It’s easier to find the time to read long pieces of journalism on the weekends. I enjoyed reading this piece about the 8 ways our youngins are being programmed not to rebel. I’d say the number one way is The Entertainment, however you define that. Smart phones, the Internet, and television are destroying a generation of people, in my opinion. We have instant access to almost any information we might need, but we’ve never been more stupid or docile. It’s really quite remarkable. I also think we underestimate how quickly people turn to pharmaceuticals when their children are struggling in school. We’re trying to dope away eccentricity, basically. I mean, school is not for everybody. But we ought to have space in our schools for people who don’t know how to play by the rules.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Very interesting article. It leans a little heavy on the school system, but that system is profoundly important and pertinent to the topic so it’s understandable.
What I would add is the media most young people use, which is computers/internet. This reduces attention span, and diminishes linear thought. This is not an original argument. I was of the TV generation, and this, bless their hearts, is much more cognitively debilitating.
Could you imagine if Marx had the internet to distract him at the British Library? There’s be one less Capital v.1 in the world, for sure. His Twitter feed would be sweet, admittedly.
You are so onto something here. So many children who misbehave or are hyperactive or seem slow just aren’t being accommodated. They don’t fit in. But we’ve eliminated music, art, physical education, anything outside of what’s required to take “the tests” from regular school. We expect every kid to fit the same mold and if they don’t, we drug them.
When I was in school, they would pick these kids who are not performing to spec and send them to really good alternative schools where they could be among the other eccentrics. (I know. I was one of them.) We would joke that we were at the Land of Misfit Toys. Most everyone there was actually very bright (many of genius level) and we had small classes where we sat on couches instead of at desks and everyone, including teachers, went by first-name.
These were just people who didn’t fit in with the normal cliques that you have in public schools. Many were gay or lesbian, many were abused kids, many were strongly driven to music or the arts, which were not accommodated in regular school. We would joke about the regular schools as being the accountant and insurance agent factories. We were definitely unique. I’ve followed up with several and we seem to all have been pretty successful in life.
Little do the regular (conforming) kids know, we got a much better education than they did. We had small class sizes and they would accommodate the interests of every student. In some cases it meant sending them to college classes or private music/art lessons or whatever they needed. And we all had practical courses like how to do taxes, manage personal finances, fix your car, program computers, etc. Most of us also took Work Experience, where we were given an expanded (adult-level) work permit and our teacher would meet with our bosses at our real jobs every quarter to evaluate us and base our grade on that.
We were treated like responsible adults and we behaved accordingly. Good times…
Bloomington (home of Indiana University) had an alternative public high school that seemed quite successful until the republicans destroyed it with budget cuts. The good news is that a valuable alternative remains, although its private.
How many 10 yr old boys getting drugs because of an ADD DX have an IQ of 150 and are just bored in with school? Our schools are successful in producing world class athletes and preparing kids for college. All the other kids are taught to pass the test. Our schools do not know how to accommodate kids that are different or exceptional. At this point in time you can probably count on one hand a public middle school where a kid interested in playing the violin will be able to get free instruction from a public school music teacher. Will there be any public high school bands in 2020? A 20th century public school system has got to do more for the average kid besides preparing them to push keys with pictures on them at Micky Dee’s.
It’s a crime to put any kid on those drugs, if you ask me. Spend the time. Find out what makes them excited. Deal with their outbursts. It’s all part of growing up. Have we forgotten that?
Something excites them. Virtually every successful artist, musician, engineer, etc was a little problematic when they were kids. They’ve got ideas bouncing all over the place in their heads and they don’t know what to do with them. Yet we try to suppress this? Because it’s inconvenient? Are we nuts? These are the future innovators. Can we not handle that they don’t conform to stupid standards that only stupid or ignorant people could possibly conform to?
It’s child abuse by the State. And the parents.
Half of that piece makes perfect sense, and the other half reads like a shitty “get off my lawn” whine. Each generation thinks it’s the last sane one on the planet. The kids these days will find plenty of newfangled stuff to freak out over once they’re 40.
The problem is that learned passivity is prevalent among the younger generations, so what will change even if a future 40 year old freaks out?
