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Reviving Education: Balancing Digital Distractions with Classical Learning

• Michele McAloon

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Discover how the digital revolution is reshaping education with insights from Dr. Mark Bauerlein, a senior editor at First Things and English professor at Emory University. Our conversation navigates the challenges posed by social media and smartphones, which are distracting students from engaging with traditional literature. We tackle the shift in educational priorities, moving from a deep dive into Western civilization to focusing merely on critical skills through brief text analysis. This transformation, influenced by progressive and libertarian agendas, has led to the erosion of classic texts and cultural literacy. Dr. Bauerlein provides a profound look into how this impacts students' analytical skills and cultural awareness, urging the need for a balance between contemporary skills and traditional knowledge.

We also address the pressing issue of declining literacy and educational standards, with the pandemic further unraveling student engagement and preparedness. The episode questions the role of federalism, with its uneven curriculum standards, and explores the political responses pushing for school choice through vouchers and charter schools. As we explore the potential of classical education and the recent push to ban cell phones from schools, we highlight the media's role in shedding light on the negative effects of digital tools on Gen Z. This episode is a call to action for supporting educational institutions that prioritize intellectual growth, and for recognizing the societal benefits of incorporating classical teachings into modern education.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michelle McElhoun, your host, and today we have the great honor of having Dr Mark Bauerlein, who is a senior editor at First Things. Mark Bauerlein, who is a senior editor at First Things, he's a professor of English at Emory University, where he has taught since earning his PhD in English at UCLA in 1989. He has written a number of books and he really is an educational expert. He wrote the Dumbest Generation and the Dumbest Generation Grows Up. He's a trustee of New College of Florida and has done a lot to help organize Ralston College. He's written articles for Wall Street Journal, washington Post, boston Globe and he has a great, great podcast. Mark, what's the name of your podcast?

Speaker 2:

You know, we just call it, I think, the Conversation, and it's at firstthingscom, so tune in to listen to people for spend 30 minutes talking about their recent books.

Speaker 1:

Great, that's perfect. Okay, good. Actually you're talking to people really who are holding the conversation now in the United States on, I want to say, sort of a Catholic conservative agenda. Can we just say sane at this point.

Speaker 2:

Common sense.

Speaker 1:

Common sense, right. All those good adjectives, all right. So what we're going to talk about today is something that is coming up and that is starting to really bubble up. We've now seen several articles talking about, basically, high school graduates that either cannot read or they're getting into the elite colleges and they've never read a book. They don't know how to handle a book. What do you think is happening out there in the world of education now?

Speaker 2:

I think we go back 20 years to the development of Web 2.0, as it was called, which was the introduction of social media, and then the tools that facilitated social media, including the video and visual components of social media, that hit our culture like a tidal wave, let's just say from 2003 to 2013. By then the iPhone was in full sway, text messages were going back and forth 3,500 text messages a month for teenagers. They were still doing 100, 200 phone calls a month. Month and this sort of introduction of the technology. It took a few years to filter into institutions. It got into the leisure lives of adolescents and pulled them away from reading and we're not going to say that reading text messages and watching Instagram videos are a form of reading as certainly as traditionally understood. And then what happens in the culture is going to filter into the classroom, and the classroom can't really resist something so strong as 25 kids with cell phones in their pockets in your 10th grade English class and think that you're going to be able to assign William Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury and expect all the kids to read the whole thing. It's just not going to happen.

Speaker 2:

And added to that, you had a shift in curricular emphasis whereby, instead of, we'll take English class. That's my specialty. Instead of English class being oriented toward introducing 16, 17-year-olds to the great tradition, we'll call it the magisterium, the secular magisterium literature of art, great ideas and great expression. We shifted the English class into the critical reading skill, where we're going to focus not upon knowledge of Shakespeare, upon knowledge of Shakespeare, but we're going to focus on whether, if someone hands you a soliloquy from a Shakespeare play, that you can just analyze the language in that little excerpt, that passage. So the big picture was out Creating little analytical thinkers, reading little analytical thinkers. That was in in English. And so reading big books, michelle, reading the whole thing was less important than being able to apply your analytical thinking skills towards small, small bits and pieces, and that this was said to be a better workplace and college readiness program than knowing a lot of the King James Bible.

