January 4, 2006
These Kids Today, They Don’t Know Nothing Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:45 AM EST In a pair of recent entries in this blog, Ellen Feldman and John Steele Gordon have decried the sorry state of knowledge on the part of the American public, particularly its younger portion, about history and economics. I heartily agree with their observations, and I would add mathematics to the list. A few years ago I was staying at the oldest and best hotel in Pittsburgh and needed some postcard stamps. They cost 20 cents at the time, and I asked the desk clerk for ten. She had to use a calculator before she could tell me that the price was $2.00. In the movie Drugstore Cowboy, one character who wants to sell ten units of some narcotic item at $9 apiece is so perpetually wasted that he can’t figure out what the total cost should be. He asks, “What’s nine times ten?” and Matt Dillon tries to pull a fast one by saying, “Um, let’s see . . . 75.” The guy just nods. When I saw this movie in 1989, the audience laughed loudly at this scene, but now it’s all too common in real life, and not just among junkies. Everybody has their pet theory for why people are so uninformed. One factor is probably the politicization of school curricula. There are many ways of teaching history or economics, depending on your politics, and sometimes the desire to inculcate certain beliefs or attitudes takes precedence over basic learning. The same is true of science teaching, as we have seen recently as well as in past eras. Even in mathematics, the “fuzzy math” of today, like the “new math” of my childhood, can make finding the actual answer to a problem (or the “solution set” to an “open statement,” in 1970s-speak) seem like a minor detail. In general, I think there has been a trend since the 1950s to teach students about a subject rather than teaching the subject itself. This is usually justified on the grounds that “we’re teaching our kids how to think, not just filling them up with facts.” The trouble is that you need a basic set of facts, often quite a large one, to be able to think analytically about a subject. And by learning facts you develop an analytical framework, not vice versa. I could go on about this at great length, but I won’t. Equally important, however, is the fact that there’s so much more to know today than there was half a century ago. Not only do we have 50 years more history, but we expect our students to learn about topics that were ignored or glossed over in the past. When I was growing up, even in college, Rosa Parks was the answer to a trivia question, about on a level with the pitcher who gave up Roger Maris’s 61st home run (Tracy Stallard of the Red Sox, in case you’re interested). Nowadays every schoolchild knows her name, and when she died recently she was treated as a national hero. With the scope of history teaching having expanded so much, it’s no surprise that some of the old favorites get lost in the shuffle. I’m not saying that knowing about Rosa Parks is more important than knowing about Joe McCarthy or Anne Frank, just that there’s a limited amount of information that can be crammed into students’ heads, and as we broaden the scope of the history they’re taught, some readjustment is inevitable. In the end, all this may work out for the best, because ignorance can be better than simplistic or imperfect knowledge. Knowing nothing about economics is not a good thing, especially for a political journalist, but it’s better than being educated on the subject by Karl Marx or William Jennings Bryan. Similarly, it’s better to have never heard of Joe McCarthy than to make the common mistake of equating McCarthyism with anti-Communism. Today the phrase “Renaissance man” is applied to anyone who enjoys both Desperate Housewives and classical music, but its original meaning was a man who knew everything about a wide range of subjects—because of the limited range of knowledge at the time. Today we know, and are expected to know, so much about so many things that it’s no surprise to see important subjects get pushed aside. Until somebody comes up with a Moore’s Law for humans, in which brain cells double in capacity every so often, the ever-accelerating expansion of knowledge will continue to outpace our ability to absorb it all.
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