The United States of America is Fucked
Last week, I cleared customs and entered the United States on a business trip that will, of course, contain a dose of pleasure.
This morning, I decided to accompany a “friend” to her class at a top 10 law school. I figured it would be interesting to step foot inside a classroom at one of the America’s finest educational institutions. I wanted to see firsthand the education of the next batch of ambitious young attorneys who will no doubt be called upon to defend the interests of America’s great companies (and great white-collar criminals).
Approximately ten minutes into the lecture, I noticed that I had within my field of view six students who were using their laptops. And as soon as I started paying attention to what was on their screens, I noticed that only one was actually taking notes.
The others were busy browsing the Internet while the professor went on about a subject that wasn’t all that interesting or important – the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct.
I had read about this phenomenon before.
Josh Waitzkin, the chess prodigy who was the subject of the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, wrote a guess post for Tim Ferriss entitled “The Multitasking Virus and the End of Learning?”
In it, he recounted his own trip to a college classroom:
A few weeks ago, I returned to the classroom of Dennis Dalton, the most important college professor of my life. From the back of an amphitheater seating several hundred students, I realized how much things had evolved at Columbia and Barnard. The lecture hall was now equipped with a wireless sound system, webcams, video projectors, wireless internet. Students were using computers to record the lecture and to take notes. Heads were buried in screens, the tap tap of hundreds of keyboards like rain on the roof.
On this afternoon, April 16, 2008, Dalton was describing the satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi, building the discussion around the Amritsar massacre in 1919, when British colonial soldiers opened fire on 10,000 unarmed Indian men, women and children trapped in Jallianwala Bagh Garden. For 39 years, Professor Dalton has been inspiring Columbia and Barnard students with his two semester political theory series that introduces undergrads to the ideas of Gandhi, Thoreau, Mill, Malcolm X, King, Plato, Lao Tzu. His lectures are about themes, connections between disparate minds, the powerful role of the individual in shaping our world.
Dalton is a life changer, and this was one of his last lectures before retirement.
Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief). From my perspective in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes!
Aware that I was having the same experience, I decided to assume the role of anthropologist and started logging as many of the websites and applications these students were using as I could identify. Here’s the list:
- Consumerist
- Digg
- Email Clients
- Gizmondo
- GMail
- GTalk
- Google Maps
- iTunes
- Legal Profession Blog
- Netflix
- New York Times
- Rotten Tomatoes
- Scrabble
- Scramble
- Silicon Alley Insider
- Solitaire
- The Gavel
- The Huffington Post
- The Onion
- The university’s recreational sports website.
- Valleywag
- Virtual Pet Adoptions
- Yahoo News
Unfortunately, no Twitter. But I digress.
I’m pretty sure that these websites and applications had nothing to do with the lecture.
After Waitzkin had his experience, he reflected:
When the class was over I rode the train home heartbroken, composing a letter to the students, which Dalton distributed the next day. Then I started investigating. Unfortunately, what I observed was not an isolated incident. Classrooms across America have been overrun by the multi-tasking virus. Teachers are bereft. This is the year that Facebook has taken residence in the national classroom.
Students defend this trend by citing their generation’s enhanced ability to multi-task. Unfortunately, the human mind cannot, in fact, multi-task without drastically reducing the quality of our processing. Brain activation for listening is cut in half if the person is trying to process visual input at the same time. A recent study at The British Institute of Psychiatry showed that checking your email while performing another creative task decreases your IQ in the moment 10 points. That is the equivalent of not sleeping for 36 hours—more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana. But to be honest, on the educational front, multi-tasking feels to me like a symptom of a broader sense of alienation.
I, of course, have pointed out the less-than-desirable implications of our overuse of technology – from narcissism to negative impacts on social interaction. In fact, I agree with Nick Carr’s hypothesis that the Internet is making us stupid.
As I watched the students browse, email and chat, it struck me that the future of the United States cannot be all that bright when the brightest young Americans can’t sit through a class listening inventively to an important lecture without feeling compelled to browse the most useless of websites. I really hope the weird looking guy browsing Silicon Allley Insider never goes on to practice securities law.
