We all know that many students emerge from universities knowing less than they did when they entered; graduating with heads full of random, un-integrated bites of information, and arguments they’re aware (deep down) they’ve never really mastered.
We know you can leave today's universities without every having heard of the giants of your own field; that you can be given an economics degree having never read (or read of) Adam Smith; or an architecture degree without ever getting to grips with Frank Lloyd Wright; or a philosophy degree without ever even encountering, or wrestling with Aristotle.
But it gets worse. More and more young people "just don’t want to read books any more: they seem to lack either the will or the attention span."
"If you’ve been teaching at the [university] level for a number of years," says the
Atlantic in a long piece on the distressing development, "and your teaching involves reading books, you’ll have noticed the phenomenon." I have. Even
fourteen years ago it was evident.
Economist George Reisman used to reckon that graduates in any discipline should really emerge possessing
the essential content of well over a hundred major books on mathematics, science, history, literature, and philosophy, and do so in a form that is well organised and integrated, so that he can apply this internalised body of knowledge to his perception of everything in the world around him. He should be in a position to enlarge his knowledge of any subject and to express his thoughts on any subject clearly and logically, both verbally and in writing. Yet, as the result of the mis-education provided today, it is now much more often the case that college graduates fulfil the Romantic ideal of being ‘simple, uneducated men.’” [Emphasis mine.]
This is everywhere. As the
Atlantic recounts,
students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. .... Many students no longer arrive at [university]—even at highly selective, elite [universities]—prepared to read books.
The Spectator and
Daily Skeptic tell a similar tale. The problem starts even earlier than university.
[A] student told [one uni lecturer] that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
Hard to study literature if you've never read a book. And can't.
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
The result:
Students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. ...; students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of [one] English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.
A sonnet is only fourteen lines!
The problem is said to be the internet.
Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.
But "teenagers are not bothering with the internet either."
They don’t want to know that much to actually initiate a question of the internet. If pushed, they might ask Alexa at home but they hardly go to the bother of typing out a question.
And this, I have finally worked, out is the reason for teenagers’ disinterest in the possibilities of the internet: the current generation of children are passive users, not active ones. They look at their phones and entertainment is presented to them via their specific feeds: reems and reems of the stuff on Snap or TikTok. Teenagers have no need to actively look for anything, as everything has already been perfectly curated for their specific needs (generally beauty for girls, fitness and jokes for boys – disappointing but there it is). Internet use is a bit like reading a magazine of old, someone else has done all the hard work for you and all you have to do is sit back and scroll. ...
[F]or the vast majority of children, the internet is as ignored and unvisited as the libraries and bookshops of old.
So perhaps the problem is not that regular whipping boy. Perhaps the problem is that generations of children — teachers of the teachers of the teachers of today's teachers — have been taught dis-integrated knowledge; that facts are negotiable; that the author is dead; that creators are hegemonic; and that the oceans are boiling and colonial settlement is necessarily genocidal. The hierarchy of knowledge is routinely ignored (or entirely unknown), and teachers increasingly see themselves as agents of social and political change instead of what they once were: teachers.
Is it then any surprise, after decades of this intellectual rot emanating from philosophy departments and then teachers colleges — a result of the long 'progressive' march through the institutions —that we're not overwhelmingly seeing strong, healthy, confident, independent and knowledgeable young folk, but too many who can't write, can't read, and can't think?
How to solve this?
Start by burning to the ground the teachers colleges from whence this poison emanates. (Or at least close them). And insist that teachers know their goddamn subject. Philosopher Leonard Peikoff is a strong advocate of this policy to fix Why Johnny Can't Think:
There is no rational purpose to these institutions (and so they do little but disseminate poisonous ideas). Teaching is not a skill acquired through years of classes; it is not improved by the study of “psychology” or “methodology” or any of the rest of the stuff the schools of education offer. Teaching requires only the obvious: motivation, common sense, experience, a few good books or courses on technique, and, above all, a knowledge of the material being taught. Teachers must be masters of their subject; this — not a degree in education — is what school boards should demand as a condition of employment.
This one change would dramatically improve the schools. If experts in subject matter were setting the terms in the classroom, some significant content would have to reach the students, even given today’s dominant philosophy. In addition, the basket cases who know only the Newspeak of their education professors would be out of a job, which would be another big improvement.
This reform, of course, would be resisted to the end by today’s educational establishment, and could hardly be achieved nationally without a philosophic change in the country. But it gives us a starting point to rally around that pertains specifically to the field of education. If you are a parent or a teacher or merely a concerned taxpayer, you can start the battle for quality in education by demanding loudly — even in today’s corrupt climate — that the teachers your school employs know what they are talking about, and then talk about it.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . .” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.”
Let us fight to make our schools once again bastions of knowledge. Then no dictator can rise among us by counting, like Big Brother in 1984, on the enshrinement of ignorance.
And then we may once again have a human future ahead of us.
UPDATE:
At least one youngster is fighting back. On the tech front, at least.
And one school. On the philosophical front.