a workforce that consists of the world’s brightest minds. . . . First, we must demand strong schools so that young Americans enter the workforce with the math, science and problem-solving skills they need to succeed in the knowledge economy.”
And yet, while teens and young adults have absorbed digital tools into their daily lives like no other age group, while they have grown up with more knowledge and information readily at hand, taken more classes, built their own Web sites, enjoyed more libraries, bookstores, and museums in their towns and cities . . . in sum, while the world has provided them extraordinary chances to gain knowledge and improve their reading/writing skills, not to mention offering financial incentives to do so, young Americans today are no more learned or skillful than their predecessors, no more knowledgeable, fluent, up-to-date, or inquisitive, except in the materials of youth culture. They don’t know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events. They read less on their own, both books and newspapers, and you would have to canvass a lot of college English instructors and employers before you found one who said that they compose better paragraphs. In fact, their technology skills fall well short of the common claim, too, especially when they must apply them to research and workplace tasks.
The world delivers facts and events and art and ideas as never before, but the young American mind hasn’t opened. Young Americans’ vices have diminished, one must acknowledge, as teens and young adults harbor fewer stereotypes and social prejudices. Also, they regard their parents more highly than they did 25 years ago. They volunteer in strong numbers, and rates of risky behaviors are dropping. Overall conduct trends are moving upward, leading a hard-edged commentator such as Kay Hymowitz to announce in “It’s Morning After in America” (2004) that “pragmatic Americans have seen the damage that their decades-long fling with the sexual revolution and the transvaluation of traditional values wrought. And now, without giving up the real gains, they are earnestly knitting up their unraveled culture. It is a moment of tremendous promise.” At
,
James Glassman agreed enough to proclaim, “Good News! The Kids Are Alright!” Youth watchers William Strauss and Neil Howe were confident enough to subtitle their book on young Americans
The Next Great Generation
(2000).
And why shouldn’t they? Teenagers and young adults mingle in a society of abundance, intellectual as well as material. American youth in the twenty-first century have benefited from a shower of money and goods, a bath of liberties and pleasing self-images, vibrant civic debates, political blogs, old books and masterpieces available online, traveling exhibitions, the History Channel, news feeds . . . and on and on. Never have opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater. All the ingredients for making an informed and intelligent citizen are in place.
But it hasn’t happened. Yes, young Americans are energetic, ambitious, enterprising, and good, but their talents and interests and money thrust them not into books and ideas and history and civics, but into a whole other realm and other consciousness. A different social life and a different mental life have formed among them. Technology has bred it, but the result doesn’t tally with the fulsome descriptions of digital empowerment, global awareness, and virtual communities. Instead of opening young American minds to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them. Young people have never been so intensely mindful of and present to one another, so enabled in adolescent contact. Teen images and songs, hot gossip and games, and youth-to-youth communications no longer limited by time or space wrap them up in a generational cocoon reaching all the way into their bedrooms. The autonomy has a cost: the more they attend to themselves, the less they remember the past and envision a future. They have all the advantages of modernity and democracy, but when the gifts of life lead to social joys, not intellectual labor, the minds of the young plateau at age 18. This is happening all around us. The fonts of knowledge are everywhere, but the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, pictures, tunes, and texts back and forth, living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are up to now.
This book explains why and how, and how much, and what it means for the civic health of the United States.
CHAPTER ONE
KNOWLEDGE DEFICITS
Everybody likes the “Jaywalking” segment on
The Tonight Show.
With mike in hand and camera ready, host Jay Leno leaves the studio and hits the sidewalks of L.A., grabbing pedestrians for a quick test of their factual knowledge. “How many stars are on the American flag?” he asks. “Where was Jesus born? Who is Tony Blair?” Leno plays his role expertly, slipping into game-show patter and lightly mocking the “contestants.” Sometimes he allows them to select the grade level of the questions, offering a choice from eighth-grade, sixth-grade, fourth-grade, and second-grade primers. A few of his best guests reappear on a mock quiz show presented on the
Tonight Show
stage.
The respondents tend toward the younger ages, a sign that their elders perform better at recall. It’s the 20-year-olds who make the comedy, and keep “Jaywalking” a standard set piece on the air. Here are some snippets:
“Do you remember the last book you read?” Leno queries a young man.
“Do magazines count?” he wonders. Moments later, a longhaired guy replies, “Maybe a comic book.”
Another:
“Where does the Pope live?”
“England.”
“Where in England?” Leno follows, keeping a straight face.
“Ummm, Paris.”
And:
“Who made the first electric lightbulb?”
“Uh,” a college student ponders, “Thomas Edison.” Leno congratulates the student until he adds, “Yeah, with the kite.” Leno corrects him, “That’s Ben Franklin.”
And:
“Do you ever read any of the classics?” Leno inquires. The guest draws a blank. “Anything by Charles Dickens?” Another blank. “
A Christmas Carol
?”
“I saw the movie,” she blurts out. “I liked the one with Scrooge McDuck better.”
The ignorance is hard to believe. Before a national audience and beside a celebrity, the camera magnifying their mental labor, interviewees giggle and mumble, throwing out replies with the tentative upward lilt of a question. Stars on the flag: “Fifty-two?” Tenure of a Supreme Court judge: “I’m guessing four years?” They laugh at themselves, and sometimes, more hilariously, they challenge the content. On the mock-game-show set, Leno quizzes, “What’s another name for the War Between the States?” “Are we supposed to know this off the top of our heads?” one contestant protests. “What kind of question is this?”