Well, I’d give you a real answer, except I’m not feeling very active right now.
keirdubois, thanks for this. I had a similar reaction. A lot of that article struck me as semi-informed handwringing about “kids these days and their newfangled contraptions”.
Go back 50 years and you can find Time and Newsweek articles that lump the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins with panty raids at Ivy League fraternities. It’s a combination of generational cluelessness (how can they call the “rock and roll” music?!) and social/ethnic/economic distance.
In case folks haven’t noticed, the analogue to the leadership young people provided to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s is alive and well among DREAM Act supporters. Not to mention the crucial role teenagers and their older brothers and sisters are playing in the fight for LGBT equal rights.
Oh yeah, and there was that little thing 3 years ago of electing an African-American president. I seem to remember young people (and their newfangled contraptions) having something to do with that, too.
Have you ever read John Taylor Gatto’s book “The Underground History of American Education“? I forget when I read this… but it was a bunch of years ago when I suddenly got a renewed interest in the American education system. It really changed how I looked at my own schooling and what had mattered within it.
From about 7th grade on I kind of ignored what was actually going on in school. I’d show up (though I seem to recall taking a lot of sick days when I probably wasn’t really sick) and go through the motions and get decent grades. But for the most part I focused on studying what I wanted to. I got really into physics for a while. Or hard-boiled detective fiction. Or whatever struck my fancy. And my parents were quite supportive of this. I also worked with my father in film production from time to time and during the summers. Though I stopped once I started getting into computers and realized that I had a real knack for that type of stuff.
My senior year of high school I almost dropped out when school suddenly became more like a prison than a place to learn. With some help from my parents, my neighbors, and teachers I managed to tough it out and graduate… but I was deeply suspicious of the place from that point on. Having a short internship for a computer conference over spring break and landing a summer internship after that working for a university as a programmer probably did more than anything to keep me from slipping off someplace. (Not really sure what would have happened had these chance things not happened… suffice to say my whole life now would be different.)
As it turns out things have worked out for me even though I eventually dropped out of college. But I had a lot of work experience to fall back on that let me succeed nonetheless. But throughout my schooling I always felt like I had to fight against it to get my “education”. And at one point I finally realized that my best bet was to focus on getting the education I felt was right and to kind of ignore the school part (though I never failed a class… but I definitely slacked off a lot where my teachers didn’t inspire me to care about the subject matter).
But what the hell do students like me do today? My mom works as a teacher now and is shocked by the number of students taking some sort of drug. And how exactly are we supposed to help when at some level one of the fundamental problems is probably the school system itself. And it’s not like homeschooling is going to fix that either. How many families really have the ability to homeschool their children if both parents have to work to even make sure everyone is fed an housed.
It’s a complicated problem… and as of yet… I don’t see any good solutions. Well… maybe a return to the whole apprenticeship system. But that implies that the jobs out there in the world actually require real skills. And how many of those are left at this point? And could a system like this really be scaled up to accommodate large groups of students? Is this the idea behind things like Khan Academy? But I don’t see how the gap is bridged from there to where I find myself today.
I LOVE your comment. You seem to get it. You described my (and many of my friends’) predicament growing up almost exactly. I can only imagine how much worse it is for kids today now that we don’t make any effort to accommodate their interests. We just stamp ’em out by the same mold.
Who cares if they can’t find their own state on a map? They can use a calculator and they can print their name, but not sign it.
Just drug ’em up and they’ll get by. Both parents are too busy working to care anyway. So the kid wants to be a rock star. No music education anymore. Maybe he can make it as a rapper. They don’t know how to play instruments because they didn’t get the music education either.
Thanks! (My first comment of substance here at the frog pond where I’ve been lurking for a long long while (over 6 years).)
I can’t even imagine how much worse it is now… though I’ve heard stories from my mom (she works as a teacher in an alternative private school) that make me extremely concerned. It seems like students today are even more hemmed in than I was (I’m in my early thirties). And with the whole standardized testing mess… I’m really not sure how anybody expects students to get an education even if they fit into the system and can function there.
