Part of the problem of keeping up with current events is understanding who to believe. In an age when anyone can broadcast anything, we end up with almost nothing.
Perhaps high schools and colleges should be a little less concerned with transmitting data and concentrate more on how to think, where to get data, and how to evaluate that data.
OTOH, maybe this is just another opportunity for those of us who would rather build something than spend time watching American Idol, facebooking, and partying. (Spending time on hacker news is OK.)
Here's the thing: keeping up with current events is wrong. Don't try to keep up.
The right way to understand things is slowly. This is why I don't watch the TV news, I don't read mainstream news web sites.
I have two major sources of news: Le Monde (which I have daily) and The Economist (which is a weekly). Of those two I get the most information from The Economist because once a week I can read considered opinion and news not Breaking News which is irrelevant.
I also don't follow Twitter and I have a very limited set of RSS feeds. The only social news site I read is this one.
But if that's true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?
Salon.com is pretty good too. If you subscribe they send you an email every morning with a link to one article and a short description. They might only publish three or four articles worth reading per week, but the quality of those articles is far better than anything you'll find in any newspaper. There are also almost never any factual errors, unlike the NYT. And also, unlike the NYT, it isn't full of blatant propaganda. (Ever notice how the Times always describes the warrantless wiretapping with the epithet "that begin after sept. 11th," even though their own reporting shows that claim to be false. [1])
I let my subscription to Salon.com lapse around 2002 when it was no longer possible to ignore the fact that they were happy to be a blatant mouthpiece for the left. It just wasn't worth the work to sort out the good pieces from the leftist nonsense. (Also note: I'm not any more a fan of right-wing nonsense.)
> keeping up with current events is wrong. Don't try to keep up.
To the contrary, keeping up with events online gives you the ability to be proactive about acquiring knowledge, rather than waiting for what makes it though the filter of a periodical or what someone else thinks important; not to mention the bias of opinion pieces. If your periodical of choice sits on a story, or misreports, you will likely never find out about it if you don't pay attention to outside sources (e.g. the NYT sat on their report about the administration's illegal domestic spying/warrantless wiretapping program until after the 2004 election).
The Economist is lousy. It's just current events. It won't give you the frameworks to understand what's going on, economically or politically. An Economist reader would not have known not to buy a house in the last three years, for example.
It's lousy, but not for the reasons you've listed. A good weekly magazine would be "just current events". But The Economist offers opinions, which are as misguided as those in other publications (such as Newsweek), despite the impressive-sounding diction.
This is a red herring. It's a pack of lies that you can't figure out who to believe.
It is the fatalistic, repugnant Fox News answer: "CNN was lying to you, the damn liberal media was lying to you, so now we throw up our hands and we lie to you from the other direction. We are Restoring The Balance. In fact, that's going to be our slogan. Fair And Balanced."
Buying into this is a recipe for disaster. Some people clearly don't believe it's important to inform their opinionated advocacy with data and events that occurred in the real world. And then some people do.
[Not to start a political discussion, for illustrative purposes only] The other day, my brother pointed out an article to me that showed that Obama took "oil company money", even though he ran an ad saying that he wasn't under the influence. It turned out the article said that Hillary took more oil money than Obama, and was also by oil company employees and their families, not their PACs. So I went to opensecrets.org to learn more about what percentage of the fundraising this "oil company money" was. It turns out it was something like $300K, in a campaign where Obama had $30 million cash on hand this month, not to mention the other tens of millions that had already been raised and spent. So the original expose (on factcheck maybe? I forget) veered dangerously close to mudslinging. [end]
The first thing you can do to find facts is start listening to people who ground their stories in data. Another good thing to do is to listen to people who criticize people by quoting them, by giving them a fair shake (Jon Stewart has made an industry out of just that). Listen to people who care about consistency. Listen to people who are forthcoming about their biases, such as affect their opinion. Listen to scientists.
Part of the problem of keeping up with current events is understanding who to believe
Come on, he claims that students can't name a single country that borders Israel, don't know which country Kabul is a capital of and their timing for WW-II is off by a decade...
Let me anticipate the obvious counterargument by acknowledging that anyone who wants to have a basic discussion of world events needs to know these facts, off the top of their head, because without them you can't reason logically about the news. But that brings us back to the original problem: Why would American kids want to have a discussion of world events? There is almost nothing in American journalism to inspire them. The published news in the U.S. is propagandistic, sensational, vapid, unenlightening, and often flat-out false -- and that's the New York Times and the Washington Post! The situation on CNN or (god help us) Fox is far, far worse.
