A study of university professors in Ontario (Canada) reported students were immature, lazy and unprepared.  They also lacked the research skills that might yet save them from going blithely forth to their, and our, doom.  The so-called most informed generation had little knowledge and what they did possess was superficial at best and outright myth at worst.  For example, Canadian troops, in one form or another, have been fighting in Afghanistan since 2002.  Yet when I ask students at beginning of semester where Afghanistan is only 1 or 2  can answer correctly.  None of them have a clear understanding of how we got there and what we are trying to accomplish.  But if I ask whether they support their troops the majority answer in the affirmative.  How can you support your troops if you don’t know where they are or why they are there? 

Something not reported was that many of them are functionally illiterate.  A functional illiterate can read and write but with severe limitations.  They could perhaps read a menu (without the pictures found in fast food joints the purpose of which is a recognition of the extent of illiteracy); they could read the headlines of a newspaper but would struggle with the content.  If they get news at all it is from television and even then they are lucky to fully comprehend the story as their vocabularies are woefully inadequate. 

Are teachers to blame?  They are certainly the easiest target.  They stand on the front lines in the classroom day after day.  Surely they are aware that what passes for education today is a hollow shell.   The problem is that people outside the education system can’t see the forest of bureaucrats hacking away gleefully on the ability of the trees to teach.  Teachers have marginally more say as to what goes on in the education system than the school janitor.  Decisions are made by bean counters and other bureaucratic nitwits shuffling papers in some climate controlled paradise.  They wouldn’t know what end of a white board marker to use let alone how to fire up the data video projector.  They love flow charts but anything with real people involved like a classroom, forget it.  Those bipedal chatterboxes in the hallways are clients or products to them not kids with a life that demands preparation.  The business mentality that has invaded our schools has created good cogs but poor humans. 

This is not the first study to raise an alarm that something horrible is happening in our society.  It will likely not be the last.  What I have yet to come to grips with is why we allow this to continue.  Maybe the reaction by students in one of my classes to the survey sheds some light.  They laughed.  They had been insulted and they thought it was funny.  They had been called immature and they accepted it. 

In a separate study this generation of high school graduates was found to be closer to their grandparents than their parents in attitudes and outlook.  Fresh-faced youths interviewed for the news report merrily expressed their optimism for the future.  The current recession/depression concerned them not at all; nor did the two foreign wars that are going badly for western powers.  They seemed oblivious in their certainty that life would unfold as it should.  But is this optimism or naiveté?  When I was their age I too was optimistic.  I believed that we could create a better, more just, and more humane society.  I believed the future could bring an end to unnecessary suffering and ease the pain of the rest.  And of course I believed that I would find love and adventure.  Optimism in youth should be a given.  I still strive for that better society.  Change is slow but it is measurable.

However, I knew the dangers presented by an illegal and unjust war in Southeast Asia.  I realized the fragility of life under the umbrella of nuclear weapons.  I watched the machinations of government destroy people’s lives without conscience and knew only herculean efforts would bring about meaningful change.  I was optimistic not that things were great but that things could change; that most people were basically good and if we banded together there was little we could not accomplish.  The key was being in as well as of my world.  My father always complained that I was an idealist but it was an idealism grounded in reality.  I am not saying that young people today should rent their clothes and wail at the fates all the time.  I don’t now and I didn’t then.  Rest and recreation, which I admit was sometimes chemically induced when I was their age, has always been important to me.  I am definitely a Type B personality.  But denying the obvious is not escapism it is just dumb.

This generation thinks everything is basically wonderful and Bill Gates will fix everything else.  That truly is a telling reminder of the 1950s.  In the Leave It To Beaver era housewives wore pearls to vacuum and were ditsy redheads whose antics would attract disapproving but loving smiles from their husbands.  The 1950s was the clean cut illusion of what life in North America was supposed to be.  Ike was in the White House and he would fix any problems that might arise.  There was a sense that the world had been settled with the defeat of Naziism.  There was a comfort and certainty about society.  But it bore little resemblance to the reality.  Many teens of the era, particularly those of interest to ‘popular’ researchers, knew nothing of the world outside their immaculate suburbs.  Blacks were smiling Rochesters singing and dancing, happy in their simple life.  Mom was always home to make a hot meal and gush over the latest kitchen marvel.  These young people had not yet learned of the horrors of life in the ghettos of the North or shantytowns of the deep South.  They had no idea that after they kissed mom goodbye in the morning she would turn to a bottle or pill to get through her day, both gleefully prescribed by a male dominated medical profession who thought the little filly was just suffering from a bout of female hysterics.  While conscientious studies chronicled the dark side of society, there was an entire industry within social science to prop up the illusion and a flickering television to inject the social sedative. 

How did we end up with a generation that knows little and worships the fatuous?  Shouldn’t we have seen this coming and done something about it?  For the past 30 or so years successive political leaders in Canada and the United States have been trying to fix the education system.  But wait a minute.  When did it break?  There is the key to the problem.  An Ontario education minister in the 1990s said everything we need to know about the problems we see with our youth today.  He brought his senior bureaucrats into a meeting and told them to create a crisis in education because he was going to fix it.  I will not hold it against this particular man that he himself did not finish high school.  After all neither did I.  I completed only grade 9 while he went on through grade 11.  The difference between us is I never stopped learning.  He did.  I quit high school for social reasons; he quit because he believed education was unnecessary.  Like many on the Right, he believed the sole purpose of education was to inculcate vocational skills to suit the current job market.  But there is more.  I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories but I do believe there can occur a confluence of interests.  As the franchise had been expanded in the 1960s and 1970s to include the previously disenfranchised groups, women and minorities but also the lower classes, life became more complicated for those who wielded the instruments of power in western society.  Democracy is a messy, chaotic, inefficient, and if you are a corporate capitalist inconvenient, method of governing a country.  More people in the mix just slows the process down further.  Knowledge is power and knowledge was increasing in groups who had been cheated by the status quo. 

You can’t just stop teaching in schools altogether so you need to make it appear as if everyone is getting an education

when they are not.  The solution arrived at was a return to the 3 Rs, Readin’, Ritin’ and ‘Rithmetic.  I have always loved this little phrase about education because it is the mantra of morons.  At least people who can’t spell because only one of the words really begins with the letter R.  (For those educated in our current system the three words are actually Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.)  The fact that it usually comes from people on the political Right gives me added joy.  But what do you expect from a political movement that considers Ann Coulter a seminal thinker?  The 3 Rs is Right-wing code for let’s gut the content of education.  History, civics, geography, anything that expanded the human in our young people was brushed aside as a waste.  Critical thinking was replaced by rote learning.  No wonder students get bored at school.  How many times can you recite the times table or set formulas?  Add to this little mix forcing teachers to become boosters for the little cretins and voilà a generation that can be lied to and manipulated to support any atrocity, any blunder and George W. Bush for two terms.  Stupidity should be a choice not a given. 

Well the Right got what they wanted, a crisis.  And what might you ask about the children of the people who did this to education.  Don’t worry.  They are in private schools that still provide education.  Nice how everything works out for the best for those in charge.