Sunday, November 21, 2010

You want fries with that?


A triple whammy in today’s NYT....

A feature story on page 1 reports on how today’s kids are so besotted with technology – addicted to texting, video games, etc. – that they don’t pay any attention to their studies. It’s no wonder our international standing in education is slipping, and our jobs are going overseas....

Meanwhile, Tom Friedman’s column, with no acknowledgement of the news story, talks about the very hole we’ve dug for ourselves in education....

But the capper comes in the adjacent column by Frank Rich about the popularity of Sarah Palin as both political and media figure. Because what he observes is that “it’s anti-elitism that most defines angry populism in this moment, and, as David Frum, another Bush alumnus (and Palin critic), has pointed out, populist rage on the right is aimed at the educated, not the wealthy.”

Swell. Not only are we getting more stupid, we have a grassroots movement spreading the word that it’s “in” to be stupid. I’d say we were a nation of sheep, except that would be an insult to sheep. At least they’re productive. But how many kids today know that’s where wool comes from? (Or even what wool is?)

So who’s going to rescue the next generation? Not the fundamentalists; they want the Word of God to be swallowed unquestioningly. Not the Republicans; they want to cut funding to education. Not the teabaggers; they equate good grades with elitism. And don’t expect the kids to bootstrap themselves; they’re too hooked in to their iPhones to give a shit.

I once had a doctor whose examination room was decorated with photos of bums with cigarettes, bearing captions like “Smoking is Debonair.” So let’s expose kids to pictures of middle-agers flipping burgers with the message “Texting beats studying any day.” But I guess if we expect them to notice, we’d better send it to their phones.


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