Without any motivation to know the timeline of World War II, it becomes a piece of trivia: A random fact that is not especially useful. The ability to memorize trivia used to be considered a sign of intelligence; Google, Wikipedia and the iPhone are going to change that.
The advantage of facts in your head is that they can be mixed in with things you already know, provide context for new things you learn, and used to form new thoughts. While any given fact might be easy to retrieve from the internet, I can't use it until I ask for it. And I can't know in advance what the best facts to know are, so I try to put as much in my head as I can.
Well said. I think the best example of this would be the trivia geek; full of useless information, but almost always a well learned individual with wonderful ideas.
While keeping vast amounts of data in your head isn't worth it because of the internet, it is certainly still important to know this stuff off the top of your head.
The more that you keep in your head for later means that you have more information with which to provide a context for other information.
An example: I've been reading Noam Chomsky's book on the Balkans, and I remembered a few things he said. When I saw that Kosovo declared independence via the BBC I had a better understanding of how important that was. This type of stuff doesn't happen when you're sucking info from the internet on demand. When I see some news article, I don't lurk around Wikipedia for an hour researching it, I skip it.
FWIW, knowing is still important. The internet does not replace your brain. It replaces books (kinda).
Yes, I agree, but this is the argument that I tried to short-circuit.
How many freshmen in college are in the habit of listening to the BBC? How many have heard of Noam Chomsky in any context? How many have read so much as one book on history or politics, beyond high-school textbooks? Raise those numbers, and students will learn the trivia by themselves, just as your brain subconsciously learned trivia about the Balkans as a side effect of reading the Chomsky.
But the amount of trivia that students know is not, in itself, very important. Indeed, studies which show that "most students don't know where Kosovo is on a map!!!" can be dangerous because they misdiagnose the problem and lead to the wrong solution: Forcing students to memorize maps and regurgitate them on tests, a process which also convinces the students that geography teachers are sadists and geography is a torture device.
Learning starts before college. Parenting helps. I heard a noted essayist say once that more parents are more likely to know more about celebrity lives than to know their child's elementary school teachers.
What if you get the following item in your RSS reader:
"Dalai Lama Shows Support for Olympics" (NY Times)
How will you know the significance of this if you don't know who Dalai Lama is? And you would also need to know about the protests to know why his support is newsworthy.
This is on the right track, but once again we have the chicken-and-egg problem. You're using your knowledge of history and geography to sort through news feeds, trying to tease out which stories are meaningful. But students have little reason to practice that skill unless they believe that there is meaning to be teased out in the first place. And how are they to know that? It's all I can do to find a reason to read a news feed -- in fact, I don't do it. I get pointed to the most interesting news by reading the blogs of half a dozen news-junkie bloggers, who watch the papers and the TV and link to the articles that are actually significant... often placing them in a larger context at the same time. Otherwise, I ignore the news. I'm already depressed and fearful enough.
Those who haven't yet started reading news blogs, though, might find it hard to fall over them by accident. What they will find by accident is CNN and the like, and why should we be surprised when students think that CNN is a waste of time? It is a waste of time -- pseudo-scandals, celebrity gossip, mindless stenography, yammering talking heads, scare stories with blood, flames, and explosions...
Give the students a reason to believe that news is valuable and important -- perhaps by raising their political consciousness, as the author of the original article did -- and they'll learn the skills they need to find valuable and important news.
"Perhaps high schools and colleges should be a little less concerned with transmitting data and concentrate more on how to think, where to get data, and how to evaluate that data."
Right on target. My generation had 4 hours a week, for 2 school years, of what was called 'Philosophy', but was actually how to think logically, how to lie convincingly, how to identify falacies, how to parse a newspaper headline and articles, how not to be a fool in this world. Learning directly from the legacy of the masters of the past.
Two years after us, the Spanish government decided that reducing this "horrible" subject that "nobody cared about" to a mere 1 hour a week, and watered down, was a good idea.
They did so following a schooling model that was more flexible and nice with the students, and the "standard" in the most powerful economy in the western world.
9 years after that decision Spain has finally started to regret and revert their decision.
Very well said, but the teachers that take upon themselves to present subjects like 'Philosophy', are not to enthusiastic about it and the students may find it difficult to grasp the implications of 'Philosophy' in their lives.
These facts and issues simply don't matter to most people. There is an academic-minded "sect" that might consider this blasphemous, but Kabul, the current Secretary of Defense, even the year of WWII, none of these issues come to bear on the daily lives of college students.
