Bauerlein's concerns are that the ignorance of our young people will result in the nation sliding into apathy. I will add, do you think it's all a giant plan? Is this plethora of electronic marvels designed specifically to distract the younger generation from developing an interest in civics or politics or history? I'm not one for conspiracies so I won't take it that far, but it does make me wonder sometimes.
I have my own concerns. Into what kind of world will our homeschooled, literate girls be launched? Our daughters will be square pegs in round holes. Indifferent to the exploits of Hollywood dribble, unconnected with "friends" through Facebook or Twitter, deprived of cell phones (because they don't need them) … what kind of freaks will our kids be when they leave for college?
It is a terrific column by Patrice Lewis, as always. But, I don't quite agree with it.
I understand the concerns that Patrice and Mark Bauerlein have about the detriment of our children's intelligence because of technology. Electronic devices offer a great deal of time away from the distressing events of the world. You know, a "Time 2 Escape." However, I believe that there is another side of this story that should be discussed.
What I believe is the REAL problem with the children comes down to parenting, and not the tools of technology as Mark Bauerlein suggests! And, when it comes down to it, what Patrice wrote in her column actually supports my opinion. Okay, so Patrice is actually educating her children without the "highly anticipated benefits of technology" that were supposed to be the "cutting-edge intellectual stimulants for young minds." But, even Patrice admits it: Her children will be "freakishly" technologically illiterate when they attend college: "Into what kind of world will our homeschooled, literate girls be launched? Our daughters will be square pegs in round holes."
Well, Patrice continues on to say, "Whatever freaks our girls turn out to be, they won't be dumb ones. They'll be literate ones. If that makes them freakishly different, so be it."
What I am suggesting: If people depend on the public indoctrination system as the lone educator of our children, and then the kids go home and play with their electronic gadgets for the remainder of the day, should we expect them to be intelligent? The solution is parenting. How about limiting the time the kids can play with their electronic toys? How about getting kids to play outside now and then, without the gadgets, but with just their own imagination and creativity? A little game of kickball, perhaps? Badminton? Volleyball?
And then, when it comes down to educating our children, let's start with limiting the amount of power the federal government has in deciding what they learn. Let's just go back to the three R's: Reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic.
Patrice has had the right idea all along. She developed her children's interest in literature and learning by being a great mom and homeschool educator. But, let's not be like Bauerlein and blame technology for the diminished intelligence of our kids. The technology of today and the future really CAN be used for the good. The true issue is how the new technological tools are used.
The Dumbest Generation
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| PATRICE LEWIS |
By Patrice Lewis
March 12, 2011 ~ 1:00 am Eastern
© 2011
Our younger daughter (age 12) recently saw a movie called "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." The plot involves a Victorian-era man played by Sean Connery (swoon, thud) who gathers together some of the most famous characters from literature, including Dorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll, Tom Sawyer, Captain Nemo, etc. on a secret mission to fight a technological madman.
My daughter loved the movie and decided she wanted to read all the books concerning the characters. So far she's read "The Portrait of Dorian Gray," "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." We have all the volumes in our personal library of 5,000-plus books, so she can just pick them up as she wishes.
Now let me jump subjects a bit. Occasionally I am in a position to hear a friend's 11-year-old son read out loud. This boy comes from a stable, intact family and there's nothing wrong with his intelligence – except he is, for all intents and purposes, illiterate. He can read, but barely; and he has no comprehension of what he's reading. This puzzled and concerned me for the longest time. How could a kid from such a great family be effectively unable to read? Then it dawned on me: Books are not a part of his life. There are none to be found in his home. He lives in a cyber-world of technological excess.
The reason I've been thinking about the contrast between my daughter's devouring of the classics versus the other child's functional illiteracy is because I'm currently reading a book called "The Dumbest Generation" by Mark Bauerlein who argues that this generation's wired-in and connected lifestyle leaves young people unable to think, work, read, or form real (versus cyber) relationships.
