Apprehensions

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At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Bauerlein has been generating controversy with a book and blog post arguing that the digital age is negatively affecting the way that young Americans apprehend information, diminishing the slow, deliberative and deep reading required for effective education.  As a result, we today confront the problem of educating the “Dumbest Generation.”

Similar sentiments come from Nicholas Carr at The Atlantic, who worries that Google is taking over his brain, and also from James Bowman at The New Atlantis, who reads Bauerlein and Carr and realizes that it is not just students who suffer from the e-reading affiliction:

Busted! Even those who have come to the Web late in life are not so very different [...] from the fifth-graders who, as an elementary school principal told Bauerlein, proceed as follows when they are assigned a research project: “go to Google, type keywords, download three relevant sites, cut and paste passages into a new document, add transitions of their own, print it up, and turn it in.”

Of course, we have heard versions of the Bauerlein hypothesis before, from the likes of Jacques Ellul in the 1960’s Alvin Toffler in the 1970’s and Neil Postman in the 1980’s.  Ivan Illich once professed to be able to tell – by the prose alone – the difference between papers written on a typewriter and those written on a word processor, leaving little uncertainty about which sort of prose was more reflective.  According to this venerable (even, I would argue, necessary) genre of critique, the mind is apparently being rewired as a result of using a particular technological medium in such a way as to enfeeble its higher capacities.  This process supposedly endangers: (a) reason, (b) democracy, (c) the soul, (d) culture (e) mental health, (f) humanity’s future (g) the price of eggs (h) any combination of the above.

Surely, this declination narrative is guilty of an exaggeration that is easy to thwart.  Siva Vaidhyanathan uses the occasion to not only attack the idea of a “dumbest” generation, but the very concept of generational identity itself. An even suppler rejoinder has recently been issued by Gerald Graff, President of the Modern Language Association.  In this post, I’d like to look at the argumentation in Graff’s response to the controversy, in the belief that this response is not only pretty smart, but also a useful tool with which to analyze some important dynamics of a scholarly dispute.  As we shall see, in objecting to the Dumbest Generation hypothesis, Graff wields invaluable argumentative tools that have their own special aptitudes and problems.  By attending to these attributes, we can learn a lot about how to craft effective cases that respond to works of critique that evince apprehensiveness concerning bewildering new  technological developments.

After outlining the contributions of Bauerlein and others, Graff makes much the same move as I did above, reminding us that there is little novelty in the notion that the digital age is responsible for an ominous decline in intellectual faculties.  “In comparing our time unfavorably with a better past” Graff writes, “we ignore the fact that many of the same complaints were made in that supposedly better past.”  He then quotes his own predecessor, MLA President Charles Hall Grandgent, from a convention address in 1912:

You are all aware of how dangerous it is to assume, on the part of our college classes, any definite knowledge of any subject. Last year I had occasion to question a good many students about . . . Charlemagne; and one after another unblushingly assigned him to the eighteenth century. A colleague in a “fresh water” college could find no one in his class who knew what event is celebrated on the fourth of July.

The above is a fine example of one type of objection to the Bauerlein hypothesis: periodization.  Almost any work aimed at strongly characterizing a current state of affairs can be undermined by looking to the past to find similar prognostications that failed to produce the “dark ages” that they portend.  It can be pretty satisfying to make an objection of this kind, since you usually get to unearth some unremembered but grandiloquent theorist (“Fresh water colleges?” Blech), who sounds silly in retrospect.  By analogizing the current argument with one that has been long-discarded, Graff makes the Bauerlein hypothesis seem just as puffy and worthy of dismissal.

But there is also a disadvantage to the periodization attack in that it does not actually respond to the evidence proffered by the likes of Bauerlein, who has plenty of research and experience backing him up, after all.  The periodization attack thereby refuses to meet the argument on its own terms.  As a result, it can feel a little dishonorable.  To a great many readers, this is like tripping someone in a fistfight.  Sure, your opponent may be on the ground, but everyone knows that the way that you put them there is a little shabby.

So the serious objector to the Bauerlein hypothesis must do better.  Graff continues:

The most serious problem with the decline scenario, however, is not that it idealizes the literacy of the past—or even that it tends to reduce literacy to lists of books and isolated facts like Charlemagne’s dates, though that’s a problem too. The most serious problem is the failure to consider the reasons we fail to learn information or read books, reasons that have to do with the contexts and investments that make knowledge stick in our heads.

My view is that knowledge doesn’t stay with us unless it makes sense to us, and to make sense it helps greatly if it’s tied to debates that we can see a stake in. Had there been a real debate in the media on Iraq, for example, more Americans not only would be able to locate that country on a map but also would have known early on that it had no WMDs and played no role in the 9/11 attacks.

Notice how Graff has countered the Bauerlein hypothesis by deepening it.  It’s not about what you read, or even how you read – it’s about how we are invested in the process of reading, what purchase it has on our lives, on motivations behind it.  Graff attributes this idea to Christopher Lasch, who has noted that increased access to information does not alone produce more informed citizens, unless that information is tied to issues that citizens care about.  According to this view, we will find the problem neither in how our eyes move upon a page nor in how our cursors highlight text.  It’s the arguments that are missing.