Speaker 1:

Why was that? What was the reasoning behind that?

Speaker 2:

I think that it was coming from a couple of angles. One, in progressive education circles and progressives did conquer the public school system many decades ago Western civilization was a bad word. Knowing the big picture of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Paris and London, and then the US, that was to them an ideological construct fraught with imperialism and colonialism and slavery, and so we had to eliminate Western civilization requirements, which is what was still there when I was in high school in the 1970s. You know Hawthorne and Melville and Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Willa, Cather and Faulkner. That was still a formation that you had to learn. You had to know a background there. Bible King James is the most important book in all of American history.

Speaker 1:

Sure, it's a piece of literature.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, civics literature oratory. It was all over the place. It was in every pioneer household. So you had to study some King James. You had to know Bible stories, bible characters. That was simply part of your basic education.

Speaker 2:

Well, you know, for the last few decades we know the Bible's a bad thing in schools. Progressives don't like it, and especially in this woke age. Biblical sexuality, biblical marriage that is oppressive and reactionary and all the rest. So there was that ideological shift away from the big picture, the great tradition, western civilization, in order to make it more multicultural. That was the argument from the left. The argument from the right, we'll say the libertarian, pro-business, free market right, was come on, who cares about Shakespeare? We just want people to go into workplaces and be doing things with PowerPoint skillfully. We don't need to have them memorize poems. What we need to do is to have them engage in problem solving and critical thinking so that they will become more productive workers.

Speaker 2:

Now, I think it actually that's a false conception of the value of reading great literature. I mean, if you want people to sniff out misinformation and disinformation, have them read poetry by Alexander Pope, a great Catholic poet, or the great romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. How they use words. You're going to learn how people misuse words, how they can manipulate and deceive, better than direct instruction, and this is misinformation. This is disinformation.

Speaker 2:

So there was a false, false premise behind that focus on producing good analysts of words. But then also you want to say is that all education is for Produce, productive, little workers. That's what it's about. Is that what the Gettysburg Address learning Gettysburg Address is about? So that you can be skillful with words. That's all. What an impoverished conception of learning, of formation. That that is. And that was more the libertarian, not the conservative right, the libertarian right. And we now know conservatives and libertarians are not friends, right? Yeah, we had kind of a false unity during the Cold War and then with the rise of the left to the progressives and identity politics in America. But we know in the last few years, libertarians and conservatives, you're not on the same side.

Speaker 1:

I think we are reaping what we have sowed now, because when you look at how news and journalism and issues are reported in the United States and I hate to sound trite, but especially if you're looking at this current election cycle, mama mia, I mean it just doesn't make sense of a lot of stuff that is put out Again. If you don't have the context, if you can't analyze the words, if you don't understand the civics behind it, you're vulnerable to whatever you're being told and it makes you less powerful as an individual, it makes you less informed, it makes you dumb, actually. So here's the question If children don't know how to read by the time they get into 18, 19, 20, what are they doing in college now?

Speaker 2:

Yes, our premise must be in our information age, we're being manipulated all the time, right, everything is a manipulation in the media, in advertising, in the entertainment world. On some level we're being manipulated. We may be being manipulated to spend our money. We may be manipulated in how to vote. We may be manipulated in the attitudes we're supposed to absorb. And it's what you just said.

Speaker 2:

If you don't read, you don't know just how manipulated you are, absolutely At any point. Learning reading, knowing some history, knowing your Bible, knowing your, knowing your Bible, knowing your civics, literature, novels, art these are ways of making yourself less vulnerable you used the word vulnerable a moment ago Less vulnerable to persuasion, especially false persuasion. We've got a lot of wolves in sheep's clothing out there. False persuasion, we've got a lot of wolves in sheep's clothing out there. And one should also say to people, young people or educators, where does that term wolves in sheep's clothing come from? Just having that kind of cultural literacy goes a long way, but we've taken that away from young people. They're not reading nearly as much as they used to.

Speaker 2:

College has become easier in that great inflation is so bad. Now you really have to just not show up in order to get a D or an F. These days, colleges have come to expect less and less, because students come into college being able to do less and less. And now, with the pandemic boy, it's really, it's really bad. I mean, right now in colleges and in high schools we have an absentee crisis.

