The comedy runs deeper, though, than the bare display of young people embarrassed not to know a common fact. Something unnerving surfaces in the exchanges, something outside the normal course of conversation. Simply put, it is the astonishing lifeworld of someone who can’t answer these simple queries. Think of how many things you must do in order
not
to know the year 1776 or the British prime minister or the Fifth Amendment. At the start, you must forget the lessons of school—history class, social studies, government, geography, English, philosophy, and art history. You must care nothing about current events, elections, foreign policy, and war. No newspapers, no political magazines, no NPR or Rush Limbaugh, no CNN, Fox News, network news, or
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
No books on the Cold War or the Founding, no biographies, nothing on Bush or Hillary, terrorism or religion, Europe or the Middle East. No political activity and no community activism. And your friends must act the same way, never letting a historical fact or current affair slip into a cell phone exchange.
It isn’t enough to say that these young people are uninterested in world realities. They are actively cut off from them. Or a better way to put it is to say that they are encased in more immediate realities that shut out conditions beyond—friends, work, clothes, cars, pop music, sitcoms,
Facebook.
Each day, the information they receive and the interactions they have must be so local or superficial that the facts of government, foreign and domestic affairs, the historical past, and the fine arts never slip through. How do they do it? It sounds hard, especially in an age of so much information, so many screens and streams in private and public places, and we might assume that the guests on “Jaywalking” represent but a tiny portion of the rising generation. No doubt
The Tonight Show
edits the footage and keeps the most humiliating cases, leaving the smart respondents in the cutting room. Leno’s out for laughter, not representative data. In truth, we might ask, what does a cherry-picked interview on Santa Monica Boulevard at 9 P.M. on a Saturday night say about the 60 million Americans in their teens and twenties?
A lot, it turns out. That’s the conclusion drawn by a host of experts who in the last 10 years have directed large-scale surveys and studies of teen and young adult knowledge, skills, and intellectual habits. Working for government agencies, professional guilds, private foundations, academic centers, testing services, and polling firms, they have designed and implemented assessments, surveys, and interviews of young people to measure their academic progress, determine their intellectual tastes, and detail their understanding of important facts and ideas. They don’t despise American youth, nor do they idealize it. Instead, they conduct objective, ongoing research into the young American mind. Their focus extends from a teen or 20-year-old’s familiarity with liberal arts learning (history, literature, civics . . .) to calculations of how young adults spend their time (watching TV, surfing the Web, reading . . .). They probe a broad range of attitudes and aptitudes, interests and erudition, college and workplace “readiness.” Much of the inquiry centers precisely on the kinds of knowledge (under)represented in the “Jaywalking” segments.
The better-known examples of monitoring include the SAT and ACT tests, whose annual results appear in every newspaper as each state in the Union reckons where it stands in the national rankings. Nielsen ratings for television and radio shows provide a familiar index of youth tastes, while every election season raises doubts about the youth vote—where does it fall, will it turn out . . . ? Added to these measures are dozens of lesser-known projects that chart the intellectual traits of young Americans. Some of them excel in the scope and consistency of their coverage:
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—
a regular assessment of student learning in various subjects, mainly reading and math, conducted by the U.S. Department of Education. Nicknamed “the Nation’s Report Card,” NAEP involves national- and state-level inquiries, with the former gathering a respondent group of 10,000 to 20,000 students, the latter around 3,000 students from each participating jurisdiction (45-55 jurisdictions per assessment). ( )
National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)—
Housed at Indiana University, NSSE (nicknamed “Nessie”) is a national survey administered to college freshmen and seniors each fall semester, the questions bearing upon their demographic traits, campus experiences, and intellectual habits. In 2006, nearly 260,000 students participated. ()
Kaiser Family Foundation Program for the Study of Entertainment Media and Health—
a research project funded by Kaiser and concentrating on media and children, with an emphasis on the media’s effect on mental and physical health. Important data collections include surveys of media consumption by infants and toddlers and by 8- to 18-year-olds. ()
American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics (ATUS)—
an annual survey with a nationally representative sample of more than 13,000 respondents who chart how they spend their time on weekdays and weekends. ATUS tallies work and school time, and among leisure activities measured are reading, watching TV, playing games, using computers, and socializing. ()
Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts (SPPA)—
a survey conducted approximately every five years that measures the voluntary participation of adults in different art forms. Respondents numbering up to 17,000 record how many novels and poems they read and how often they visit a museum or a gallery, attend a theater performance, listen to jazz on the radio, etc. ()
There are many more important ongoing investigations of the young American intellect, such as National Geographic’s
Geographic Literacy Survey
and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s civic literacy surveys, along with one-time reports such as
Are They Really Ready to Work?
(2006), a study of workplace skills of recent graduates by the Conference Board. One after another, though, they display the same dismal results and troubling implications.
Most young Americans possess little of the knowledge that makes for an informed citizen, and too few of them master the skills needed to negotiate an information-heavy, communication-based society and economy. Furthermore, they avoid the resources and media that might enlighten them and boost their talents. An anti-intellectual outlook prevails in their leisure lives, squashing the lessons of school, and instead of producing a knowledgeable and querulous young mind, the youth culture of American society yields an adolescent consumer enmeshed in juvenile matters and secluded from adult realities. The meager findings force the issue as researchers form an inescapable judgment, one that will dismay anyone who cares about the health of U.S. democracy and the intelligence of U.S. culture. The insulated mindset of individuals who know precious little history and civics and never read a book or visit a museum is fast becoming a common, shame-free condition. The clueless youths Leno stops on the street aren’t so different from a significant and rising portion of teens and young adults, the future of our country.
