At my college alone:
- a writing professor reports that his students think Martin Luther King Jr. fought against slavery;
- a history teacher says that "a good student” believes that the United States should not have started World War Two by attacking Pearl Harbor;
- a reading teacher adds that one student thinks Pearl Harbor was “where America won her independence;”
- and a philosophy professor relates that students working on mathematical validity could not understand that “100” validly answers the question “what is the number of United States Senators?” because they knew neither how many Senators there are per state nor how many states there are.
Professors have complained about student shortcomings for millennia but something new is going on here. I see two questions: How is it that the Internet’s “information super library” co-exists with, and is the playground of, what Mark Bauerlein calls “the dumbest generation?” And what is our role as professors when students display a fatal lack of elementary cultural, historical, political knowledge? Do we ignore it or do we try to address it? In my experience, most of us try to ameliorate the new vacuity—we are teachers, after all. But the problem seems so convoluted and systemic that we immediately face the question: “Where do I begin?” In each of the above cases, the professor interrupted his or her college-level lesson and college-level responsibilities. The philosopher, for example, decided to embark on a mini-course in Civics, taking his tabula rasa students on a quick tour of our nation’s founding and the establishment of the upper and lower houses. But only at the cost of the logic lesson. And the lingering question is: how do you arrive at 18 years of age not knowing how many states there are? No finger pointing at K-12. Ignorance does not mean that students have not encountered the knowledge before—it just doesn’t stick. In my Department, we are finding it harder and harder to teach anything that requires more than one class session. Frequently, what students heard on Monday has evaporated by Wednesday. At least the philosopher could solve his instant problem by supplying the absent knowledge, but the other examples are even more troubling. Consider the history student who felt herself competent to pass judgment on something that didn’t happen. She did not have a lack of knowledge, but a mix of garbled data and assumptions that she thought WAS knowledge. It’s one thing to realize that you don’t know something but it’s another thing entirely to think that you do know something which turns out to be absurdly, ridiculously wrong. The decline in student knowledge is bad enough but the replacement of student knowledge with junk and noise is worse because it provides the illusion of knowledge. How much class time would it take me to correct the one-in-ten Americans who believe that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife? Where would I even begin?
