

Today's college students have tuned out the world, and it's partly our fault - edw519
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=9WdWMfPrdR9HJDmcJcW5pMkf4bvmpvgp

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ericwaller
These facts and issues simply don't matter to most people. There is an
academic-minded "sect" that might consider this blasphemous, but Kabul, the
current Secretary of Defense, even the year of WWII, none of these issues come
to bear on the daily lives of college students.

Older generations love to talk about how politically/globally minded they were
and how they fought against the Vietnam War, but the fervence of their
objection was only proportional to what they stood to loose through the draft.

I see a lot of opinion that generation xyz is stuck to their
blackberries/iphones/facebook/myspace/etc. and that not only are they
ignorant, but that this is some kind of historically unprecented phenomenom.
But I just don't buy it -- they're in college (or high school), by and large
their parents are supporting them -- maybe when the time comes for them to
support themselves some of these issues will become relevant (at least tax
raises and cuts), and many of these kids will "get smart."

There will always be those who are diligent and alert -- as long as being so
conveys some kind of quantifiable advantage. I don't mean to say that public
education isn't important, only that as a society we're no worse off than we
were 25 or 50 years ago.

------
sdurkin
"Times change and men decay"

Since the Greeks, the older generation has always decried the younger
generation as weak, ill-informed, and just not up to snuff by the standards of
"back in the day."

The truth is, most of my classmates are incredibly informed about current
events. They can tell you not only where Kabul is, but also name all of the
provinces of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.

I think the majority of people have always been a little bit ignorant with
regard to foreign policy. And the mean may be especially low today. But this
is offset by the upper segment of the population that is better informed than
their equivalent at any time in history.

------
streblo
As a college student, I can't help but feel that he's exaggerating the issue.
I refuse to believe that most of my classmates couldn't answer 90% of those
questions. The only question I couldn't answer myself was who is the current
SoD, and I was at least informed enough to ask myself who took Rumsfeld's
place when he resigned. It makes me wonder whether the problem is with my
generation as a whole or with his particular sample of it.

~~~
Zev
Maybe its not that he's exaggerating the issue completely, but college
students (myself included) are used to being connected to a source of
information somehow; a quick google search - phone call to someone at the
worst - and we can get any bit of information we could want (slight
exaggeration here but the point remains). As a result, we don't place as much
importance on rote memorization of daily events and occurrences.

While I can personally answer the questions, I do see the viewpoint from the
people around me who look at the questions he was asking - "Who else is a
democracy?" "Who's the SoD?" etc - and go "Thats on Google/Wiki, why bother
memorizing it when I can look it up just as quickly?" And honestly? It's
comforting in a way to know that I'm not going to have to remember random bits
of information if it doesn't interest me.

Is it depressing? In a way. But its the modern world for millions of people
and it's not about to change anytime soon. Instead of giving an irate tirade
on the issue, maybe it would be better for them to talk to the students and
try to look at things from our point of view (grew up with technology and
basically always connected) instead of the one they have/want us to have
(technology is an aid to help us, not a crutch to rely on)

~~~
jimbokun
"It's comforting in a way to know that I'm not going to have to remember
random bits of information if it doesn't interest me."

The very specific example in the article was the fact that not one single
student knew that their government was abducting random people around the
world and disappearing them into holes in which anything could be done to
them, and there was no legal process for anyone to challenge the practice in
any way.

Does that qualify as a random bit of information?

~~~
Zev
Don't take "random" to mean "unnecessary"

Any bit of information that I'm not specifically interested in finding is
random as far as I'm concerned. That doesn't mean its not important in some
way.

------
kajecounterhack
What kind of class was this? I'm a junior in high school, and I've known the
meaning of rendition since 6th grade. I and 90% of my classmates know the
answer to all those questions. For college students to be unable to answer
these kinds of questions...well they live in a hole. Theres no other
explaination. What school is this? Case Western Reserve University? What kinds
of people attend this school?

All this article has revealed to me is that the quality of students at that
particular University is quite low. I mean sure, perhaps my standards are high
coming from a suburban area where the population is 20% Asian (high education
standards). But seriously. 11/18 kids can't tell you Kabul is in Afghanistan,
where we've been fighting a war for over a half decade?

------
lpgauth
Where I live (Montreal, Canada) we get CNN and I can understand why college
kids don't watch the news. It's complete bullsh __news. Lou Dobbs is
ridiculous in so many way...

Agreed that they could read the news on the net (because who gets the
newspaper delivered to their rez?) but personally I feel like reading serious
stuff on a screen is dry and very hard to do (much rather like paper).

Just my 2 cents.

p.s. Also, I haven't completely RTFA but generalizing is never good.

p.p.s. It's not because their top of their class they should be more aware of
the news, that's BS.

~~~
Jesin
> generalizing is never good.

Remember, _every_ rule has exceptions.

------
dhimes
My professors griped exactly the same way about us. And when I became a
professor, I griped the same way. In any country you choose, the professors
are griping about how ignorant the students are. It's not just "stupid
Americans."