Speaker 2:

Students just aren't showing up, they're just not going to class. More often than ever before, they're just not doing the assignments. A lot of them are dropping out because they're just kind of not. They don't have the work ethic for it, and the colleges don't really know what to do about this. They have to kind of adapt because they don't want to lose so many students. They want to retain as many as they can. But at the same time you can't do that unless you lower the requirements. You expect less out of students, and that's what we're seeing now in the United States, and it's I don't know what's going to happen in the next five years, Michelle.

Speaker 1:

With that, at least from the K through 12 level is mainly controlled at least financially, I think, somewhat curriculum-wise through county governments, right Through local governments, through county taxes, land taxes. Everybody who pays taxes know that they pay taxes to the public school system, and these counties, these school systems, are controlled by school boards on a county level. We have a national crisis where our children are not being educated, but there's not a way to solve the problem really on a federal level. It's almost like the housing issue that we're facing, that it really is at a hyper local level that we have to fix this school system.

Speaker 2:

You know, this is where the states really come into play. Federalism, that is, states have a lot of independence in how they run their schools. There are certain federal requirements legal ones, civil rights issues, title IX issues, regulations but when it comes to standards and curriculum, states do their own thing. And this is where the governor comes into play. Who are you asking to run your education program? Who are you asking to run your education program? Who are you asking to create the content and learning standards for the different fields, like social studies and English and math?

Speaker 2:

And there's a certain competition among the states that goes on because states are ranked in how well their kids do by, usually ranked by test scores, the NAEP scores, run by a federal agency. California used to be always near the very top among state rankings in terms of education. Now California has sunk down to the middle of the pack and it's an embarrassment to California. If people would, you know, pay a little closer attention to this, because it is very important. If you look at those states and put pressure on them to try to improve what they're doing, then maybe we would get some real reform. Unfortunately, the progressive establishment owns the education system in all the blue states like California and actually, michelle, they run a lot of education in red states.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, they do in Alabama. Yeah, and Alabama is probably the most conservative state in the nation.

Speaker 2:

It's really one of the weaknesses of the Republican Party that they didn't pay attention to education the way the Democrats paid attention to education for decades. Their Democrats went all in on law and economics. Really, in the 70s they gave up on the schools. They gave up on the culture, and so a lot of Republican politicians. At the state level, michelle, they don't have a clue. If you ask them about what state standards are, and the standards are like Common Core things you lay out In 10th grade, students shall be able to do this. Students shall know this, this and this. They don't even know what that's about, and so they turn education policy over to the experts. You know who the experts are-wing. They're all progressives. So this is why the Republican answer has often been vouchers, parent choice over things. They haven't really tried to change the public schools. They've altered the logistics so that parents can get their kids out of public schools if they want Charter schools, homeschooling. They've supported private schooling. That they've supported by giving parents money to go to the school of their choice. That's what they've tried to do and in some places it's been very successful. We've got.

Speaker 2:

One of the bright lights here is the growth of classical education, including Catholic classical education. These schools have opened in the last five, seven, eight years and they may start with 20 students. I spoke to a guy yesterday who runs a school in Connecticut. The Catholic high school there was dying. It was a huge school but it was about to close its doors. Well, a group of parents went to the diocese and said to the bishop, can we start our own little classical Catholic school? And he said, yes, you can do that. And they started as kind of a school within the school, the big school like a little honors group, 20 kids in it. The Catholic high school is closed, it's gone. This was six years ago. Now that little Catholic classical has 120 students and it's growing every year. That is a bright light and we see this happening a lot in the United States.

Speaker 2:

Classical schools, the Chesterton schools, as a network. They opened nine or 10 schools this fall. They opened nine or 10 last fall. The year before they are having parents come to them saying, please, please, take my child. I want to rescue my child from this awful public school and, sad to say, the occasional Catholic school which is really just a public school with a mass attached to it. So this is where one wants to support the good thing that is happening right now. We know how bad the public school situation is in many, many places. Well, let's point out that the good options, let's tell parents you have another place to go, and a lot of these schools are not expensive at all, though they are private.

