Letters to the Editor
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Eventually the internet is used to reinforce the bigotries you already hold
You will pull up the sources you like and ignore the ones you don't. I can't imagine a generation raised on Howard Zinn having a wide enough perspective to investigate sources that aren't just like Howard Zinn for instance.
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Sure, they read . . .
and they also plagiarize. Constantly. Turning in critical analyses lifted from Sparknotes is irresistible, I guess, though most of us are savvy about the websites students routinely use (luckily, they're fairly lazy about their sources). Take a look at the increasingly Byzantine process colleges and universities have to follow in order to prevent and penalize plagiarism. Yes, yes, there has always been scholastic dishonesty and always will be, but my colleagues and I have seen a huge rise in plagiarism in the last 5-10 years (many departments now employ databases that identify lifted passages in student essays--we're entering into a technological stalemate with those we teach). Often, when the students are confronted, they are more dismayed about getting caught than the deed itself. It's frustrating, sad, and it would frankly bewilder me if I didn't know that they had operated this way all through the years of their elementary and secondary education. The internet is a wonderful tool, but it can't teach them ethics and critical thinking--that's our job.
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plagiarism
My generation who were in their teens when the Internet became popular also plagiarized and cheated their way to good grades. We just used print sources rather than online ones. Perhaps these were harder for teachers to identify. I don't know. Personally, I blame Atari and perhaps Dungeons and Dragons, for our lack of integrity. Also, drugs. We were all on drugs! These amoral Generation Xers.
Actually, I just read that cheating was big at the Ivy League back when it was mostly WASP men and also, cheating was popular at English prep schools way back before the Internets were invented. You were considered uncool if you didn't crib.
It's human nature to do these things. It's not right, but that hasn't stopped generation after generation from trying them. Unfortunately.
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The problem is they're voting
Let's face it. This is all about a shift in societal and political power far more than it is on "the kids being dumb."
As people have pointed out the U.S. education system has been failing for a number of years now. Young people have increasingly asked for a larger voice since at least the early 1990s (understand those people are not so young anymore and now in their mid-30s) and certain segments of the older population have always been, shall we say, grumpy. But it is all coming to the forefront now. Has anyone bothered to ask why?
One need do no more than that "research" that the older generation is constantly vaunting. Read through the leaders on this site. It's clear. What we have is a shift in the power dynamics. Young people have finally reached the point where there are enough of them that they have a coherent, strong political voice.
This is the source of the tensions between young and old that are coming to the surface. Many older people, as all groups of older people do, fear this change from an inherent belief that it means the loss of their own political power.
Also given the lack of any activity in terms of stopping global warming, the spark in the number of genocides across the world (that started with Bill Clinton's administration), the collapsing economy and the disastrous war in Iraq (which both of the older candidates supported) I think they also know they are on thin ice with regard to the leadership argument. Baby Boomers, who as a generation HAVE been a great success, have been dismal leaders falling into the trap of being too self-absorbed (Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton) and they know it.
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John Randolph
As for the Internet issue, I'll just say it simply: the problem here, I think, is that students are losing the ability to follow complex arguments. Not being used to reading in depth, they don't ; and while that "proactive" approach has its upsides, the big downside is that if you ask them to reiterate an argument that goes from A to B to C to D, most of them can't go much past B.
To be quite honest, I don't find very many people of any age who can follow logical reasoning very well.
This is particularly true if you are trying to make a point with which they disagree.
"Reasoning" with many people, even people who write quite well, is like trying to nail jello to the wall.
There are an astounding number of people who simply cannot read what is written.. All you have to do is go to Glenn Greenwald's column here on Salon to see blatant examples every single day.
Glenn, a lawyer and trained in logic, makes his arguments succinctly and clearly. And yet, without fail, someone will accuse Glenn of writing something which it is perfectly obvious he did not.
There is about thirty percent of the population which is simply incapable of logical thought.. Dr Bob Altemeyer's book _The Authoritarians_ lays out his decades of research on these people in a manner which is readily accessible to the layperson. Dr Bob's book is available for free to read or print/distribute as you see fit. I recommend it to anyone interested in the "thought" processes of that portion of the public which cannot handle logical constructs.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
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Information Iliteracy
The ablility to power search horizantally through results from a search engine is NOT equivilient to knowing how to do research in depth, and to how to evlauate what you are getting. In fact, the information literacy of the millenials (Google Generation), in particular is atrocious. Probably has something to do with being distracted by "flash in the pan" news a bit too often. At times, it reminds me of how television can numb and even supplant critical thinking when you focus on too much of the crap. The British Library published a study recently on information literacy that should concern everyone. http://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf
One of the realizations acknowledged that by the time kids get to college it's too late to change those ingrained habits and behaviours. Most college kids today they believe they know far more about research than they actually could demonstrate they know.
It may turn out that todays college students, and the upcoming millenials may in fact be the most information illiterate, as a group, in recent history. Of what value is shear quantity of "information," if your criteria for evaluation is just finding ANY plausable answer to a superficial question? This is where more experience can be shared, but either is not, yet, or is being rejected by the young because any plausable answer seems good enough for them. Not to say older people can fall into that trap too, but it is particularly troublesome to see it in the young, and being fostered and encouraged by the very nature of the Internet as a commercial, consumer, and entertainment medium, NOT an educational one.
Knowing facts and figures is a STARTING point, and not just incidental to understanding and applying critical thinking to what you read on the Net.