Lasch:

Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its by-product. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise we take in information passively—if we take it in at all.

[...]

Ignorance of public affairs is commonly attributed to the failure of the public schools, and only secondarily to the failure of the press to inform. But since the public no longer participates in debates on national issues, it has no reason to be better informed. When debate becomes a lost art, information makes no impression.

What you know becomes what you know not because a teacher told you so, but because you are compelled by society to find information that will help you to defend beliefs in public.

This is a pretty devastating objection to the Bauerlein hypothesis.  Graff has given a much more powerful account of the motives behind knowledge than the one on offer from the Dumbest Generation crowd.  Rather than identifying knowledge as mere “decontextualized information,” Graff uses Lasch to identify information as that which is remembered and embodied by people so that they may bolster their arguments more firmly in a society that demands as much.  It is a completely different notion of the process of apprehension about which Bauerlein, Carr and Bowman are so … er … apprehensive.

Obviously, Graff’s second form of critique is stronger because it has brought the discussion to the philosophical basis of knowledge.  So what’s the real problem, Professor Graff?  Why, it’s “the trivialization of the nineteenth-century idea of citizenship, which stressed democratic participation in public debate.”

Uh oh.

This classical vision of the citizen underlay the central place accorded to rhetoric in education, where the aim was to teach not only information but how to use it to persuade one’s fellow citizens. This rhetorical view of the citizen has come to seem unreal, as the center of power has shifted from the small town to the city and as the citizen has given way to the consumer. If even successful adults find it hard to picture themselves swaying the community with their argumentative eloquence, it’s easy to see why young people find it all the more difficult to imagine themselves in such public roles and why they end up turning cynical. Instead of ritualistically complaining about what our students haven’t learned or read, we should be working on reviving a public sphere of debate that would give meaning to learning and reading.

Alas, Graff now has the very same problem that he has recently exploited – he makes a claim that is rooted more deeply in periodization than it needs to be.  Maybe he’s right, but even if he is, now any jackass can now come along and say: Oh yeah?  What about this big speech entitled [insert pompous-sounding title] made by [insert forgotten public figure's name] in the year [circa 1776-1914]?  Isn’t he/she/it making just the same complaint about the decline of rhetorical citizenship in [circa 1776-1914] that you are making about 2008?  Hmmmm?

After tripping up Bauerlein so effectively, Graff seems as if he is warming up for a sprint after tying his own shoelaces together.

Happily, all is not lost.  Indeed, Graff completes his meditation with the theme of education, which has been far too peripheral to the discourse so far.

Lasch’s observation that “we become avid seekers of relevant information” when “we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention” should speak to teachers and curriculum makers, especially at a time when a consensus may have emerged that students need “critical thinking skills” more than they need memorized information. [...] Organizing high school and college courses around compelling debates could make information and books more meaningful—and worth looking up—than they now often are to many students. That’s my reply to those who will ask, “But how can my students debate when they don’t know anything?”

[...]

Such a curriculum could take a page from “learning community” colleges, where instructors from different disciplines team-teach courses on provocative themes and problems. Pairing existing courses around common topics and reading lists [...] offers another way to use controversy as a means of curricular connection. Such a change may be easier to propose than to implement, but if we manage (sometimes) to argue with one another productively at academic conferences and in our books and journals, it’s not clear why we couldn’t find ways to do so within the curriculum.

Here is what really makes Graff’s objection so compelling to the educators who are the target audience of all involved.  To attack periodization is cheap.  To attack the philosophical underpinnings of one’s opponant is vauable.  But to really take apart a hypothesis such as that offered by Bauerlein, all you really need to do is shift discussion from a problem to a solution.  The Dumbest Generation idea is difficult because it seems so hard to solve: educators have no power over the way that students read books or blog posts, as most actual reading happens beyond the pedagogical bailiwick.  If Bauerlein et al. are right, we are probably doomed to eternal frustration, and nobody wants that.  By limiting the debate to the classroom setting, and then giving a good account of how knowledge is produced therein, Graff has reorganized this seemingly intractable problem, confining it to a context in which a solution could be found.

We can’t make the whole world learn through debate.  But we can make students do so, and in the process it might be possible to produce motives for students to apprehend information more deeply than is their current custom.  If we’re lucky, such motivation may mature into a bona fide instinct.  I gotta say, as an educator – and as somebody who writes a blog about intellectual disputes – I find this goal reasonably practical and pretty attractive.

At any rate, Graff’s marching orders at least give us a direction to head in once our laces are nice and tight.

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Filed under Language, Teaching

Tags: Alvin Toffler, Bailiwicks, Charles Hall Grandgent, Christopher Lasch, Gerald Graff, Google, Jacques Ellul, James Bowman, Literacy, Mark Bauerline, Neil Postman, Nicholas Carr, Objections, Reading, Rejoinders, Siva Vaidhyanathan