Whither Wisdom?

 You can amuse yourself by searching for the complaints of writers who say there is no longer any respect for literature or philosophy or standards of art, and so on. I've seen complaints from 18th Century writers, and from writers lamenting (in the 1990s) that the 60s killed art, taste, value, objectivity, and so on.

If I were to add my lament to such a long list, I would have to agree on some things that have contributed and still contribute to the swill of the zeitgeist which we call modern (or is it postmodern) culture.

The old, gray-haired men (like me) have always complained about the young's values and behaviors, focusing on these areas:

1. The young show no respect for the old. Support for the old comes from  knowledge, tradition, thought--in a word, the result of long  years of study and analysis. The young's rebuttal is that what the old know is completely outdated, inapplicable, and irrelevant. Knowledge that matters has been in existence only for five minutes, and has only three minutes of life and relevance left. "The future was  yesterday," they tell us, with a smirk.

2. The old, especially those retired from academia, shake their  heads and complain that the young cannot write their way out of a paper bag. They cannot pronounce, spell, or define the words they would need to know in order to respond to an argument of any complexity. Their sentences are 12 or 15 words long, reflecting their limited ability to engage arguments, or even to produce coherent paragraphs. The first time one of these old, crotchety university professors asked a student to read something aloud, the prof thought the student was joking. "No wonder these students cannot follow a discussion or summarize an argument," they think. "They don't even notice the logical transitions that shape the movement of the discussion. 

3. The only  examples the young can bring into consideration to support or rebut an intellectual claim are examples from their own experience or that of their close friends. Such a solipsistic view of the world reflects the lack of reading, writing, and discussion that would have opened the vistas of their understanding.

4. A little investigation reveals that these students' inability to read, write, or think comes in large part from their K-12 schooling. Teachers at the K-12 level quickly discovered that there are ways to save grading work: Require less of assignments that need the teacher's attention (less reading, less writing), and require more "team assignments," where students work together and grade each other. Unoiversity faculty have adopted similar techniques to save work. Suppose you teach a class of 30 students in an introductory to philosophy class. A class that meets twice a week might have about 30 meetings on a semester-long, Tuesday/Thursday schedule. Can you see it? 30 meetings with 30 students? Assign each student an hour-long report, spread out over t he semester, and your course is virtually complete without any more work by  you.

Old  Joke:

"What shall we get Jane for her birthday?"

"How about a book?"

"No, she already has a book."

New Joke:

"What shall we get Jane for her birthday?"

"How about a book?"

"What's a book?"