Here’s
a pop quiz: Who is the U.S. Secretary of State? The answer, as we
prepared this report in the summer of 2008, was Condoleezza Rice. If you knew
the answer, you’re smarter than 74 percent of the 18- to 29-year-olds in a Pew
Research Center study who recently answered incorrectly.1
Moreover,
70 percent of them do not know what the Reconstruction was, and they were six
times more likely to be able to identify the latest winner of the American
Idol reality television show than the Speaker of the House of
Representatives.
Another
study found that nearly 60 percent of 17-year-olds don’t know that the Civil
War took place in the second half of the 19th century. And yet another survey found that 25 percent of
17-year-olds think that Christopher Columbus discovered America after 1750.
Could
the vast majority of teens and adults under the age of 30 really be so
clueless? As a matter of fact, yes. This is a generation of young
people who grew up reading blogs instead of books. They read updates about
their friends’ parties on MySpace instead of reading about world events in
newspapers. They know more about video games like World of Warcraft than they do about World War II.
They
look up information on Wikipedia instead of Encyclopedia Britannica. They get
their political information from Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” hosted by
comedian Jon Stewart. When they do read news online, it is filtered through
RSS feeds that only send them stories about subjects that interest them — a
list that could be as brief as celebrity weddings, panda bears, Paris Hilton,
and new games for the Wii video game console. They don’t want to read about
subjects of which they know little or nothing.
Ironically,
the generation that is most comfortable with digital technology, which gives
them unprecedented access to all of the world’s knowledge, knows less than the
previous generations that lacked this advantage. Instead of using the Internet
to improve their understanding of the world, young people are using it to stay
in touch with their friends.
Mark
Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, has seen this first-hand
in his...
