Student Life: More Views

By John Tierney

I knew that my earlier post on contemporary student life would provoke comment, even outrage. And it came -- some of it predictable and expected, some of it a surprise.

From the "expected" pool:

My daughter is a freshman at Barnard, and is bursting with excitement about all she is learning. When she came home for break, I had to physically stop her from listing the states and counties in India. More substantively, she gave me a long and thoughtful review of the long-term trauma inflicted on India and Pakistan by partition, with particular
emphasis on the effects on women.

As the parent of a college student, and as someone who has been deeply engaged with her friends and their families over the years, I strongly disagree with Tierney and would be happy to rebut. Quite frankly, I think these kids are way more educated than I was at that age, way more thoughtful about what they want to learn and how they want to learn it,
and way more willing to seek out extracurricular education

I expected that lots of readers would write in with some version of this comment. Yes, of course, there are many hundreds of thousands of very bright, eager, hard-working students out there who are learning an incredible amount and who can put their parents to shame.

I suppose the question is whether Barnard students -- or the brightest, most diligent students on any campus -- are the norm. What is the norm? Will we hear from the parents who feel the tuition dollars they pay are wasted on their kid, who sits in his dorm room all day playing video games and who drinks himself into a dither every night? They're not the parents who boast to their friends about their offspring's intellectual excitement -- nor, probably, have they ever had the pleasure of engaging with their kid in a discussion about partition of the Indian subcontinent.

From the "unexpected-but-unsurprising" pile, this response from a reader who thought my earlier post was insufficiently balanced and scrupulous, and who starts his reply by mocking my loose assessment of the situation:

"It rings true." That's the sort of analytical rigor I've come to expect from elite girls private schools. Really, Dr. Tierney, that entire post was a horror show of overly credulous reading, research from dubious and deliberately provoking books, and a total absence of consideration of provisos, qualifications, and alternate opinion which are the mark of quality social science. You owe your readership, James Fallows, and the academy so much more. I'm genuinely disappointed.

Two points in response:

(1) I'm pretty sure I made it clear at the top of the post that I wasn't aiming even to write a coherent essay, much less one that would make any pretense at "analytical rigor" or "quality social science." Rather, I was simply pulling together articles about contemporary collegiate life and asking for reactions to them. Calm down.

(2) Frankly, I don't owe "the academy" anything. What a preposterous notion! As for Jim Fallows: I owe him many things, including my sincere thanks for letting me into this space for the week. But it's not clear to me that I owe him the particular model of blog post you envision. And as for the readership: ~~I'm sorry, but~~ I cannot control your expectations or your disappointment. Go read something you consider measured and balanced until your blood pressure settles down!

Also, from another "expected" pile. A widely beloved and prominent professor at a small liberal-arts college in New England writes in, saying that the view of college life presented in the earlier post rings true with him, too. He then adds:

You know, I have a special place in my heart for our [Asian] students, who exhibit few of the troublesome traits you lament. The American students are nice kids, and I like them, but I don't respect them. I guess that's the thing.

I laughed when his reply went on to give me useful advice on blogging:

Here's a tip: you are way too honest. Three times in your piece you say that you have not read a book or something like that. Never make such an admission. Lie. That's what they all do. Do you really believe that Krugman, Will, Krauthammer, Noonan, et al., have really read all the books they cite in their rants? Why should you be the honest one?
. . .
Often students preface a comment or question with an apologetic "this may be wrong, but..." or even "this may be stupid, but...." I come down hard on them when they do that. "Never apologize," I tell them, "it makes you sound weak. You've lost the argument before you even try to make it. Most of intellectual life is bluffing," I tell them, "so start right now. You don't know more than I do, but I want you to act like you do. You must try to intimidate me; not give me the upper hand with the first wimpy words out of your mouth."

Clearly, here's a professor who is intent on educating the "whole person," not simply instructing on course material. (All should their kids are lucky enough to end up in the classroom of such an educator.) Incidentally, his timely advice is responsible for the stuckthrough word of apology to the "genuinely disappointed" reader above. This professor is right: there's no traction in being a milksop. (Future respondents, consider yourselves warned. No more "Mr. Almost-Nice Guy.")

Finally, under the "delightful surprise" category of responses comes this, from a professor at a distinguished Canadian university:

For a fresh perspective on the education debate, I highly recommend this short YouTube video by Sir Ken Robinson.

This turns out to be a video of a lecture by Robinson, animated by RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce). It is, quite simply, one of the most instructive and enlightening video-lectures I've ever seen. It's also enormously entertaining. Even if I learned nothing else from this week of blogging here (though, thanks to readers, I learned much), being exposed to this video would alone have made it completely worthwhile.

Take time to watch it here. And you might check out some of the other videos RSA has posted on YouTube and/or go to the RSA's own website for more.

About the Author

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book is China Airborne.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”