Originally these modern technological marvels were hailed as cutting-edge intellectual stimulants for young minds. But this has not turned out to be the case. "If the young have acquired so much digital proficiency, and if digital technology exercises their intellectual faculties so well, then why haven't knowledge and skill levels increased accordingly?" asks the author. "If the Information Age solicits quicker and savvier literacies, why do so many new entrants into college and work end up in remediation?"
Bauerlein describes the constant and ever-improving technology as "prosthetic," a chilling term when applied to the minds of children and young adults.
Most of the early and highly anticipated benefits of technology on the intellect of students have turned out to be negative – so much so that some schools are actually disconnecting or discouraging the use of digital media they had encouraged with such high hopes five years before in an effort to "unplug" kids and increase test scores.
The trouble, apparently, is while kids are frighteningly savvy when it comes to all electronic media, those skills do not translate into actual knowledge. They do not retain the material they study. "When the fifth-grade teachers assign a topic, the kids proceed like this: go to Google, type keywords, download three relevant sites, cut and paste passages into a new document, add transitions of their own, print it up, and turn it in. The model is information retrieval, not knowledge formation, and the material passes from Web to homework paper without lodging in the minds of the students."
READ FULL STORY at WorldNetDaily.com
Perhaps five years later, I was in a bookstore at the mall when a young boy's loose shoelace got caught in the escalator. He yelped as the machine dragged him off-balance. I saw what was happening, snapped open my pocket knife, and went for the escalator to chop his lace free – when his parent reached him first and pulled him bodily free by the waist. I quietly folded my knife and went about my business unnoticed, but I remembered the incident. I remembered and was glad that I learned to act rather than watch.
Fifteen years later, I stood in the same bookstore. It was just last weekend, and that bookstore is dying. Its shelves are almost empty. Its cafe furnishings are being sold off plate by plate. It is doomed, a victim of technology. As the e-book kills the paperback, places like it will crumble to dust. I stood at the foot of that same escalator less than one week ago, and I remembered. I remember that lesson, so long ago now, about technology, about mental preparedness ... about complacency.
In his column today, Phil writes about a subject that normally may not receive much attention or even provoke any thoughtful contemplation. Phil's discussion about complacency and its cause makes me think about other columns that I've read recently, where our life-styles of comfy living have made us oblivious to what is going on in America and the world. Robert Ringer, in his column "What soft socialism has wrought," may have sparked Phil's thoughts, or at least my own, about complacency, when he wrote:The average American had no idea that he was slowly being boiled alive, because soft socialism made it possible for him to buy a house he couldn't afford, go on vacations he couldn't afford and fill his life with high-tech toys he couldn't afford. This comfy lifestyle made him oblivious to the realities of life.
All you really need to know now, before reading this column, is that when I looked "complacency" up on dictionary.com, this definition comes up:
a feeling of quiet pleasure or security, often while unaware of some potential danger, defect, or the like; self-satisfaction or smug satisfaction with an existing situation, condition, etc.
How our gadgets breed complacency
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| PHIL ELMORE |
By Phil Elmore
March 03, 2011 ~ 1:00 am Eastern
© 2011
The most fundamental component of technology, of the technocracy we occupy in our daily lives, is the software on which we operate. That software is found in your brain. Your brain is the most often neglected aspect of every piece of technology you use – for just as a thing to be perceived begs an entity to perceive it, that which is to be operated begs an operator. We, as human beings, are largely self-programmed. We integrate the data provided us through numerous means, and from this data, we draw concepts.
What happens if we start to rely too much on any piece of technology? Be it a smartphone to store our phone numbers, an application that remembers our passwords, or the network of networks on which we rely for everything from entertainment to commerce to communication ... if we forsake the software that is our brains in favor of the hardware that is all around us, we become complacent.
Complacency is fatal.
Almost 20 years ago, I witnessed something that would change my attitude about complacency forever. In retrospect, the incident helped form my opinions of technology, too, which I bring to you every week in this column. It was such a simple thing and, looking back, such a potentially terrible thing.
I was leaving a four-story college residence hall. As I exited the building I stopped to see what was going on – for a crowd of people was staring up the large hillside into which the campus was built.
