It's that time of year again when I prepare to piss in academia's collective cornflakes. Yes, the Beloit "Mindset List" is out for the class of 2014. Ostensibly created 'way back when to keep college instructors "aware of dated references," it instead inspires my annual full-body cringe, because in spite of its intention, it appears to me to be a thinly-veiled excuse for the most educated people in society to gloat over the ignorance of their charges. Why? I don't know, but it's probably because they fear death.
But let's get this out of the way first. I know it's a list, and on the internet lists validate everything, but explain to me what can possibly be meant by "11. John McEnroe has never played professional tennis." Sorry, but W? T? (to the) F? Can I say that "John F. Kennedy never lived" because I was born in 1964? Could Chaucer say that the Norman Conquest never happened? Can baby boomers everywhere say the Holocaust never happened? (I know genocide is a touchy subject, but check out, if you will, #32).
Isn't there a better way of saying what you mean, whatever that is?
Or are we really just implying that college students are incapable of knowing anything they didn't personally experience? If you really believe that, why are you spending your time trying to educate them?
Listen: public higher education is suffering greatly at least in part because academics in many fields spent more than a generation insisting on, even reveling in the very irrelevance of their gloriously postmodern enterprises. Maybe they were saying it because it was "true," but given that there is (it turns out) no such thing as "truth," I doubt it. It's just unfortunate that they were so successful in teaching a generation of policymakers that part of the lesson. Now everybody knows that you don't need to know about Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Elizabeth Bennet, or Molly Bloom, the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the Industrial Revolution, in order to be a successful legislator or even president. You want to chuckle wisely over the stuff these students don't know? They're the least of our worries. You want to alienate them on the first day of class? Hand this list out and gloat a little because at least you know who Beavis and Butthead are.
Guess what, folks: we think our students are ignorant? Well, our professors thought we were ignorant. Their professors thought they were ignorant. Educators have always bemoaned the crappiness of their students and the moral decay of the system (check out Glenn Ford in Blackboard Jungle, 1955). Their ignorance is our livelihood. The Gawain poet says that heroes were really heroes back in King Arthur's time. Yes, those were certainly the days.
Oh, but I forgot. Like the Depression, like Watergate, like the K-car, those days probably "never happened."
The list? There's some interesting stuff there, I guess ... but gang, it's about how out of it we are. And if you're getting ready to walk into that classroom and rock their worlds and change their lives, think twice about leading off by using this list as a "Let me tell you how little you know" toy. I don't know whether that approach will fit with their "mindset."
And for the record, I hate the word "mindset."
7 comments:
Is it true that John McEnroe never played a mindset?
Amen. You helped me understand why *I* hate that list, too, Jim.
My "kids today" moment in college happened when a modern poetry prof lambasted us all for not knowing who Albert Schweitzer was. I still don't quite get why that particular lack was the one that set him off, but isn't that the whole point? Different generations value different kinds of knowledge. Duh.
@mg, well, he lost in back-to-back mindsets, anyway.
I had to look up the list. It is mildly humorous but I can't grasp why anyone should feel superior because they understand their own cultural period better than people from a different period. I'd venture there are all sorts of current cultural references that older folks don't get either. Has it not always been so? ;)
I had to look up the list. It is mildly humorous but I can't grasp why anyone should feel superior because they understand their own cultural period better than people from a different period. I'd venture there are all sorts of current cultural references that older folks don't get either. Has it not always been so? ;)
I think the point is that students seem to know less and less. I knew that America had a Civil War and that Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, not that "old dude with a beard." E.D. Hirsch was on to something when he coined the tern cultural literacy. There are some things that every American should know, every French person should know about Racine et al., and I suppose there are things that everyone in the world should know.
Does anyone remember "The Paper Chase" and Professor Kingsfield? "You come to me with your minds filled with mush, but you leave here thinking like lawyers, " he told his Harvard law class.
Our students come to us with their minds filled with mush and leave with their minds filled with mush.
Points well taken. I also wonder where these attitudes are being reinforced. I remember not *wanting* to look stupid in undergrad and grad school. Now I see students not wanting to look smart. Maybe it was always that way? (Admittedly, I was/am a nerd.)
One another perhaps related note, I've heard the first week of class referred to as "syllabus week," implying that there's no reason to attend? New freshmen aren't learning that in high school ... they're learning that from us.
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