I Can’t Think, Therefore I’m Not.
In 2003, Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post released a series of commercials labeling those with high-fuel consumption vehicles ‘terrorists’ — the theory the money purchasing fuel winding up in the hands of America’s enemies. In response, Woody Hoschswender published an article in the New York Times, lampooning Huffington’s claim with little more than opinion and a string of logical fallacies. For longer than it should have been, Hoschswender’s article, ‘Did My Car Join Al-Queda’ served as an early writing assignment or discussion board thread at major colleges all over the United States, evident from the number of term papers available for download by cheating students and from threads on reddit.com.
The assignment typically asks students to determine if Hoschswender is persuasive in his argument. The vast number of students in my online classrooms replied in the affirmative; various term papers proliferating the Internet agreed, as well. Despite the lack of sources, and in spite the Hoschswender’s inflammatory language, many students found the argument persuasive. When probed, students revealed they agreed with the author’s premise, which is why they found it persuasive. Going further, most of the students who agreed with the author’s points already agreed with him.
In other words, these students believe a persuasive argument is based on an author’s ability to reinforce previous convictions on the topic.
From here, we can go in a number of directions. We could look at the problem with a generation consistently and religiously reading only those texts which affirm their worldview. In this vein, we could look at the epidemic of people crying ‘fake news’ to any article which challenges their beliefs. We could also discuss the issue of future generations lacking interest in reading news or opinion articles.
Instead, and what is a more pressing matter, what should be discussed is this: a large portion of students today are unable to read an argument and discuss its merit.
They are unable to reveal the author’s thesis statement.
These students are unable to perform even the most rudimentary checks to determine an article’s news worthiness.
They are unable to see the problem with utilizing opinion-based sources as primary sources in their essays.
They are also unable to write coherent sentences to communicate their ideas. Often, students appear to select a popular view of a controversial topic and write a paper taking the position on the topic their professor seems most likely to support. Those who opine on how colleges, particularly for-profits, are churning students out by the truckload appear to blame the professors, the administration, and laziness for the inability of these students to express themselves sufficiently. The problem is, none of these proposed reasons pass muster when scrutinized.
In The Washington Post, Jeffrey Selingo insinuates while the nation laments the growing gap in STEM-based research, more and more employers complain about the problem with graduates who are unable who write coherently. All the education in math and science cannot help an employee who has stumbled upon some remarkable discovery but is unable to develop this data into a publishable finding.
Likewise, professors have not taken this issue lightly; for years, they have scrambled to find ways to integrate new technologies into the classroom to help students learn. The concept of teaching using a variety of techniques to appeal to students’ learning styles quickly gained traction in efforts to stem the continued brain drain, although according to Scientific American, little evidence exists to support this idea.
This problem isn’t limited to reading, either; students have little understanding on how to construct a well-researched argument. Research papers in my own classrooms reveal many students write their papers and then fill in the parentheses with their citations when they are done writing them. I know this because more than a handful of students have left ‘insert citation here’ inside the parentheses of their final drafts. This is to say nothing of how unbalanced papers are today; students either quote too much, quote too little, do nothing but quote, or do nothing but summarize. Many students barely skim the surface of the topic, doing the bare minimum to satisfy the requirements of the assignment — and the class.
How did we get here? Is the problem necessarily with a generation raised and spoiled, handed everything to them from tutors for video games to unrestricted access to media? Is it the parents’ fault for allowing too much technology into their lives? Or is it how the technology has shaped our minds and changed how we think?
I decided to be an author at ten, and during the summer months, while other neighborhood kids played sports, went to camp, or played video games, I read and wrote voraciously from the front porch of my parents’ suburban Boston home, an old Fisher-Price record player blaring Cosmo’s Factory tinny through ancient speakers. At thirteen I disconnected Nintendo, finding it interfering with my writing time. We always had a television, cable, even but, preferring music, it never occupied my time as much as it could have.