We watched and a few people pointed and muttered. A lone student dragged a metal bed frame down the hill. I remember him as tall and skinny. He moved with determination and without a word, the bed frame scraping the asphalt walkway as he tugged it along.
No one questioned him. No one stopped him. We watched as he walked up to the old brick-faced building, upended the bed frame, and climbed it like a ladder. The corner of the frame shattered the window of the room he was boarding like a pirate. He scrambled in through the opening.
I walked into the building. The student burst from a room on the lounge level -– the room that was, I would learn later, below the room occupied by a young woman who'd just dumped him. Crazed and screaming incoherent oaths, he stopped in the hallway.
I froze.
I knew I should do something, but I did not know what. I had no gun. I had no knife. I had no pepper spray. I was not near a phone; this was before cell phones, even before pagers became common. Like the 20 or 30 people who had watched this bizarre scene unfold, I was technologically unprepared – but mentally, I was even less prepared. My software could not handle the data. The scenario was outside the normal. My brain clicked to a stop, unable to process a situation with which it had not been prepared to cope.
READ FULL STORY at WorldNetDaily.com
The e-book is the future. Publishers, to remain relevant, are evolving. Readers, for good or ill, must do the same.
In this column, Phil examines the trend of the electronic books (e-books), and what it means for the readers and the publishers. Will it catch on? The answer is a definite yes, as the transition is already happening at a rapid pace. And yes, there will be people that are "traditionalists" that would rather have the hard-cover and/or paperbacks over the e-books.
However, will they always have the option? Will people be able to buy paperbacks, much less magazines and newspapers, for very much longer? That day could come soon when there will not be a choice. (Think green...) I actually predicted several decades ago, when I bought my first Apple II computer and had a 300 baud modem and AOL that the day would come when everything would be read on computers, and that was BEFORE Al Gore invented the internet!
The e-book is the future
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| PHIL ELMORE |
By Phil Elmore
February 03, 2011 ~ 1:00 am Eastern
© 2011
"I don't want an e-reader," I've groused. "I like reading real books." But am I right to object to e-books ... and does it matter that I do? Last week, CNET reported that Amazon is now selling more e-books for its Kindle reader than it is selling traditional paperback books. When e-books outsold hardcovers, this was no real shock, given the high prices hardcovers command. The paperback, by contrast, is the standard by which leisure reading is judged. For most of the years of my teenage and adult lives, a stack of paperbacks was my constant companion. Paperbacks went with me in my briefcase, my shoulder bag and my jacket pocket, entertaining me in waiting rooms, coffee shops and at home. For the venerable paperback to be replaced by virtual books read on devices costing more than 20 or 30 of those paperbacks, a truly major shift must be occurring – both in consumer preference and in producer offering.
Interestingly, Amazon won't say exactly how many Kindles it sells, although its website proclaims the device their best-selling item. This is impressive given the traditional hurdles e-books must overcome in supplanting printed, paper books.
As I have previously discussed in Technocracy, a major criticism of e-books is that such books are treated as software and sold under what could be construed as a software licensing model. We naturally resist this. Whether we put it on a shelf or level the coffee table with it, we figure a paper book is wholly ours, forever. What we forget is that licensing limitations constrain what we may or may not do with the paper books we purchase. You cannot take your new paperback, run photocopies and sell those copies on eBay. You can't scan it and put the resulting PDF file on Scribd for all the world to enjoy. You are, therefore, as limited as you are when "renting" or otherwise licensing a piece of software. You just aren't aware of it.
Early missteps involving the yanking of electronic books, unannounced, from users' readers – appropriately enough, over issues of licensing – did not help build confidence in this new model of literature sales, distribution and enjoyment. As we adjust to the idea that software is ephemeral and impermanent, that books are not fixed in space and time so much as they are read, archived and either backed up or lost, we step closer to a world in which "book" means an arrangement of data rather than a physical object that happens to convey the same. The e-book focuses the reader on the reading, not on the delivery system.
READ FULL STORY at WorldNetDaily.com
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