As they glide through their courses, they seem unaware of the long-term disadvantages. Here, too, the abnegation of the mentors plays a role, for in releasing students from the collective past they deny students a resource to foster a healthy and prosperous future. Dissociated from tradition, with nobody telling them that sometimes they must mute the voices inside them and heed instead the voices of distant greatness, young people miss one of the sanative, humbling mechanisms of maturity. This is the benefit of tradition, the result of a reliable weeding-out process. At any present moment, a culture spills over with ideas and images, sayings and symbols and styles, and they mingle promiscuously. Many of them arise passing only a commercial standard, not a critical or moral one, and in the rush of daily life it’s hard to discriminate them, the significant from the insignificant, trendy from lasting, tasteful from vulgar. As time goes by, though, the transient, superficial, fashionable, and hackneyed show up more clearly and fall away, and a firmer, nobler continuity forms. We think of jazz, for instance, as the tradition of Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Monk, Fitzgerald, Getz, and the rest, but at the time when they recorded their signature pieces, jazz looked much different. The cream hadn’t fully risen to the top, and “Parker’s Mood” and “Blue 7” appeared amid a thousand other, now forgotten songs in the jazz landscape. Only with the passage of time does the field refine and settle into its superior creations.
The tradition-making process, then, somewhat distorts the actual historical genesis of its ingredients. But it serves a crucial moral and intellectual function. Tradition provides a surer standard, a basis for judgment more solid than present comparisons, than political, practical, and commercial grounds. Young Americans exist amidst an avalanche of input, and the combination overwhelms their shaky critical sense. Tradition provides grounding against and refuge from the mercurial ebb and flow of youth culture, the nonstop marketing of youth products to youths. The great nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold explained the benefits of connecting to “the ancients” in precisely these “steadying” terms:
The present age makes great claims upon us: we owe it service, it will not be satisfied without our admiration. I know not how it is, but their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those who constantly practice it, a steadying and composing effect upon their judgment, not of literary works only, but of men and events in general.
Contact with the past steadies and composes judgment of the present. That’s the formula. People who read Thucydides and Caesar on war, and Seneca and Ovid on love, are less inclined to construe passing fads as durable outlooks, to fall into the maelstrom of celebrity culture, to presume that the circumstances of their own life are worth a Web page. They distinguish long-term meanings in the sequence of “men and events,” and they gamble on the lasting stakes of life, not the meretricious ones.
Nobody likes a scold, but the critical filter has never been more needed. The rush of the “present age” noted by Arnold in 1853 has cascaded into a deluge. Digital technology has compounded the incoming flow, and young adults flounder in it the most. Their grand-parents watch them at the keyboard, on the cell phone, with the BlackBerry, etc., and it looks like delirium. All the more reason, then, to impart the unchanging and uncompromising examples, in Arnold’s words, the “best that is known and thought in the world.” Without the anchor of wise and talented men and women long gone, of thoughts and works that have stood the test of time, adolescents fall back upon the meager, anarchic resources of their sole selves. They watch a movie—say,
Pretty Woman
—and see it in the light of real and imagined high school romances instead of, in this case, fairy tales and 1980s finance wizards. Asked for a political opinion, they recall the images they catch on television, not the models of Washington, Churchill, and Pope John Paul II. Instead of understanding the young adult roller coaster of courtship and rejection with the help of novels by Jane Austen, they process their miasmic feelings by themselves or with sympathetic friends. And why should they do otherwise when the counsel of mentors, not to mention the avalanche of movies, music, and the rest, upholds the sovereignty of youth perspective? The currents of social life press upon them hourly, while the pages within
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
and
Wuthering Heights
seem like another, irrelevant universe. They don’t know much about history and literature, but they have feelings and needs, and casualty figures from Shiloh and lines from Donne don’t help.
No wonder psychological assessments show rising currents of narcissism among Americans who haven’t yet joined the workforce. In one study publicized in early 2007, researchers analyzed the responses of more than 16,000 college students on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory going back to the early 1980s. Undergraduates in 2006, it turned out, scored 30 percent higher than students in 1982 on the narcissism scale, with two-thirds of them reaching above-average levels. The researchers traced the rise directly to self-esteem orientations in the schoolroom, and lead author Jean Twenge groused, “We need to stop endlessly repeating, ‘You’re special, ’ and having children repeat that back. Kids are self-centered enough already.”
The behavioral features of narcissism are bad enough, but a set of other studies demonstrates just how disabling it proves, particularly with schoolwork. One consequence of narcissism is that it prevents young people from weighing their own talents and competencies accurately. Narcissists can’t take criticism, they hate to hand power over to others, and they turn disappointments into the world’s fault, not their own. These are the normal hurdles of growing up, but for narcissists they represent a hostile front advancing against them. It’s a distorted and destroying mirror, as Narcissus himself showed when he fixed upon his own reflection in the pool and snubbed the calls of love and caution he’d heard before, unable to leave his lovely countenance until the end. Education requires the opposite, a modicum of self-doubt, a capacity for self-criticism, precisely what the narcissist can’t bear.