But it gets better: professors of X cannot believe how silly professors of Y
are on subject X (how would this prof do on an applied technology quiz? A
biology quiz? More to the point how would he have done when he was 20?). etc.
etc.

But man, when I read that some of the students think 1975 is a plausible year
for the A-bomb, I feel old...!

------
tx
So true:

 _Those who tune in to television "news" are subjected to a barrage of
opinions from talking heads like CNN's demagogic Lou Dobbs and MSNBC's Chris
Matthews and Fox's Bill O'Reilly and his dizzying "No Spin Zone." In today's
journalistic world, opinion trumps fact (the former being cheaper to produce)_

------
edw519
Part of the problem of keeping up with current events is understanding who to
believe. In an age when anyone can broadcast anything, we end up with almost
nothing.

Perhaps high schools and colleges should be a little less concerned with
transmitting data and concentrate more on how to think, where to get data, and
how to evaluate that data.

OTOH, maybe this is just another opportunity for those of us who would rather
build something than spend time watching American Idol, facebooking, and
partying. (Spending time on hacker news is OK.)

~~~
jgrahamc
Here's the thing: keeping up with current events is wrong. Don't try to keep
up.

The right way to understand things is slowly. This is why I don't watch the TV
news, I don't read mainstream news web sites.

I have two major sources of news: Le Monde (which I have daily) and The
Economist (which is a weekly). Of those two I get the most information from
The Economist because once a week I can read considered opinion and news not
Breaking News which is irrelevant.

I also don't follow Twitter and I have a very limited set of RSS feeds. The
only social news site I read is this one.

~~~
Alex3917
Salon.com is pretty good too. If you subscribe they send you an email every
morning with a link to one article and a short description. They might only
publish three or four articles worth reading per week, but the quality of
those articles is far better than anything you'll find in any newspaper. There
are also almost never any factual errors, unlike the NYT. And also, unlike the
NYT, it isn't full of blatant propaganda. (Ever notice how the Times always
describes the warrantless wiretapping with the epithet "that begin after sept.
11th," even though their own reporting shows that claim to be false. [1])

[1]
[http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/14/32927/2778/622/47636...](http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/14/32927/2778/622/476369)

~~~
wanorris
I let my subscription to Salon.com lapse around 2002 when it was no longer
possible to ignore the fact that they were happy to be a blatant mouthpiece
for the left. It just wasn't worth the work to sort out the good pieces from
the leftist nonsense. (Also note: I'm not any more a fan of right-wing
nonsense.)

------
mmp
Maybe it's just his students that are like this, and not all young people.

Considering how mediocre and ignorant most journos are, is it that surprising
to consider that the same may apply to journalism students? When I say
mediocre journalists, I don't have Hunter Thompson or Helen Thomas in mind,
but the people that invariably make you cringe when you read their newspaper
article on a subject you're familiar with.

------
b20a61u31
It was a very well written article. Wisdom is something that eludes the
masses. I can't begin to comment on it seeing that I lack a lot of it myself.
Even though knowledge is more and more accessible, the wisdom to use it will
not be within the granting power of Man. [taken from various philosophers like
Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and probably many more have glimpsed this trait of
human nature]

------
Alex3917
What about the 60% of twenty-somethings that don't get a college degree? Is
their participation in the democracy not mandatory?

------
tokipin
i think the major overtone is that life is getting easier and easier

------
nazgulnarsil
want to understand the world? study economic history. follow the money and you
find the motivations.

start in the late 1600's with proto-capitalism and follow the trail of money.

------
craig-faber
OK. But how do we build a better news service?

------
weegee
I was lucky enough to have a history professor in high school who taught in
such a way that opened our eyes to more than one way of seeing any historic
event. He listed sources for us to read from around the world. There was also
a lot of optional reading, this source is more difficult than this other
source. If you're not interested, stick with Miller, if you want more depth,
read Blum, etc. I took from that class a new interest in history as well as
current events. Of course, this was in the 1980s before the media became so
readily available via the net. It's almost at a saturation point. You can get
information so easily, why even bother getting it in the first place? I can
always do it later, and so on. This might be a common attitude among todays
students. I have a 12 year old nephew who is heavily shielded from the outside
world by his parents. His father won't let him read Harry Potter because
someone dies in the book. It's sickening. When I was 12 I was reading Stephen
King and loving every minute of it. Shielding your kids from the world isn't
necessary at age 12.

------
slcook54
Case Western University is where the brightest kids in the nation are
attending, now that is a piece of news I haven't heard about.

------
izak30
Ok, while I did know the answers to all of his questions (just left college),
my reaction was such that I just thought: "Another person who is lamenting
about the education system, in regards to current affairs, big deal"

I closed it after the second paragraph. I wonder if he also gathers statistics
on telia tequila as well as the civil war...

~~~
xlnt
how do you know that you knew the answers to all his questions if you closed
the article after the second paragraph?

~~~
izak30
Ok, So I read about half way through the article, second idea, and I didn't
re-count the paragraphs to type this up.

Here is the thing for me: Blaming it on anything other than the individual and
their parents seems like a cop-out.

