Every year around this time we have some fun with the Beloit College Mind-Set List. This year's version was out a few days ago. Rather than examine that in detail, let me point you to 3 QD writer Akim Reinhardt's observations on the changing character of the incoming freshman classes that he has taught over the years.
Thanks for steering us away from the insipid Beloit zeitgeist baloney. Reinhardt’s essay is much more interesting and informative. I appreciate his candid assessment of his own institution, but he may be projecting a few of his own anxieties onto his students. The LEGO example works fine to distinguish open, free-form play from scripted play, but he leaves implicit its true significance. It’s about marketing, the tie-in with vacuous cultural phenomena like Star Wars, and a facile, rigid measure of success and worth. That’s why students demand clarification of the rules and are leery of deviating for the sake of experiment. Take Lincoln Logs, which he mentions nostalgically, as if they were no longer on the market; they are. Furthermore, they, too, came with detailed instructions for building set objects. Reinhardt is imagining a non-existent kind of creativity, and pretending that a big part of education isn’t indoctrination.
I don’t believe the Internet has much to do with students’ writing if the consequence is what Reinhardt perceives as improved ability to organize thoughts. Instead, students outline their arguments because they’re instructed to do so, and because a veneer of lucid rationality is de riguer these days. This shows how deeply we’ve accepted the notion that the world operates in terms of costs and benefits. (Or maybe students just know to plagiarize well-organized texts.) It’s curious that he wants students to be creative, to bend rules or make them up, but he eschews oblique writing.
I do believe that many of today’s youth are in many respects more tolerant, but the suggestion that bigotry “is no longer openly acceptable in the popular culture” is just ridiculous. Careers are built upon robustly marketed bigotry. This is perhaps a function of the so-called postmodern (a meaningless word among meaningless words) relaxation of dogma.
Finally, nobody every pitted disco against rock ‘n’ roll. There are plenty of examples of crossover acts (Giorgio Moroder, Sparks, Bee Gees, David Bowie, for starters) that appealed to lots of listeners even in the late ’70s. Mash-ups and hybrids are not new phenomena, Larry Lessig notwithstanding. Reinhardt forgets what it was like, because he wants to characterize his students today as more tolerant and open to new ideas when it comes to pop cultural fodder than we were.
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Careers are built upon robustly marketed bigotry.
For sure. Just listen to the GOP leaders’ talk of “taking America back.” It’s going over quite well with certain sections of the electorate, even perhaps some younger people. But there is no doubt that today’s younger folks, even if they are conservative on economic issues, are overwhelmingly more tolerant culturally than their parents. That is one hurdle they have cleared more gracefully.
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Star Wars may be a ‘vacuous cultural phenomenon’ but it surely did engender some creative Lego play by my son when he was in kindergarten. He used to rush to the after-school daycare, dig into the Lego box (all small pieces, odds and ends from who knows where) and make Lego Podracers of his own design. Soon a bunch of other kids were vying with him to make the most outlandish but sturdy podracers; the preferred mode to check the sturdiness being flying them around by hand and crashing them into each other, counting which lost the most pieces in the process. No canned replicas of the originals to be assembled by following instructions, here.
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“Thanks for steering us away from the insipid Beloit zeitgeist baloney. Reinhardt’s essay is much more interesting and informative.”
I wish I said that first.
I loved Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, and Erector Sets precisely because I was not limited to suggested patterns and models. Tinker Toys were the best, because the pieces had no inherent, predetermined use or placement. I built a Tinker Toy telescope on a tripod to stargaze out my bedroom window. It waa my own design, by the way, with no plans except my imagination. I didn’t need lenses because looking at a star through the center axle holes of the wheel cogs would shut out all other stars except the one I wanted to examine. It might as well have been a 15X magnification.
One day I tried to make a playhouse in my bedroom out of Scotch tape and a ream of loose-leaf paper. It was my first instruction in structural engineering. A weight-bearing wall first had to support its own weight while maintaining a desired shape.
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Thanks much for the very thoughtful comments. I love the exchange of ideas and anecdotes. And I really want to look through Sujatha’s Tinker Toy telescope at some point. That sounds pretty brilliant.
Oh, and regarding Disco v. Rock phenomenon, I’ll just point to Disco Demolition Night in Chicago. <“>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Demolition_Night>
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Er, Akim. The telescope was Norm’s.
I was a teacher myself in a previous incarnation. My students were high schoolers. Since I “retired” from my formal teaching duties I have dealt mostly with adult students as a volunteer for adult literacy programs. Also, my own kids are adults both having graduated from high school in the 1990s. I don’t therefore claim to have a particularly keen insight into the changing minds of the younger population and the latest prevailing youth culture. I would like to make a general observation which I think is true for all generations past and future. Ironically, boredom is one of the best motivators for creativity. Not long, mind numbing boredom but intermittent periods of idleness spur us to often to think new thoughts and look at the mundane surroundings with a fresh eye. I grew up in India in an era when there was no TV and no Internet. We played outside a lot and when the usual games got tedious, we improvised and invented new games. We built things with “primitive” toys and sometimes with paper, pebbles and whatever rubbish was around. We read books and told stories. Nowadays the kids have very little time in their over-structured lives and therefore must deal with assigned “tasks” rather than with their own innovations. But that doesn’t mean that given the opportunity and a few moments to reflect on their own, they cannot be creative.
One great difference that I find between past generations and the current ones is the latter’s greater ability to organize. Today’s youth are very good at net-working and use the Internet as an effective tool to come together for a common cause or event.
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@ Ruchira,
You reminded me of one of the great books in psychology, “Day Dreaming,” by Jerome Singer in the 1960s. It was updated in 1975 and titled “The Inner World of Day Dreaming.” Alas, the only copy left in the world is a used hardback on Amazon.
Singer, now deceased, took day dreaming out of the closet of perceived inattentiveness, laziness, and bad character and explained how important it was for the development of ideas and the creative mind. I can’t begin to tell you how he assuaged my guilt and helped me accept my day dreaming as a valid part of the development of thought and ideas.
Whoever dreamed up idleness as the devil’s workshop was an idiot.
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“Alas, the only copy left in the world is a used hardback on Amazon.”
That’s beautiful hyperbole. Love it.
“Whoever dreamed up idleness as the devil’s workshop was an idiot.”
Only if the devil’s workshop was meant to represent unproductive, uncreative time wasting.
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