I find it odd that students would waste over a hundred thousand dollars on tuition over the course of three years to go to school and browse the Internet. Certainly Starbucks is a cheaper alternative.
It’s worth pointing out that the best universities in the United States are still where many wealthy foreigners send their children to receive their college educations. Of course, many (if not most) of those students now go home after graduation because there are greater opportunities outside of the United States, but the point is that despite all of the problems that the United States faces, an American university education is still highly-regarded around the world. It seems like a real waste that American students would rather play around on the computer than take advantage of it.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing to me about my experience is that this was not an undergraduate class at a second-rate university. It was a class at a top 10 law school. The students here are supposedly the best and the brightest and will ostensibly graduate to careers at some of America’s top law firms.
In fact, after class, I learned that the student who seemed to be the best multitasker (having managed to thumb through Halloween party photos on Facebook while browsing his Netflix account and reading Rotten Tomatoes) would be a summer associate at Morrison & Foerster this coming summer.
Morrison & Foerster has a solid reputation and it occurred to me that if this is the type of associate that such a law firm is willing to pay $160,000+ to as a first year associate, one has to wonder about the quality of America’s law firms going forward. I certainly won’t be putting Mofo on retainer anytime soon.
In short, after my experience, my belief that the United States is a modern day Roman Empire-in-decline has never been stronger.
Bouncing back from the collapse of a ponzi scheme financial and monetary system? Possible. Reestablishing its leadership around the globe? Possible. Trading in an unsustainable consumer culture for something a little bit more sensible? Possible.
Doing so with a generation of ADHD-ridden “multitaskers” who can’t sit through a lecture without browsing the Internet and who, most importantly, don’t respect the value of their educational opportunities? Impossible.
As George Carlin told Keith Olbermann in an interview before his passing:
This country’s finished. It’s been sliding downhill for a long time. And everybody’s got a cell phone that makes pancakes so they don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t want to make any trouble. People have been bought off by gizmos and toys in this country and no one questions anything anymore.
I agree. Nothing can beat stupid. Nothing.
Some Law schools have begun banning laptops from the classroom. http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i40/40a00104.htm
I think in many ways technology is a distraction to learning. People’s brains haven’t changed so I don’t know why there is such an impetus to use the latest gizmo when teaching. The internet is an invaluable research tool but I don’t know how you can improve on debating concepts and ideas in small groups for learning.
k: thanks for posting that article. Seems to confirm that what I experienced is all too typical in the classrooms of America’s universities.
As an outsider, what’s so baffling to me is why anyone would go into significant debt to attend law school while not taking advantage of the opportunities to learn from their professors, many of whom have impressive real-world backgrounds.
If laws schools in the United States are set up so that students can pass because they’re good at taking tests and big law firms are impressed by students who don’t even have the discipline and attention span required to make it through a lecture, I don’t think the future of America’s legal industry looks all that good.
I’m glad that my primary personal attorney in the US is a sole practitioner over the age of 50.
Same thing applies to cellphones in classrooms and text messaging. Go figure what the iphone generation will become.
All that wouldn’t matter much if at least diploma had any value and if you couldn’t literraly buy your graduation in this country. Not to mention graduations earned through sport.
Unfortunately, it’s all about money here. You can even buy your citizenship: invest 1 million dollar in a business, hire 10 people, and you automatically get a green card and citizenship 2 years later.
will you think less of me if I told you I wanted to marry all of Green Day at once?
btw- what? you’re not american? the plot thickens….
Does it surprise you that I read this article, when supposed to be doing important work??
thought not..
jez: given that your IP address indicates that you’re based in the United States and work for a prominent corporation, no.
A disgrace…
When I went to law school just 10 years ago lectures were certainly not the place for fannying about on laptops and cell phones.
They were for reading the newspaper and sleeping.
Uni is just an opportunity to drink and shag. Learning takes place once you graduate and realise that you know f*ck all…
Craig: I’ve always found it curious that people spend tens of thousands of dollars (if not hundreds of thousands of dollars) going to university to party and fuck.
I didn’t go to university and I can assure you that a college education is not a prerequisite for partying and fucking.
As I understand it, university is not necessarily supposed to teach you how to perform job functions. It’s supposed to teach you how to think so that after you graduate knowing fuck all, you have refined your cranial capabilities to the point where you’re able to learn on the job.