Older generations love to talk about how politically/globally minded they were and how they fought against the Vietnam War, but the fervence of their objection was only proportional to what they stood to loose through the draft.
I see a lot of opinion that generation xyz is stuck to their blackberries/iphones/facebook/myspace/etc. and that not only are they ignorant, but that this is some kind of historically unprecented phenomenom. But I just don't buy it -- they're in college (or high school), by and large their parents are supporting them -- maybe when the time comes for them to support themselves some of these issues will become relevant (at least tax raises and cuts), and many of these kids will "get smart."
There will always be those who are diligent and alert -- as long as being so conveys some kind of quantifiable advantage. I don't mean to say that public education isn't important, only that as a society we're no worse off than we were 25 or 50 years ago.
Since the Greeks, the older generation has always decried the younger generation as weak, ill-informed, and just not up to snuff by the standards of "back in the day."
The truth is, most of my classmates are incredibly informed about current events. They can tell you not only where Kabul is, but also name all of the provinces of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.
I think the majority of people have always been a little bit ignorant with regard to foreign policy. And the mean may be especially low today. But this is offset by the upper segment of the population that is better informed than their equivalent at any time in history.
As a college student, I can't help but feel that he's exaggerating the issue. I refuse to believe that most of my classmates couldn't answer 90% of those questions. The only question I couldn't answer myself was who is the current SoD, and I was at least informed enough to ask myself who took Rumsfeld's place when he resigned. It makes me wonder whether the problem is with my generation as a whole or with his particular sample of it.
Maybe its not that he's exaggerating the issue completely, but college students (myself included) are used to being connected to a source of information somehow; a quick google search - phone call to someone at the worst - and we can get any bit of information we could want (slight exaggeration here but the point remains). As a result, we don't place as much importance on rote memorization of daily events and occurrences.
While I can personally answer the questions, I do see the viewpoint from the people around me who look at the questions he was asking - "Who else is a democracy?" "Who's the SoD?" etc - and go "Thats on Google/Wiki, why bother memorizing it when I can look it up just as quickly?" And honestly? It's comforting in a way to know that I'm not going to have to remember random bits of information if it doesn't interest me.
Is it depressing? In a way. But its the modern world for millions of people and it's not about to change anytime soon. Instead of giving an irate tirade on the issue, maybe it would be better for them to talk to the students and try to look at things from our point of view (grew up with technology and basically always connected) instead of the one they have/want us to have (technology is an aid to help us, not a crutch to rely on)
"It's comforting in a way to know that I'm not going to have to remember random bits of information if it doesn't interest me."
The very specific example in the article was the fact that not one single student knew that their government was abducting random people around the world and disappearing them into holes in which anything could be done to them, and there was no legal process for anyone to challenge the practice in any way.
Any bit of information that I'm not specifically interested in finding is random as far as I'm concerned. That doesn't mean its not important in some way.
It's not your generation or his sample, its a problem that affects everybody, he's just writing about it because he happens to be a professor. How else do you explain that 30% of americans can't remember the year of the 9/11 attacks?
http://www.pensitoreview.com/page/2/?p=2665
The problem is people just don't care. Whether you're talking about the environment, tech research, civics, history, it doesn't matter, they just don't care.
Come on now, I'm over 10 years removed from college and most of my colleagues can't answer those questions. In fact, I bet up to 50% of the people on this board couldn't name the capital of America's largest trading partner.
It's not so much the random facts that are the issue. If you're not interested in the Middle East because you think the conflict is self-perpetuating, you might not bother to remember that Jordan sits between Israel and Iraq.
The problem is that many people just don't know how to think. That's the meat of the matter, and it's certainly not being exaggerated by the author.
Take a look at my question: The people on this board in large part will think that the obvious answer would be Beijing. They're also smart enough to deduce that I probably wouldn't have suggested that 50% wouldn't know it if the answer was that simple. So they'll examine what they know about the US's trading relations, and probably remember NAFTA. If they also know that Canada is in the G8, they'll conclude that the answer would be Ottawa. Those in the south might lead towards Mexico, but at least they're thinking.
That's what's lacking with many people today, primarily because it isn't taught by parents and more importantly, at any level of our education system.
I'm also a college student and I think I agree with what you're saying for the most part... but at least for the high school I went to this article wouldn't be an exaggeration.
In high school, one of my classmates couldn't tell the teacher if President Bush was a Republican or Democrat. It's sort of shocking to see how little some people know or care about anything outside their immediate world.