I worked in the educational technology field for a long time… but found myself at odds with the approaches being taken. I feel like we need to go backwards. We’ve definitely lost something in creating our factory style schools. Though if everything in the “Underground History” is to be believed… that was the intent. I can’t shake the feeling that our current education system is completely and utterly failing the students in terms of helping guide them into being productive members of society in the long run. And I can’t help but thinking that maybe the only option is to let them fail since they may have been a bad idea in the first place. But what to replace them with and how do you make that change. I seem to recall reading that the Khan Academy has proposed having some sort of collection of proficiency exams as a substitute for school testing. But again… not sure how I feel about that. Maybe decoupling the educational system in this way would be a good thing. But will we then end up with generations of students who have been sheltered at home their whole lives and only interacted via Skype? And this would definitely bring the digital divide problem in this country even more into focus.
You might find this interview with Madeline Levine interesting on the topic of childhood depression and tangentially education. I don’t remember where I ran across this (though Google seems to indicate I found an ad on this site pointing me to it. :-).
I am 40 years old so I went through the system (in a wealthy Northern California suburb) while they still had a little bit of money for non-compliant kids. I guess I lucked out.
As far as standardized testing, we had one of those scan-tron type tests every couple of years (to measure the school district) and we had a basic competency test (with essays) in 10th grade that we could NOT fail. That’s about it.
We had extensive reading comprehension education, critical thinking education, all the good stuff – from K all the way through 12.
But it’s all changed since then. And it’s scary. It’s like they’re grooming the youngsters to be good little Nazis or something. Just compliant enough to not be much trouble and just dumb enough to not question why things are done the way they are. And intense punishment for anyone who steps out of line. That used to be illegal. Where I live now, they even have a “School District Police Force.” Ain’t THAT some shit?
Ah… before Prop 13. Which was before I was born… but heard a lot about it growing up since my mom worked at my school.
I still don’t quite understand what the people of our state were thinking. I mean I understand the appeal of lower taxes (especially now that I pay them), but it’s not like we were being taxed for no reason. But making a 2/3 majority requirement to raise taxes… I think that’s essentially left the state of California ungovernable since that point.
But as you say… it’s all changed since then… even since I was in school. The purpose of the public school system is to make us conform. It was designed for a time when most of the jobs were assumed to be factory work without much skill required. You did one thing over and over and over. If you thought critically about it you’d probably go crazy. So if you washed out of the system… all the better since the “powers that be” would know you are a problem.
Today we have all these low skill low pay jobs (working at various fast food establishments, or as cashiers at walmart and the like) and another pool of jobs that Peter Drucker lumps together as “knowledge work”. Strictly speaking “knowledge work” doesn’t require a formal education, but it does require that you know a lot of things and be able to learn and adapt and change. And I think the expectation is that you’d do these things on your own… but if you’re a modern student who is compliant and doesn’t question how things are done… how are you supposed to be effective in a work environment like that. You could have a PhD and you still wouldn’t be employable… or at least you wouldn’t be that useful.
This is a huge problem. And this is really only just scraping the surface of what I see going on.
The School District Police Force thing… well that seems pretty normal to me. The year before I started high school they had some drive by shootings at the campus… so it didn’t really surprise me that we had police on campus. But what does it say that such things were happening on school grounds? And at some level the whole gang problem is just a symptom of the failure of our education and labor (or lack of) policies in this country over the past 30 years.
Prop 13 was in like 1977 or 1978. I was 7 or 8 years old. But the effects of it (property taxes never raising unless you sell the house to new owners, then never raising again until they sell) really weren’t all that painful for several years. So I skated through at the end of the education gravy train in California. We actually had all of the extracurricular stuff for free, but the years of kids just behind me got cut off, it seems. I even had free driver’s education (with the student-car-driving and everything) for free, provided by the school district. My nieces and nephew had to pay for it from a private company, and it ain’t cheap.
But the thing you’ve got wrong is that back then, public school was not about conforming. It was about treating every child as a brilliant little snowflake with their own unique talents. The schools would do everything within reason to develop a unique child’s talents.
How do you think the Silicon Valley ever developed? These were young people from the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s with crazy ideas who couldn’t conform to IBM and such. “Wear a suit? Are you crazy?” They started businesses out of their garages (think Apple – Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak fit the mold exactly.) They were not alone. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of little companies that sprouted this way thanks to the pre-Prop-13 California educational system. If these companies not around anymore, it’s because they were bought out by companies like Cisco – but many were amazingly successful, even though they were run by pot-smoking tie-died-t-shirt-wearing hippies.
