Archive: Opinions

When Jay Leno hosted the Tonight Show he had a segment called 'Jay Walking' on which he asked questions of passers-by and the hilarity came from how very much they didn't know.  I saw a similar video on the Internet the other day on which Texas Tech students were asked simple questions about current events and pop culture (Click here to view the video.).  Only one of them could tell the interviewer that Joe Biden is our Vice President, but they could all tell her about Brad Pitt's stormy marriages to Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston.  The title of the piece was 'The Dumbing Down of America'.

"Who won the Civil War?" the interviewer asks.  "We did?" replies one student, "The South?"  "Who did we gain our independence from?"  "I couldn't tell you."  These kids got into college?  Well, yes, but is America really getting dumber?

One of my favorite quotations comes from Mark Twain: "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."  I have to think that his father thought the kid was pretty ignorant, too, but young Samuel eventually grew out of it, probably about the time he realized how much his old man had learned.

I used to teach college and many of my faculty colleagues would complain that the quality of the students wasn't up to the quality of students in their day.  Somehow young people had gotten stupider since the faculty members had grown up.  I never bought that.  I thought our students were, for the most part, pretty bright and engaged, and a good number of them were smarter that me.  They were fun to teach and to learn from.

I certainly had (and have) opinions on the state of modern education.  As educators have become more and more politically correct it has gone out of style to call things what they are.  You can sit through a school meeting and have no idea what anybody is talking about because they are so afraid of offending anyone they use terms that don't make any sense.  And the way some topics are taught these days defies good sense.  You got it, I am referring to memorizing the multiplication table, among other things.  There are just some things you have to memorize -- there is no way around that.  Grumble, grumble.

But that isn't the young peoples' fault.  It's the fault of adults who think new approaches are better than proven methods of learning.  New isn't always better.  Sometimes it's just new.

Let's also take into consideration that anyone who has a camera pointed at them and a microphone unexpectedly thrust toward their head is likely to freeze when asked a question out of the blue.  And, again, perhaps current events simply isn't being adequately taught.  Or maybe current events just isn't that interesting to many young people.  I see a lot of old people in front of their TVs watching nothing but CNN or Fox News hour after hour, reveling in the repetition (again, a great way to learn the multiplication table) and able to tell anyone who will listen to them what they think of Joe Biden.

My takeaway: get Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lawrence, Katy Perry, Zachary Quinto, and a slew of young and youngish celebrities to teach current events.  Then all young people will know who our Vice President is.

That will leave one more challenge: getting older people to know who Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lawrence, , Zachary Quinto and Katy Perry are.

v12i47