Letters to the Editor
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Inanities about Doris Lessing's Nobel speech
I am tired of people who, apart from a line repeated over and over in the media, show no familiarity with Lessing's Nobel speech but feel themselves competent to judge what she said.
She, by the way, Ms. Goldwasser, already beat you to the point that someone among the privileged young she encounters will win a prize like the Nobel for literature. But she also contrasts their scant interest in the contents of their school libraries to the almost desperate hunger for books she has seen in Africa.
Read the speech! At http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.html
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The same thing that was the matter with their parents yesterday
We need to start celebrating this unprecedented surge, incorporating it as an educational tool ...
This is the takeaway. Adults don't know how to use the net to teach kids the things that we all agree kids need to know — about art, science, and above all history — because frankly the adults don't know either.
American ignorance of basic sciences and humanities is appallingly broad at every level of society. As Amy Goldwasser reminds us, young people aren't ignorant because of the internet — but I would put it even more strongly. They're ignorant in spite of the internet.
If anything, they will probably grow up to be less ignorant than their parents. Which isn't hard, admittedly, but it will still be an improvement.
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It's Always Something Else
No no no, I don't mean to sound like Roseanne Roseannadanna. It's just that no matter what the critique, whether it be here on Salon or in the barber shop or the fire station or whatever functions as The Public Square, it always devolves into Black and White. The Kids are All Right or the kids are all wrong, and if the kids are, indeed, all right, then the "old" are most certainly wrong. And vice versa. America truly is, as someone far smarter than me once said, incapable of looking at anything from more than one aspect at the same time, at least without spraining its collective neck.
The kids are, in general, fine. I despair for the ones who are not fine, and I do come across them with regularity, but I also run into an awful lot of really just-fine ones. I don't think the proportion of brightness to idiocy has changed much among the young (and I'm still not certain where that line is drawn). But I do find, with increasing despair, that the fully grown are becoming more stupid by the day. That includes perhaps my own son, who is 38 and not really stupid, but who has deliberately avoided knowing what's going on in the world, which makes all our conversations seem to revolve around things that he really shouldn't be old enough to remember, but nothing that's going on right now. His younger sister (by 11 years) can run rings around me in terms of useful current knowlege, yet also managed to absorb so much of my influence in her childhood that she occasionally and quite spontaneously will regurgitate lengthy quotes from Kerouac, Captain Beefheart or William S. Burroughs. What have I done? Oh, they both own computers, but my son is almost phobic about his, while daughter knew COBOL while in middle school. Strange brew.
On the other hand, and there always is another hand, I don't think all us Old Farts are actually old except insofar that we have managed to stay alive, and in so doing have learned a little about and from computers as well (and right now eBay is filling the income void while I wait for medical clearance to return to work -- if ever). I have very little in common with most people my age, and a lot younger if you count my son, poor lost soul that he is.
I guess my rambling, rampant senile point is that the kids really are all right, and as a former object of cane-shaking old ladies in the late 1950s hurling the curse "Damned juevenile delinquents" at me and my computerless friends, I'm feeling Amy G. (but only figuratively). It should be noted however, that we all did worship that giant "electronic brain" that showed up in both "Desk Set" and "The Invisible Boy." We just didn't all get on board at the same time when the "brain" got small enough to fit in our houses. Of course my 73 year-old right-wing lunatic cousin won't move from the orbit of his computer, having doubled his girth and halved his intelligence while daily forwarding right-wing lunacy and religious crap which he gets from his high school girlfriend (class of '53). I don't think he's much of a gamer, but that could be a secret vice. I don't see how he could be a player without that computer.
If we're worried about our kids growing stupid and fat in front of computers, where will we warehouse old farts like my cousin in a few years? He can have my space in the ICU, because I'll be out somewhere kayaking down the Potomac with a lovely 30-something, after which we will stop somewhere along the river, find a wi-fi hotspot, check our email, and figure out how best to save the world while watching something in Hi-def from the Dial-a-Bed.
Yes, I think the kids are mostly all right.
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What's the matter with adults today?
Which generation continues to actually demonstrate a "stunning ignorance" of the lessons of history?
Which generation was raised on information from across the globe, not just the ideas that were gated by the teacher at the front of a classroom?
Which generation is busy fighting to undermine the challenge to religious indoctrination found in modern science, while continuing obedient support to religious institutions that have systematically traumatized and misinformed children for decades?
Which generation will work for their lifetimes to pay for the debt of their parents?
In my experience working with college-level interns over the last decade, it is almost universally true that these young men and women are more grounded in reality, more curious, more broadly informed, and more skeptical of constructs based only on tradition than their more "adult" mentors. They are also more specialized, which is a positioning that will serve them well in the broad workplace in which they will compete. Considering the world being handed to them, they are also surprisingly forgiving of their largely incompetent and arrogant elders -- at least for now.
Like other changes it has brought, the Internet has enabled this generation in ways more far-reaching and profound than society yet comprehends.