<p>If you google him, it appears he comes from vast wealth, as does his wife. He went to some exclusive prep school followed by Univ of Chicago and LSE. I’ll betcha he also had no student loans. Probably also has no mortgage, for all we know. </p>
<p>THere’s something rather disingenous about someone from those privileged circumstances picking on regular hardworking people only a bit younger than himself. I found myself thinking that usually when young people don’t know any history, it’s because they went to lousy public schools where the teaching wasn’t very good. Something about a guy from Exeter or wherever bashing everybody else for not having had access to the same fine education that he had.</p>
<p>As someone only some years younger than him, he’s full of it. </p>
<p>In addition to the above, he’s also forgetting that FA grants/scholarships were much more generous when we were in college compared to those who graduated just a few years after us.* </p>
<p>Most of my younger friends have been saddled with a much higher proportion of loans/debt instead of FA grants/scholarships…sometimes to mindboggling proportions.** If I had just graduated a few years later and/or made the choice to attend NYU-CAS rather than my LAC, I could have easily been one of them. </p>
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<li>Tail-end Gen-Xer here.<br></li>
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<p>** One younger friend has undergrad & law school loan debts approaching half-million…and he’s one of the fortunate few who was able to land a lawyer-gig from his law class…albeit making $30k/year.</p>
<p>As the mom of a college student and a law school student, and as a high school teacher myself, I find the sentiments offensive too. While there are things that concern me - I’ve noticed over the last decade of teaching, with the advent of ubiquitous cell phones, texting, facebook, that my students seem less capable of sustained attention to a task, and they feel the need to “collaborate” on everything. They can’t even complete a video guide without trying to ask others what they put. Whether these things will be pros or cons remains to be seen. The pros I see in this generation are that they are a lot more aware of what is going on in the world than my generation (another 70’s graduate here). They are a lot more tolerant of differences in people - different religions, sexual orientations, political beliefs - and they are really passionate about making a difference in the world. I find them great to be around. Now, one thing that always bothers me is that we equate intelligence with the ability to recite historical facts when questioned. I am intelligent, well educated, but if you started to ask me about people and places in history, even American history, I would have to look many items up, because beyond taking a few history courses in high school and college, it is not my thing. But because of my background (I worked in a medical field before I began teaching high school science) I can explain to you the process of cellular respiration or identify the causative agents of many infectious diseases, and I don’t consider those who can’t do the same stupid or uneducated. We remember what we use.</p>
<p>re. #21: apparently his education wasn’t so “fine”. he didn’t learn compassion, empathy, decency, humility, generosity, integrity, et cetera, et cetera…</p>
<p>to answer the thread title’s question: NO. HELL NO.</p>
I don’t think that’s the reason. I think it’s more related to what romanigypsy stated in post #18. This generation has had the internet at their fingertips since they could type. They don’t NEED to know those facts because they can look them up at any time. The problem (the only thing I agree with in the original article) comes in students/new grads being unaware of what’s gone before them - lack of historical context. In some ways that’s a good thing (much less racial dissension now) but in other ways not (not appreciating the true groundbreakers in solving our societal problems).</p>
<p>People need to know cultural references without having to look everything up. I was in Dallas for many weeks once working on a big project. One weekend I said to a younger co-worker that I was going to visit the museum at the Texas School Book Depository. She said “Oh, will it be interesting looking at all those books?” </p>
<p>Not essential knowledge for her job, no. But…</p>
<p>I agree with this. It is a shame that students don’t understand historical context and therefore can’t see the roots of many of our current problems. </p>
<p>However, even if someone did know who the president was in 1956- is that really useful? In my opinion, no. What IS useful is to understand the actions and climate that lead to WWII, the cold war, etc. Unfortunately, our schools don’t teach that even those that teach who the president was in 1956. I hope that makes sense.</p>
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<p>But what? Why does it matter what the name of the building was where the the JFK assassinator was? Is it really THAT important? It’s much more important that we know why JFK was assinated, what the ramifications of that were, etc than knowing the fill in the blank answers.</p>
<p>Interesting…the photo with the essay is of graduating Harvard PhDs. Only doctoral candidates wear those crimson robes at Commencement, and they’re holding the flags of their graduate House to boot. Why don’t Stephens and his editors know simple facts about our oldest university?</p>
