An interesting op-ed article in the Boston Globe this past
Friday. Whether its reading current events, knowing history, or just being
invovled in general, a trend is emerging.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/03/why_jon_stewart_isnt_funny/
Benjamin Johnson
Manuscript
Cataloger
Massachusetts Historical Society
1154 Boylston Street
Boston,
Massachusetts 02215
617-646-0569
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Sent: Monday, March 06, 2006 3:54 PM
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Subject: Re: Early Friday Funny
While
there always has been some generational grousing, there is enough
poll data
to suggest that the number of people reading about current
events has
dropped. This obviously has greater implications than
whether one
generation follows another'sl tastes in music,
entertainment, etc. I'm
not talking about where people get their news
(traditional print or broadcast
journalism, cable, Internet, etc.).
I'm talking about whether they follow the
news at all. In fact, just
recently David Mindich published a book,
_Tuned Out: Why Americans
Under 40 Don't Follow the News_.
See
http://shrinkster.com/cpw
.
An article about public diplomacy in the National Journal in 2005
noted
the results of a poll in 1994
"Americans also fare poorly
compared with Europeans both in following
the news and in understanding it,
according to a 1994 survey by Pew's
predecessor, the Times Mirror Center for
the People and the Press. No
identical survey has been done since the 1994
study, but in that study,
Americans were less likely than the Germans or the
British to have read
a newspaper the day before the survey was taken and were
less likely
than the Germans, the Italians, or the British to have listened
to
television news.
And when asked five current-events questions based
on items then in the
news, Americans scored next to last among the eight
nationalities
polled, ahead only of the Spanish. More disturbingly, young
Americans
trailed British, Spanish, Italian, and German members of
their
generation in reading a newspaper and were the group least likely
to
understand international news. That inattentive and
uninformed
generation of Americans is now 10 years older, and it would
appear,
based on the more recent Pew survey, that they are even less
engaged
with the world today than they were a decade ago."
See
also
http://www.education-world.com/a_issues/chat/chat078.shtml
for
an discussion of the observation that many young Americans are
"aliterate" --
that is, they know how to read but choose not to!
The Washington Post's
Linton Weeks reported on this phenomenon on May
14, 2001 in an article, "The
No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep: More
and More Americans Who Can Read
Are Choosing Not To. Can We Afford to
Write Them Off?"
Weeks noted, "A
1999 Gallup Poll found that only 7 percent of Americans
were voracious
readers, reading more than a book a week, while some 59
percent said they had
read fewer than 10 books in the previous year.
Though book clubs seem popular
now, only 6 percent of those who read
belong to one. The number of people who
don't read at all, the poll
concluded, has been rising for the past 20
years."
Weeks reported that "To Jim Trelease, author of "The
Read-Aloud
Handbook," this trend away from the written word is more
than
worrisome. It's wicked. It's tearing apart our culture. People who
have
stopped reading, he says, "base their future decisions on what
they
used to know.
"If you don't read much, you really don't know
much," he says. "You're
dangerous."
Weeks specifically addresses the
"loss of heritage."
To read the Weeks piece, go to
http://shrinkster.com/cpx
All of this suggests that
there must be something going on beyond the
usual us vs. them that you find
with various generations. But, I'm not
a sociologist, I just know what
I know from reading the Washington
Post, Washington Times, the New York
Times, Newsweek, U.S. News & World
Report, and Time on a routine basis --
that is reading them every
day/week, to say nothing of various supplemental
journals, LOL.
Maarja
-----Original Message-----
From:
Scott, Paul (FPM) <[log in to unmask]>
To:
[log in to unmask]
Sent:
Mon, 6 Mar 2006 14:07:56 -0600
Subject: Re: Early Friday
Funny
Colleagues,
Perhaps it is time we reflected upon
human foibles-especially our own.
Whenever colleagues talk about
how woefully ignorant the younger
generation is, I recall a conversation I
overheard between two history
professors in 1965 or 1966. They
discussed how woefully unprepared
were the undergraduates "nowadays" and how
my generation did not know
the basic elements of American History, let alone
world history. We
were even surprisingly ignorant of recent events of
only 10-20 years
ago. This conversation was only remarkable only
because I've heard it
many times since then, and not only from historians and
archivists. It
all breaks down to the same phenomenon-the younger
generation is
pitiful.
Give the kids a break-they haven't
lived through half the stuff the
rest of us have, nor have they had the
opportunity to read even 5% as
much as the average old timer. Besides,
it seems that no one has ever
learned all that much about American History in
High School. And what
do we know of their culture? How many of us
over 50 watch their shows,
listen to their music, or play their games?
I don't. The average
teenager today probably knows more about
rock-and-roll than I know
about hip hop.
The bottom line is
that the younger generation is going to the
dogs-always has been-always
will. But, in the end, they will bury us.
Paul R. Scott,
CA, CRM
(Curmudgeon 3rd Class)
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