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.Hard to study literature if you've never read a book. And can't. 

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!

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.

BATON ROUGE, LA — Sources close to Max Calderfield, the Healthiest Man Alive, say that the wonder of nature has maintained a sound mind and body precisely by doing exactly the opposite of whatever the government recommends.

Comments

Alison Green of Ask a Manager recently wrote a how-to at The Cut for people interested in asking for a raise.

Below is one of her eight points:

Be emotionally intelligent about your timing.

Managers are humans with normal human emotions and stresses, so it makes sense to be thoughtful about when you approach them. You're less likely to get the results you want if you broach the topic when your boss is especially harried, having a bad day, or nervous about impending budget cuts. On the other hand, if you've just saved the day with an important client or garnered rave reviews for a high-profile project, or if your boss has seemed especially pleased with your work lately, now might be a particularly good time to make the request. So pay attention to what's happening with your work, your manager's mood, and the company generally.

The points are grouped sequentially through the phases of knowing when to do this, preparing for the meeting, and the meeting itself -- from First, know that asking for a raise is normal all the way to Know what to say if the answer is "no" or "maybe."

-- CAV