<p>I don’t think this is just the younger generation, but a longstanding problem in US society. An older friend had as a first supervisor a boomer-aged individual who had this problem in spades despite having been a college graduate. </p>
<p>When a colleague of my friend compared her to Joseph Stalin because of her totalitarian micromanaging manner and she overheard it, she completely missed the reference and thought he was referring to “one of their customers”. She ended up wasting an hour’s of the department’s time when she ordered them to “look up Joseph Stalin in the database”. </p>
<p>In another incident, the friend was working with a Vietnam veteran who mentioned Ho Chi Minh in passing when talking about his war experience. Guess what? That very supervisor overheard and asked “So, how’s the food there?” Turns out she thought “Ho Chi Minh” was the name of a Chinese restaurant. :(</p>
<p>And many wonder why she was the laughing stock of my friend’s office and why they celebrated when a change in governors meant she was replaced.</p>
<p>In general I agree with you, rge. But for my generation – i.e., your parents, or a little bit older, people you are going to have to deal with for another 20 years or so – the Kennedy assassination has something of the same resonance as 9/11. When one of your kids’ friends says, “Why visit the World Trade Center site? You don’t care that much about trade,” it will be OK if you roll your eyes and feel that the friend is a little under-educated about things you consider important. And . . . it would be great to know why Kennedy was assassinated, and exactly what the ramifications have been, but it’s a lot easier to remember the Texas Book Depository.</p>
<p>I have a slightly different reaction to your comments about 1956 (about which I personally remember very little, since I was only there for four months, and spent much of that learning to focus my eyes and to distinguish my parents from furniture). No one thinks it’s important to be able to match a President to a year instantly, but the post-WWII period, extending into the '50s, is when the world you live in was pretty much formed (the late 60s being its adolescence, the period around 1989 its first midlife crisis, etc.). If you know anything about it, and what was going on in the world then, it’s easy-peazy to know that Eisenhower was the U.S. President then. If someone can’t even identify Eisenhower as the President in the mid-50s, it’s pretty likely that he or she knows practically nothing about that era. And that’s upsetting.</p>
<p>It’s not as bad as saying, “Who cares who was President during the Civil War?” But still pretty bad.</p>
<p>Eisenhower, MICC, lobbying, political bribes, etc. I can’t imagine anyone not knowing him, when he was prez, and his significance today.</p>
<p>Kids should know their Presidents before the end of elementary school, and it is reinforced in middle school and high school. That and Native Americans.</p>
<p>When did I say you shouldn’t care about the assassination? In fact, I said the exact opposite. The fact that she didn’t know the name of the BUILDING isn’t important. A BETTER comparison would be… why are we visiting X airport (where the plane departed from) or the X block of New York (where the towers fell). Almost no one of my generation doesn’t know what the JFK assassination is just as no one of my children’s generation is not going to understand 9/11. </p>
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<p>Well, guess my private school was an epic fail. Hasn’t been an issue in my life. Ever.</p>
<p>Yesterday’s WSJ had letters from people complaining about various aspects of education. It’s all the fault of those progressives, who don’t believe in the good old fashioned triad of rote memorization, drill, and negative feedback! School is too expensive because colleges make students take useless requirements like foreign language, philosphy, and fine arts! Etc, etc, etc. Compare it with the Stephens op-ed and it’s actually hilarious for the internal contradictions. :)</p>
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<p>For this particular case–someone interested in writing about Middle East politics–I’d say that it is highly useful to know who the main political players were at the time of a major event in the history of the region. And if someone with those kinds of goals can’t figure out who the next president was (count forward to the next election, think for just a moment about who might have been elected in 1960), that’s pretty appalling in my book.</p>
<p>Right. For YOUR major or YOUR career path. Not to the general population. I have said that it’s important to know factors x, y, and z but not necessarily the labels that go along with them.</p>
<p>I guess what is important “knowledge” is open to interpretation. To me, being able to name all the presidents or whatnot doesn’t indicate a good or bad education… at all… so again, I don’t agree with the author. Because we don’t have the knowledge that HE wants us to have doesn’t mean we lack “depth and breadth” of knowledge.</p>
<p>Additional information. By the time, she made that comment we had been in Dallas over a month. We had driven through Dealey Plaza daily. To not be thinking about the site of the Kennedy assassination with that context is to be ignorant of basic American history.</p>