That sounds like an alarmist claim, and the fact that the average 18-year-old cannot name his mayor, congressman, or senator, or remember the last book he read, or identify Egypt on a map seems impossible. But the results are in, and they keep accumulating. Here are examples, broken down by discipline.
History.
Students reaching their senior year in high school have passed through several semesters of social studies and history, but few of them remember the significant events, figures, and texts. On the 2001 NAEP history exam, the majority of high school seniors, 57 percent, scored “below basic,” “basic” being defined as partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that allow for proficient work at a selected grade level. Only 1 percent reached “advanced.” (The NAEP has four scores: Advanced, Proficient, Basic, and Below Basic.) Incredibly, 52 percent of them chose Germany, Japan, or Italy over the Soviet Union as a U.S. ally in World War II. The previous time the history exam was administered—in 1994—the exact same numbers came up for seniors, 57 percent at “below basic” and 1 percent at “advanced.” Younger test takers performed better, and showed some progress from test to test. In 1994, fourth-graders stood at only 36 percent below basic, and in 2001 they lowered the number to 33 percent. In 2006, NAEP administered the History exam to 29,000 fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-graders, and a mild improvement emerged. For twelfth-graders, the “below basic” tally dropped four points to 53 percent, and for eighth-graders it dropped from 38 to 35 percent, although both groups remain at 1 percent in “advanced,” and only 12 percent of the older students fall into “proficient.” More than one-third (37 percent) of twelfth-graders did not know that the 1962 Soviet-U.S. dispute arose over missiles in Cuba. Two-thirds of high school seniors couldn’t explain a photo of a theater whose portal reads “COLORED ENTRANCE.”
Diane Ravitch, education professor at NYU and former member of the NAEP governing board, called the 2001 results “truly abysmal” and worried about a voting bloc coming of age with so little awareness of American history. Many believe that college can remedy the deficit, but the findings of another study belie their hope. Commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni,
Losing America’s Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century
(2000) reported the findings of a commissioned survey aimed at measuring the factual historical knowledge of seniors at the top 55 colleges in the country. Many of the questions were drawn from the NAEP high school exam, and the results were astonishing. Only 19 percent of the subjects scored a grade of C or higher. A mere 29 percent knew what “Reconstruction” refers to, only one-third recognized the American general at Yorktown, and less than one-fourth identified James Madison as the “father of the Constitution.”
The feeble scores on these tests emerge despite the fact that young people receive more exposure to history in popular culture than ever before, for instance, best-selling books such as Laura Hillenbrand’s
Seabiscuit: An American Legend
and
John Adams
by David McCullough, movies such as
Braveheart
and
Troy
and
Marie Antoinette,
the History Channel and
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
and
Wikipedia.
Many mass entertainments have historical content, however much the facts get skewed. And yet, if teens and young adults consume them, they don’t retain them as history. In spite of ubiquitous injunctions to know the past by George Will, Alex Trebek, Black History Month, Holocaust survivors,
Smithsonian
magazine, and so on, the historical imagination of most young people extends not much further than the episodes in their own lives.
Civics.
In 1999, according to the U.S. Department of Education, more than two-thirds of ninth-graders studied the Constitution, while fully 88 percent of twelfth-graders took a course that “required them to pay attention to government issues” (see
What Democracy Means to Ninth-Graders
). As they pass through high school and college, too, they volunteer in strong numbers. Despite the schooling and the activism, however, civic learning doesn’t stick. In a 1998 survey of teenagers by the National Constitution Center, only 41 percent could name the three branches of government (in the same survey, 59 percent identified the Three Stooges by name). In a 2003 survey on the First Amendment commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, only one in 50 college students named the first right guaranteed in the amendment, and one out of four did not know
any
freedom protected by it. In a 2003 study sponsored by the National Conference of State Legislatures entitled
Citizenship: A Challenge for All Generations,
barely half of the 15- to 26-year-olds queried agreed that “paying attention to government and politics” is important to good citizenship, and only two-thirds considered voting a meaningful act. While 64 percent knew the name of the latest “American Idol,” only 10 percent could identify the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Only one-third knew which party controlled the state legislature, and only 40 percent knew which party controlled Congress.
In the 2004 National Election Study, a mere 28 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds correctly identified William H. Rehnquist as the chief justice of the United States, and one-quarter of them could not identify Dick Cheney as vice president. A July 2006 Pew Research Center report on newspaper readership found that only 26 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds could name Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State, and only 15 percent knew that Vladimir Putin was the president of Russia. On the 2006 NAEP Civics exam, only 27 percent of twelfth-graders reached proficiency, and 34 percent of them scored “below basic.” Since 2004, the Knight Foundation has funded “Future of the First Amendment” surveys of high school students, and in the last round nearly three-fourths of them “don’t know how they feel about the First Amendment, or take it for granted.”