But I wonder how bad this really is? My reaction to the article is that maybe it's not as "sad" as the author of this article wants me to believe... I know personally the world of politics and government isn't too appealing to me. I don't care about reading the huge newspapers and I can't stand the evening news shows. I'm not ignorant - I can answer almost everything he asks in the article - but most of what I do know is just a side effect and not a result of some extra effort I put in to keep up on current events.
Maybe I'm just naive student, but this article doesn't convince me that I'm necessarily missing out on a whole lot.
I haven't attended school in US and I sincerely want to believe that you are right. Although I can't help but notice that international affairs are never the topic of a conversation among my American friends: they're just not that interested, although they definitely know where Kabul is.
Then please, just perform the experiment: ask your classmates the 'trivia' questions on world history events and geography.
It's easy. Just be sure to include people you don't frequently talk to -we humans have a tendency to choose as friends those who know and think like ourselves.
What kind of class was this? I'm a junior in high school, and I've known the meaning of rendition since 6th grade. I and 90% of my classmates know the answer to all those questions. For college students to be unable to answer these kinds of questions...well they live in a hole. Theres no other explaination. What school is this? Case Western Reserve University? What kinds of people attend this school?
All this article has revealed to me is that the quality of students at that particular University is quite low. I mean sure, perhaps my standards are high coming from a suburban area where the population is 20% Asian (high education standards). But seriously. 11/18 kids can't tell you Kabul is in Afghanistan, where we've been fighting a war for over a half decade?
My professors griped exactly the same way about us. And when I became a professor, I griped the same way. In any country you choose, the professors are griping about how ignorant the students are. It's not just "stupid Americans."
But it gets better: professors of X cannot believe how silly professors of Y are on subject X (how would this prof do on an applied technology quiz? A biology quiz? More to the point how would he have done when he was 20?). etc. etc.
But man, when I read that some of the students think 1975 is a plausible year for the A-bomb, I feel old...!
Where I live (Montreal, Canada) we get CNN and I can understand why college kids don't watch the news. It's complete bullsh news. Lou Dobbs is ridiculous in so many way...
Agreed that they could read the news on the net (because who gets the newspaper delivered to their rez?) but personally I feel like reading serious stuff on a screen is dry and very hard to do (much rather like paper).
Just my 2 cents.
p.s. Also, I haven't completely RTFA but generalizing is never good.
p.p.s. It's not because their top of their class they should be more aware of the news, that's BS.
Those who tune in to television "news" are subjected to a barrage of opinions from talking heads like CNN's demagogic Lou Dobbs and MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Fox's Bill O'Reilly and his dizzying "No Spin Zone." In today's journalistic world, opinion trumps fact (the former being cheaper to produce)
Maybe it's just his students that are like this, and not all young people.
Considering how mediocre and ignorant most journos are, is it that surprising to consider that the same may apply to journalism students?
When I say mediocre journalists, I don't have Hunter Thompson or Helen Thomas in mind, but the people that invariably make you cringe when you read their newspaper article on a subject you're familiar with.
It was a very well written article. Wisdom is something that eludes the masses. I can't begin to comment on it seeing that I lack a lot of it myself. Even though knowledge is more and more accessible, the wisdom to use it will not be within the granting power of Man. [taken from various philosophers like Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and probably many more have glimpsed this trait of human nature]
I was lucky enough to have a history professor in high school who taught in such a way that opened our eyes to more than one way of seeing any historic event. He listed sources for us to read from around the world. There was also a lot of optional reading, this source is more difficult than this other source. If you're not interested, stick with Miller, if you want more depth, read Blum, etc. I took from that class a new interest in history as well as current events. Of course, this was in the 1980s before the media became so readily available via the net. It's almost at a saturation point. You can get information so easily, why even bother getting it in the first place? I can always do it later, and so on. This might be a common attitude among todays students. I have a 12 year old nephew who is heavily shielded from the outside world by his parents. His father won't let him read Harry Potter because someone dies in the book. It's sickening. When I was 12 I was reading Stephen King and loving every minute of it. Shielding your kids from the world isn't necessary at age 12.
Ok, while I did know the answers to all of his questions (just left college), my reaction was such that I just thought: "Another person who is lamenting about the education system, in regards to current affairs, big deal"
I closed it after the second paragraph. I wonder if he also gathers statistics on telia tequila as well as the civil war...
Perhaps high schools and colleges should be a little less concerned with transmitting data and concentrate more on how to think, where to get data, and how to evaluate that data.
OTOH, maybe this is just another opportunity for those of us who would rather build something than spend time watching American Idol, facebooking, and partying. (Spending time on hacker news is OK.)