Classes start in a couple of days at the university where I work. The streets of this small Midwestern city are full of the scantily clad bodies of twenty-somethings, tanned to perfection, waxed and manicured and most of them disturbingly overweight; they obviously didn't spend their summers doing farmwork or construction and if they spent the last three months waiting on tables, the traditional late night eating and drinking afterward more than made up for the exercise of dashing from table to table. These are my students.
One of my colleagues, who has yet to go through parenting completely, which teaches you much more than how to be scathingly accurate in your assessment of the level of pheromones and hormones in any given room full of teens and twenties, is already despairing vocally of the returning students. "The information is all on our website!" he rants at the conclusion of his tenth call in a row asking how to declare a major in our department. "I spent all summer designing that website and not a single student has bothered to check it!" It's lucky his hair is trimmed very short, and I suspect his wife may have suggested it, since his temperament is the kind that tends to pulling out hair in the midst of agonizing frustration.
A half hour later he's back at my desk. "Do you think it might help if I put a big, bold-faced line on the homepage as an active link to the information on degree plans? Something really big and simple they couldn't possible miss?" Poor man. His daughter is four. He has so far to go before he really knows what is going on with our students. For they don't come from his world at all really, even though he grew up in this state just two decades before they did.
Today's twenty-somethings don't send emails and they don't check websites, despite the fact that most of them have the ability to do so right on the sleek, smooth phones that are always within easy reach and heard even though they always, absolutely always, have the white cords of earbuds hanging from their ears to their shoulders. Emails (which is now so old it has officially lost its once mandatory hyphen), along with the entire internet including but not limited to Google Search, is too big. Instead of email, this generation texts. Instead of searching the internet, they wait for a relevant Twitter stream.
It's as if this whole generation now filling the sidewalks of my town and which will soon ooze into the hallways of our classroom buildings has pulled its collective collar up and tucked its neck into its shadow like a turtle might, to protect itself. This generation never had a chance to avoid the information explosion. This generation cut its collective teeth on the rawhide of Wikipedia, of collective intelligence for which everyone and no one is ever held responsible...but everyone must be held to account. They grew up knowing they could know everything, and that some of us actually expected them to do just this: Know Everything.
The sea of information is vast, endless, and its horizon, knowledge, is never reached. No one knows that better than today's 20-somethings. And so they've pretty much stopped sailing for the horizon; they've put in their earplugs and fastened their eyes on the small screen of their iPhones and Blackberries. If it's not a small piece of knowledge, don't offer it to them. If it doesn't fit in a text without a break, if it doesn't tweet: Toss it. It won't be read. There is no time. If they open the door even a crack, all that knowledge out there will come rushing in, the floodwaters of history, from the ancient scrolls to the monks in mountainside monasteries to children in Africa walking barefooted across scorched grasslands to get to school for one more day. These lush and overly ripe American students are supposed to know it all.
And so they've shut down. They seek to know only what they have to know. To get a job, to get an A. Welcome back, students.
(I realize, of course, that there are amazing and marvelous exceptions to this, and I thank and bless each one of you and wish you happy sailing.)
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