Based on your IP address and email address, I was able to track you down on Google and I see that you’re not practicing law. Sounds like you’re doing well for yourself but I would point out that you could have skipped law school. I read the newspaper and sleep everyday from the comfort of my own home. No law school classes required.
Thanks for the stalking.
Didn’t spend much on going to Uni (being from the UK), but to put my serious hat on for a second:
When you leave school at 17/18 you are basically still a child. For better or for worse society now has decreed that 3/4 years of further eduction is something to be undertaken by all those with half a brain.
Personally, it did nothing for me. I loved the social life, but would have been better doing something else. However, at 17 when you are applying, you don’t always have that level of foresight (especially when everyone is telling you what a great idea it is).
So for me, reading the newspaper and sleeping taught me the most important lesson I learned at Uni – that I would make a truly bad lawyer and that I should go off and do other stuff instead.
Some of that stuff has been good, some a complete disaster. But it suits me and sure seems like more fun than hanging out in an office…
No problem Craig. I always like to get to know my readers. Naked Conversations told me it was a good thing.
I think your assessment of perceptions about university is generally pretty accurate.
I would add a few points.
First, I think it’s frightening that American society believes 18 year-olds are “children.” Historically (both in the US and outside the US), 18 year-olds were expected to be a lot more mature than they are today. I saw a news piece this year indicating that most Americans believe adulthood starts at age 26. That’s just downright scary in my opinion.
Second, it’s sad that the purpose of a university education has been lost. The impression I get is that for most American students, college is “4 more years of high school.”
While it’s naive to believe that every teen knows what he or she wants to do by the age of 17 or 18, the fact that so many go to university just because it’s what they believe they’re supposed to do is sad, especially when so many of them take on ungodly amounts of debt to do so. From my perspective, this is yet another example of the dumbing down of American youth.
By the time you’re 17 or 18, you should have the maturity to recognize that you have some major life decisions to deal with and that even if you don’t know exactly what you want to do in life, you need to give some real thought to your options and be ready to commit to one. Parents, hopefully, have prepared their children for this and are prepared to slap them in the face if they’re not quite in touch with reality.
Glad you learned something in university and that you’re doing what makes you happy. I think that’s the most anyone could hope for in life.
Thanks for reading!
Drama: The vast majority of students have always been a waste of space, and when I say “always”, I mean going back to the Industrial Revolution. Do you think all those Bullingdon Club types back in the mid-20th were all diligently studying in their top hats and tails? Of course not. As every honest account of pre-war university life will tell you, the majority spent most of their time drinking and bedding the town girls. A few studied, but it almost certainly wasn’t a larger proportion than those that genuinely study now.
Only one thing has changed nowadays, and it’s that the sons (and daughters) of miners can now also aspire to three years of slacking off. If professors are pissed off, it’s because they actually have to read everyone’s sub-literate nonsense on post-colonial aesthetics. In the good old days of high academic standards, they could just read the name “Peregrine Forthington-Horstfield” at the top, give it 60%, and go down the pub.
Well, you might say, all that proves is that everyone has wasted their education, and we should be aspiring to better than the old class system managed. But is it really wasted? The lecture you saw was on “Rules of Professional Conduct”, which sounds like box-ticking nonsense. If any student needs to know that you shouldn’t lie or cheat in the legal profession, then they shouldn’t have been allowed on the damn course.
My own degree was in economics, and I will say that some of it is actually useful. But around halfway through you get to courses like “International Development” and “Advanced Macroeconomics”. These are basically about reconciling the objective view of the world basic economics gives you, with the world as it is dictated by nation states. You spend lots of time learning about the marvels of fiat currency, Keynesian stimuli and everything you’ve so eloquently condemned over the past couple of weeks, and that anyone with sense would simply reply with “That’s just BS”. Many economists never recover from this part of the course, and spend their lives as Wormtongues telling politicians how they really can make the world better with a piece of paper in one hand and an assault rifle in the other.
There are a few university courses where you genuinely miss out by slacking off. These are mathematics, science, engineering, medicine, and anything else where a wrong answer is a wrong answer. And preferably results in someone’s liver exploding, or a bridge falling into a river, so you know you got the answer wrong. But people who slack off don’t take these courses.