In my twenties, my creative writing output remained steady thanks to an intermittent Internet connection on my laptop, which by then had survived three administrations. In 2010, I started teaching online, requiring the use of a new one, and from this point on, I found myself increasingly distracted by the Internet. I got work done, but something had happened to me, something which caused me ever-increasing anxiety the more time I spent online. When I focused hard enough, I could write like I had as a teenager, but I had to finally stop and think:
What happened? What caused this? Why could I write and read and focus so much as a kid and now have a hard time reading four or five student papers? What’s more: if I’m having a hard time focusing, are my students, too?
Perhaps things are not as strange as they seem. Writing in The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr makes the claim he could once read articles spanning pages in print, and read long novels, but since the development of online texts, and in particular Google, which enables people to find what they need quickly, he is unable to scan more than a few paragraphs before he feels the need to be reading or doing something else online. While not demonizing the Internet, Carr makes the case the Internet, and in particular the rapid dissemination of brief, cookie cutter articles, has changed the way we seek out and absorb information.
While the Internet has likely rewired our brain to think a certain way, has this impacted the way we do research, what we research on, and how we determine whether an argument is sound? The Internet has clearly opened the floodgates to information, and while at one time we entered passionate debates about facts or ideas or the year this movie came out, now we can look up the answer on our smartphone, all but ending the debate.
But is our ability to do research faster a good thing?
After graduating from UMass Boston with my English degree, I moved to Central Massachusetts and started graduate school at National University, based in California. Not having a large and cozy library like UMass’ to hole myself up in, I spent my time in the dusty stacks at Boston College, where a friend who worked the front desk became an unwitting victim — er, participant in the six month ordeal of cataloguing, finding, summarizing, and documenting over fifty sources for my graduate thesis. Using online sources for a graduate thesis? Verboten. While online libraries were available, my topic, focusing on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, yielded results which could only be retrieved if I attended said college, and so I resigned myself to utilizing only book format sources.
In my thirties and well after starting my college teaching career, I started my doctoral degree. The college, Jones International University (since merged with Trident), boasted an elaborate and comprehensive online library where one could do research and retrieve the article, even going so far as to download the article as a PDF. Within two or three weeks, working at breakneck speed, I gathered over one hundred articles for use in my dissertation, and had painstakingly put the information about the source, including attaching the PDF, into a documentation software called EndNote.
Lest it appear I am contradicting my earlier argument about the impact the Internet has had on young minds and on writing in general, I should add most of the sources for my thesis were read cover to cover, while the sources for my dissertation were skimmed. While the accelerated nature of my degree program (obtained in three years rather than the traditional seven) meant I didn’t have a lot of time to waste, this has had the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing Carr’s point: after graduating, the habit of skimming material, growing frustrated from not finding sought material in the opening paragraph, became the norm. I’ve since learned to discipline myself, slow down, and read carefully, but the more I read students’ papers, the more I realize this is one of the fundamental issues we are having with our students.
Since students are skimming material to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible, they aren’t taking the time to evaluate a source and determine if it is worthy of inclusion as a primary or secondary source in their essays. The wide spread of online journals and blogs makes it easy to be published, and too often students fall into the trap of not checking the background of the publisher releasing the article. Too often, students will cite Studentloanhero.com as a legitimate source, and repeated attempts to inform the student these sites are not peer-reviewed and shouldn’t be used as sources fall on deaf ears. This also makes me suspect students rarely read the comments their instructors leave them, but I digress.
Unable to fact-check in a society increasingly biased and unwilling to read articles found on sites not normally supporting their worldview, unable to determine if an article is fact and opinion, these students are growing up in an Orwellian society, distracted by the Internet, and view education not as something which improves their life, but as something to get through to get on with their lives.
What is the endgame in all this? What is the end result of a generation of students who are so distracted by the immense opportunities the Internet has to offer, they do bare minimum research? The proliferation of fake news is the tip of the iceberg. The worst is yet to come.
Back in 1995, upon receiving my first computer, my father told me, ‘someday, there will be the equivalent of twenty Ph.Ds. online, and you will see more and more people becoming educated.’ My father perhaps thought colleges and universities would become obsolete. I don’t think they are, but if this generation doesn’t develop the ability to discern between fact and fiction, and recognize they need to think critically about issues and not go along with popular views, it’s possible there won’t be enough literate people to attend college in the first place.
Sources:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-learning-styles/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/opinion/did-my-car-join-al-qaeda.html