Encouraging “unruly” children to do what excites them and backing them up makes for an innovative culture. But today that’s inconvenient – so we drug them up.
Hint for future generations: The “difficult” kids that challenge authority and break the rules are actually the most talented. You just have to help them find and develop those talents.
Speak up more often. You’ve obviously got knowledge to share. We like the smart stuff here. Snark is always good, too.
I’m so glad that I finally just sat down ad read the actual article that you pointed to. Maybe I should read this guy’s book. Very interesting/disturbing stuff. My mother raised me to not respect authority, and to always disrespect illegitimate authority. Period. They had to prove themselves to be legitimate first. (She went to Catholic school where they would regularly beat her for defiance.)
And trust me, I never did trust the “authority figures.” Permanent Record? Ha! Bullshit! Almost all of the friends I could relate to growing up were exactly the same way. We could all be diagnosed with that ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) mentioned in the article. And how dare they drug kids for that.
I have noticed in my nieces and nephew that, while they would not naturally comply with all of this authoritarian shit, they seem to do it anyway. And when I witness this, they appear to be really dumb to me. They just follow these arbitrary rules that make no fucking sense because they’re told they should. Since 9/11 they are especially bad. They will feel sorrow any time the subject is brought up. Why?
When we have flewn together, they excitedly comply with the TSA by taking off their shoes and all that nonsense while I complain that this makes no fucking sense at all. They look at me like I’m crazy. “What, do you want to get arrested, uncle Randy?” No. I just want my fucking liberty back. And this $10/hr. dipshit has no right to order me around.
And don’t even get me going on the “Dare” program, where a cop comes in to the classroom to teach kids that “Drugs are bad.” And of course only bad people do drugs. Then they show them the drugs and talk all about how “bad” the drugs are and get the kids’ curiosity up. Needless to say, kids who have been through the “Dare” program are FAR MORE likely to actually experiment with much harder drugs than the average teenager.
I love smoking the weed and an occasional ecstasy, mushroom or LSD trip might be fun. And there’s nothing wrong with it. None are even addicting. But to hear the authoritarians preach it, you’ve ruined your life once you’ve even tried one of them. And sure enough, many students of “Dare” DO try all of them and then some. And then they feel that they’re failures in life somehow. They just accept what they were told, no questions.
One problem is that the laws are SIGNIFICANTLY more strict than when I was doing various illegal things back in college. The laws today are VERY hard on even the first time offender.
Take sex for instance. If you are in the midst of something, and she gets cold feet as things are getting to the point of no return, you can be in SERIOUS SERIOUS shit. Yes, I agree, no means no and all that, but nonetheless if you are mebbe a little intoxicated, you may go ahead. At that point, if she charges rape, you get on the sex offender list, and that’s permanent on your record, no distinctions between hard core rape and a misunderstanding. In Miami, there is NO single place that you can live except under a bridge (and if you think I am exaggerating, I am not – the judge gives you the address).
So, many of the laws makes minor mistakes into LIFE-LONG PROBLEMS.
The “Sex Offender Registry” is total bullshit. Totally unconstitutional, but no one has the balls to challenge it. Once you’ve served your time (or probation) there is no reason to force someone to report their whereabouts to the “authorities” all throughout their lives, just to have this information shared with neighbors and being harassed or shunned their whole lives.
If someone has a pedophilia problem, it should be identified in prison and they should never be paroled. Otherwise, it’s supposed to be a free country.
Far too many young men with an underage girlfriend have been caught up in this as well. Say the young man (age 19) is black and the girl (age 17) is white. Her dad finds out they’ve been doin’ it. Dad presses charges of statutory rape, even though all was consensual. Girl can’t stop dad. Boyfriend is branded for life as a sex offender. Total bullshit.
But I’m gay and was afraid to open up to others until I was an adult – and I really liked older guys (like 25-30ish) so I never had this problem. But I sympathize with all the young straight guys who get caught up in this.