That leaves the ideal that university teaches you how to think. No it doesn’t. It could, but it doesn’t. There are glimmers here and there, but mainly university is like school; it teaches you how to pass exams, and to tell the teacher what he wants to hear in such a way that the teacher can’t tell that you actually think otherwise. That, basically, is how the world works. Why learn how to think? The purpose of thought is to find truth, and right now, if you actually find truth and bring it down from the mountains, everyone asks “Isn’t it just your opinion that it’s the truth?” no matter how brightly it shines. That’s how it is, and it probably won’t change in our lifetimes.
Anyway. The purpose of an idea is to tell us what we expect in the future. So what future can we expect from the idea that American students are spending lectures on “Rules of Professional Conduct” playing on Facebook? Well, I see three options. One, they’ll all fail the course. Two, they’ll pass, and the legal system will collapse under the weight of corrupt lawyers. Three, life will go on as what passes for normal.
One is almost impossible – no professor would fail all his students. That could lead to two, but that’s just absurd – if the legal profession is full of corrupt, unscrupulous sharks, how would we notice? So that leaves three: life will go on, as it has for ten thousand years.
Speaking as a college student at Cornell U., I agree and I see this first-hand every single day. I am also guilty of participating in it on occasion, but that’s mainly because I enjoy working on building my company by making sales and planning for the future with spreadsheets and the like. School bores me, I think it bores a lot of my colleagues (who are more the “drink & shag” type). Frankly, I think the current model of “education” needs to be completely re-thought and re-implemented, but perhaps that is a whole other issue.
Regardless, it was a great post.
Sam: thanks for your thoughtful post. I agree with a lot of what you say. The “drink and shag” aspect of college life certainly isn’t new and it certainly isn’t limited to the United States.
But if you look beyond this, there’s empirical evidence of a worrying decline in the American education system:
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/dumb/dumb2.htm
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3062866.html
http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/05/02/geog.test/index.html
Were things perfect in the early 1900s? Of course not. But I think we’d have a hard time arguing that the American education system has been in decline for some time and that there’s a correlation to the United States’ declining economy and role in the world.
I’m not one to complain about drinking and shagging and I’m not naïve enough to believe that all university students are going to be diligent pencil pushers.
That said, the plagues of “ADHD” and “multitasking” have changed the dynamic. Not being able to sit through your classes without browsing Facebook pictures of your buddies drinking and the girls you’ve shagged (or would like to shag) is different from maintaining a healthy social life in college.
By the way, the lecture I attended was quite interesting and you’d be surprised that some of the ABA rules, while sensible in retrospect, were fairly nuanced. It seems that one could easily be relatively intelligent yet still fail the test because some knowledge of specifics and details is required. That, of course, requires that one pay attention.
Matt: since you’re going to school and running a company at the same time, I would be interested in the reasons why you decided to do both.
Parts of the ABA model rules are interesting. However, the primary reason students take the course is that is required for the school to maintain its accreditation.
My biggest concern is the inability of anyone under thirty to clearly communicate. I don’t know what happened, but even highly educated people under thirty will revert to lolcat speak when sending emails.
Drama: Sorry, I disagree. Because of the whole mortality thing, humans tend to overvalue the past. Even when things are exactly the same, people will claim that things are getting worse, because that’s just how our perception works.
Dumbing down is not new. All that’s changed is that you no longer need political/financial/aristocratic connections for people to tell you that you’re better than you actually are. Every era has had its Generation Y, ours is just a bit more middle-class and less well-dressed.
As for the US being fucked, there have always been enough people who study even when there’s no reason why they should. Those who keep on learning engineering and science and maths even as our masters insist that the world revolves around CDOs and liberal democratic politics. Nerds is the current term. As long as they keep on slaving away (and I’m no Randite, so I’m fairly sure they will) the world will remian unfucked, for better or for worse.
Fuck this blog, get into the street and break the windows of every bank you come across and then join a Marxist Revolutionary party and do the job right, arm yourself and get some ground to air missiles for those fucking helicopters that spy on the people. Now you are taking revolution and not bullshit!