The attitude is even more harmful than the knowledge deficiencies we’ve seen earlier. An ignorant but willing mind can overcome ignorance through steady work and shrewd guidance. Read a few more books, visit a museum, take some classes, and knowledge will come. An unwilling mind can’t, or won’t. It already knows enough, and history, civics, philosophy, and literature have too little direct application to satisfy. For many young Americans, that translates into a demoralizing perception problem, a mismatch of expectation and ability. An October 2005 report by the U.S. Department of Education drew the distinction in gloomy forecasts. Titled
A Profile of the American High School Senior in 2004: A First Look,
it culled four traits out of the academic lives of more than 13,000 students from across the country. They were: tested achievement, educational intentions, reasons for choosing a particular college, and life goals. Set alongside each other, the first two characteristics settled so far apart as to signal a national pathology. The study focused on student achievement ratings on math scores and derived the usual abysmal picture. Only “a third (35 percent) showed an understanding of intermediate-level mathematical concepts,” and 21 percent of them could not perform “simple operations with decimals, fractions, powers, and roots.” More than one-third of high school seniors (37.6 percent) could not complete “simple problem solving, requiring the understanding of low-level mathematical concepts,” and a tiny 3.9 percent reached proficiency in “complex multistep word problems.”
A troubling outcome, but no shocker. The surprise comes with the second trait, the students’ expectations. The survey asked high school seniors how much education they expected to complete—not
wanted
to complete, but would successfully complete—and their answers bounded far beyond trait #1. Fully 69 percent of the respondents “expected to complete college with a 4-year degree,” and of that group 35 percent believed that they would proceed further to earn a professional or postbaccalaureate degree. Of the others, 18 percent predicted that they would earn a two-year degree or attend college for some period of time. That left 8 percent who had no prediction, and only 5 percent who admitted that they would never attend college.
Broken down by proficiency, the expectations looked downright heartbreaking. Nearly one-third (31.7 percent) of the students who expected to graduate from college could handle, at best, simple problem solving, and one-fifth of those anticipating an advanced degree could do no better. Only 7.6 percent of the I-expect-an-advanced -degree group reached advanced proficiency in mathematics, while 9.4 percent of graduate-degree intenders compiled a transcript with the highest mathematics coursework as pre-algebra or lower.
In the National Governors Association poll cited on page 189, similar misestimations came up. When asked “How well do you think your high school prepares you in each of the following areas?” 80 percent replied “Excellent/Good” in basic reading skills and math skills—a number far exceeding the actual percentage. Three-quarters of them claimed “Ability to read at a high level,” and 71 percent boasted excellent/good algebra talents. Furthermore, they demanded more courses in senior year “related to the kind of job I want,” not realizing that they can’t proceed to more specialized courses until they improve their basic proficiencies in standard subjects.
The same exaggerations show up in younger grades as well. As we saw in chapter one, the 2003
Trends in International Math and Science Study
(TIMSS) provided sharp comparisons between fourth-and eighth-graders in the United States and in other countries in math achievement. The TIMSS also asked qualitative questions, such as how much participants agree or disagree with the statements “I usually do well in mathematics” and “I enjoy mathematics.” When researchers at the Brookings Institution compared these confidence and enjoyment measures with actual performance, they uncovered a curious inverse correlation among different nations. Its 2006 report,
How Well Are Students Learning?,
concluded that
countries with more confident students who enjoy the subject matter—and with teachers who strive to make mathematics relevant to students’ daily lives—do not do as well as countries that rank lower on indices of confidence, enjoyment, and relevance.
The numbers are clear. While confident students perform better than un-confident students
within
nations,
between
nations the relationship overturns. The 10 nations whose eighth-graders score lowest in confidence include the best performers in the world—Singapore, Korea, and Hong Kong, among others—while the highest-confidence eighth-graders come from some of the worst performers. Nearly half of the students in Jordan “Agree a lot” that they “do well,” but their national score was 424, 165 points lower than students in Korea, only 6 percent of whom agreed “a lot” that they “do well.” Just 4 percent of Japanese students believed that they “do well,” and they scored 570, while 43 percent of Israeli students rated themselves highly, and the nation as a whole scored much lower than Japan, 496 points. For students in the United States, the inverse relationship wasn’t much better. Two-fifths of them (39 percent) had high confidence, but with a score of 504 points they fell well behind the point totals of Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Chinese Taipei, even though those countries lagged well behind the United States on the confidence scale. Only 5 percent of the U.S. respondents “Disagreed a lot” with the “do well in math” assertion, even though fully 93 percent of the U.S. eighth-graders failed to achieve an advanced score (625) on the test.
In enjoyment ratings, the same inverse relationship held. Students in every one of the 10 highest “enjoy math” nations fell below the international average in math aptitude. At 54 percent, students in the United States slightly beat the international enjoyment average, but the enjoyment rating of the highest performers (Korea, etc.) stood at least 23 points lower than the U.S. rating.
In other words, enjoyment and achievement have no necessary relation. This is not to say that teachers should implement an anti-confidence, anti-enjoyment pedagogy. The Brookings researchers caution that the pattern has no positive lessons to offer, but it does suggest that “the American infatuation with the happiness factor in education may be misplaced.” Confidence and enjoyment don’t guarantee better students. Furthermore, they prevent the students from forming one of the essential ingredients of long-term success: an accurate, realistic appraisal of their present capacities.
Indeed, when comparing the self-image of the students and the knowledge/skill deficits that emerge whenever they undergo objective tests, one has to wonder: What are they thinking? Optimism is nice, but not when it reaches delusional limits. Soon enough, the faulty combo of aptitude and ambition will explode, and the teenagers won’t understand why. Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation terms it “the reality gap between students’ expectations and their skills” (see McCluskey), and the illusion gets punctured all too readily not long after high school graduation. General education requirements in college include a math course, and any degree in the sciences entails more than that. One week in calculus sends them scurrying to drop/add, and many end up in remediation or disappear altogether. It doesn’t make sense. The math skills they lack are requisite for the degrees they expect, but they don’t make the connection. They must get their college readiness conceits from somewhere besides test scores and coursework, partly, no doubt, from teachers who, with the best intentions, tell middling students that they’re doing great, that they should follow their dreams, be all they can be . . .