I think we’re beginning to see a time of darkness when, amid a plethora of high tech connectivity, one-quarter of Americans say they have no close confidante, more than double the number twenty years ago. It’s a darkening time when we think togetherness means keeping one eye, hand, or ear on our gadgets, ever ready to tun into another channel of life, when we begin to turn to robots to tend to the sick and the old, when doctors listen to patients on an average for just eighteen seconds before interrupting, and when two-thirds of children under six live in homes that keep the television on half or more of the time, and envoronment linked to attention deficiencies. We should worry when we have the world at our fingertips, but half of Americans age eighteen to twnety-four can’t find New York state on a map and more than 60 percent can’t similarly locate Iraq
–Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus Books, 2008), page 22
Last week, I wrote “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” on the board in my ethics class and asked where that phrase is found and who wrote it. Complete silence. Then someone from the back said, “It looks familiar.” Finally had to tell them myself, since they obviously didn’t know.
Yesterday, I was talking about the role of Natural Law in the Civil Rights movement and I referenced “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” I asked who had read it. No one. Even the Black kids. I was so floored, I sputtered for about fifteen seconds.
I asked some kids in my religion class if they could tell me why the date December 7, 1941, is significant. They couldn’t. When I told them, they said, “Oh. So why is that significant?” Apparently, though several of them had *heard* of Pearl Harbor, they didn’t realize that it was the beginning of American involvement in World War II.
These are community college students, so some are traditional college age and many are not. I despair. Their papers show no coherence of thought, grasp of grammar and basic punctuation, or understanding of the world outside of their television. They sit like the proverbial bumps on a log and do not interact with me. Or worse, they act as though they’re at home watching television–talking, texting, getting up and walking around. I’m pretty strict for a college teacher too; I tell them I won’t tolerate that sort of activity in my classroom since it’s disruptive, but they still seem to think I’m behind a giant screen and that I can’t see what they’re doing.
New Dark Age is about right. I think we’re on the downward slide.
Anglicanum, I agree. I was an adjunct college professor for a few years. I haven’t taught since 2003. It was bad then. Adult students attending night business school classes were disrespectful, arrogant and demanding. Not all, but enough to make you sit up and wonder where this was all going. There is a YouTube video going around about exponential change. At the end of the day, for me, a Christian, it is all about serving God and others, personally, one-on-one, involving only whomever I interact with. That concept is foreign to nearly all the students I encountered.
When you excise metaphysics from education, as America did at the turn of the 20th century, you remove what students need to integrate learning. Without metaphysics, education is nothing more than throwing catagories of information at students.
When we study the history of Ethics, we find surprising similarities between the late 20th century and the Renaissance: new technologies, glorification of human achievement, Muslim expansionism, pandemic diseases, upper classes investing in the arts, erosion of Church authority, Machiavellian politics, etc. If the Renaissance set the tone for the Enlightenment, then we may be entering a new period of ‘Enlightenment’, which in my thinking would indeed be a dark time.
Alice,
You can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl. Wouldn’t teachers have continued to exude in their teaching a stream – if not vocalized formally – of, as you say, metaphysics within education?
So when do you think it finally trailed out? And what would a side-by-side comparison of a classroom prior to the “excise”, and when the final residue from the teachng corps was gone?
The last remnants of Scholasticism were thrown out in the 19th century and replaced with a materialist-empiricist approach to education which has failed miserably. Dorothy Sayers spoke about the failures of modern education in a speech she gave at Oxford University in 1947. You can read her “Lost Tools fo Learning” here: http://teachgoodwriting.blogspot.com/2008/01/dorothy-sayers-lost-tools-of-learning.html
Scholasticism, for all the belittling it has received by modernists, still represents the best curriculum and methodology known in the Western world. As Sayers explains in her speech, metaphysics was at the heart of scholastic education. Consider some of the products of Scholasticism: Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Francis Bacon, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes…
Anglicanum’s post made depressing reading. Things look similar here in the UK. What is so surprising, and depressing, about so many adolescents today is their lack of curiosity about the world. The book seems spot on: how ironic that the world has shrunk, that we can view any part of the earth from the air, communicate instantly across the globe – and yet our younger generation has so little interest in the lives of others.