There is a book by Neil Postman “Amusing ourselves to death” about the brain salad that we are brewing ni our population.
dataguy, do you have any data to support your third point? (serious question)
My own experience, limited though it is, is that kids today are about as interested in making music as kids have always been.
I also notice that as the technology available for making music changes, kids today make use of that technology—just as their grandparents did by plugging in their electric guitars and Hammond B-3 organs, and as their parents did with synthesizers and turntables. I know kids who write music using Garage Band and other software programs.
Heck, there’s even a guy in Israel (I believe) who composes songs by editing YouTube clips together, creating songs like “The Mother of All Funk Chords”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tprMEs-zfQA
Where are the kids playing outdoors? If it’s 73 F out, no one is out there. If it is raining, no one is out there. If it is night, no one is out there.
Why are no kids playing outdoors?
The nature deficit is most alarming. I spent my summers as a kid out of doors, in an area of woods and fields and ponds and streams that is now home to multiple mcmansion developments. We swam in the summers, built forts, went sledding and ice skating for hours.
I never see kids do that now. My older boys spent most of the time playing outside when they were younger…it used their imaginations and gave them a lot of peace and wore them out for bedtime! The oldest still spends a lot of time outdoors and camping now, but the 16-year-old is happy to be a videot when he’s not working; it’s like pulling teeth to get him to do anything with us lately.
You got the new one. DO NOT make the mistake of sticking a electronic box in his hand. My sister made that mistake. The kid is OK now, but there were family get-togethers where she could not get his shitty little butt out of the box in the hand to even say word ONE to anyone else.
Parents make a serious error putting ANY BOX into a kid’s hand. No box helps them out.
When my son was 16, I did get him that civilization building game. He was pretty heavy into that, but did make an adult decision – he did not take it to college. He plays chess and board games and Magic, but these are what passes for a social life with him – he is a serious case of sexual dorkiness, much worse than I was at his age. But it’s his life.
What gets me is how many parents are afraid to let their kids go out and play. When I was young, my parents couldn’t have tried any harder to get us out of the house and out playing with our neighborhood friends, unsupervised.
Has something changed? Sure. The occasional kid (like 1 in 10,000,000) used to get abducted and the odds are probably still the same, so it’s a small gamble. And you want to get the kids out of your hair and hope they get some exercise. Now, the parents are so terrified of abductions that they actually plan “play dates” which are supervised by both sets of parents, assuming they have any time after their full-time job. So, the rest of the time, the kids just rot away at home with nothing to do.
No chance of the kids actually exploring and risking getting into trouble. WTF? How’s a kid supposed to learn anything?
Or entrapreneurs or whatever?
Simple answer: BOREDOM. They got bored, so they did something to end the boredom.
80 years ago, a lot of people could play an instrument. Today, how many play? I sing with the Symphony Chorus (one of the advantages of South Dakota), but don’t play much.
It’s important that kids should be bored. If you the parent are always giving them something to do, what will they do when you are not there?
I once read an interview with Maria Muldaur where she thanked her parents for never buying her a teevee, because that’s why she had to entertain herself with music.
I do regret not playing music with my kids. We do sing some, but not as much as probably I should have. But I really discovered my voice in the last 5-6 years.
How old are you, Dataguy? Your kids are all grown up? I thought you were younger.
I am 59. My kids are 21, 21, and 24. As you can see from my posting, not all old guys are necessarily happy about everything in the society.
I just assumed you were my age or younger based on your comments/lexicon. I’m now 40. It’s difficult to acknowledge that I’ve probably reached “the top of the hill” and it may all be downhill from here.
Yep, it’s all downhill from that point. On the other hand, I did have my kids when I was 35 and 38, so maybe you can do something before the inevitability of mortality comes on.
So, do you fart? If so, you are headed downhill already.
Just kidding, actually. I farted frequently before 40.
Ouch.
Wish I had a husband and kids years ago. I guess it’s too late now since the “inevitability of mortality” is just around the corner.
;>)
Excellent article from Washington Post on the debt ceiling fiasco:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/origins-of-the-debt-showdown/2011/08/03/gIQA9uqIzI_st
ory.html
Yes, went and read it. Very interesting summary of the last 3 years. Can we stop these morons?
I hope so.