Speaker 1:

Let me ask you a question. Parents out there who do not have the means to attend a private school, don't have the opportunity for a charter school, don't have the opportunity for homeschooling. There is so much information now on websites about what is a classical education. If you're autodidactic, you actually can glean a lot from the computers. I happen to believe that the best teacher is not a computer, it's another human being. Human beings teach human beings. That's just the way it goes. Human beings teach human beings. That's just the way it goes. And education is slow. It's not whiz bang, it's not. I wouldn't even say it's fun, it's hard work. It's work that you have to work through things, you have to struggle with things that you have to master and those a lot of time, a lot of time. That is not entertaining. So I'm kind of got away from my original question. But the question is is what? What are the prospects for parents out there that are seeking better education for their children?

Speaker 2:

schools. There actually is a crisis in finding teachers to teach these classes. There's a shortage of public school teachers out there, especially in the more science-oriented fields, and a lot of instruction is being turned over to screens. You put all the kids in front of a screen and have them do the programs. So it's not so much person-to-person instruction and what you're going to find is more and more, especially if we see costs go down. You don't have to do health care for a computer.

Speaker 2:

You're going to see more and more screen-based instruction going on in public schools and this will be an incentive for parents to take their kids elsewhere or to homeschool their children if they can manage doing that. And I think you're going to see a division setting in between those kids who've had a real instructor, who've had a good classical training. You're going to see the results showing up at the college level training. You're going to see the results showing up at the college level. They're more prepared, they have better study habits, fewer disciplinary, psychological, academic problems when they do go to college. And in a way we're going to have another division the 10 to 15% who get that different instruction, and then you've got the rest of the kids who are going to college and they're not going to read, they're not going to do homework for two hours a night, as they should.

Speaker 2:

I mean one of the crazy things about the not reading habit even of students at elite schools. The etymology of the word college is to read together. That's what college is we go to read together and here we are now not doing very much reading in higher education. This is a profound sign of dysfunction going on in our country today and I think the demons of Silicon Valley have a lot to answer for. In having put these little devices in 12-year-olds' hands, They've destroyed the intellectual growth, the inquisitiveness, the curiosity of teenagers with these tools that stimulate them, that hyper-stimulate them, that fill their eyes and ears with garbage, with youth culture, with peer pressure all the time. What an awful thing you guys have done, Silicon Valley Titans and, by the way, Michelle, they don't send their own kids.

Speaker 2:

No, I was just thinking that, yeah, they don't they don't let their own kids get on the screens all day, right, right, they know better.

Speaker 1:

I think we'll look back at this period and see so many ills that came of it. I personally have now witnessed kind of a coming around. I'm seeing younger families with younger children who are absolutely not giving their kids the screen time, they're not giving them the phones, they're not. So it's almost like the smoking phenomena. When smoking first came out it was cool for everyone to smoke and then we learned the damage that it did and I kind of wonder if this is the same phenomena that we will look back and think what were we doing giving kids phones? But you know what? Girls transition to new sex because of what they see on. I mean, it's such a multi-layered problem that can be fixed.

Speaker 2:

Michelle, does anybody really believe now that giving a 13-year-old a tool where she can have 150 pictures of herself in her pocket is a good thing? Do you think it's a good thing for 15-year-olds to be able to communicate with one another at two o'clock in the morning for hours on end? This was a good thing to happen. But yeah, you're right. The banning of cell phones in schools is spreading. A few weeks ago of Gen Z, the next generation after the millennials, and do you know that? I believe the majority of them had negative things to say about social media. The younger ones are realizing this is bad for me All the cheerleading that took place in 2010,. Oh, this digital age is fantastic. Oh, these young people. They are the pioneers. They're going to lead America into the 21st century. They're amazingly adept and informed and worldly and knowledgeable. Wrong, all wrong. Well, I guess you know. The best we could say for them is put them in purgatory for 35,000 years and see if they're ready to pay for their crimes.

Speaker 1:

Pay for their crimes. Yeah, mark, it is dark, but I do see glimmers of hope with, like you said, is these classical programs that are coming up. Also, the honors colleges that are coming up in the state school systems, the colleges that you're associated with that are coming up, like Ralston College, the new College of Florida, where you know what you're not letting kids get away with. That are coming up. Like Ralston College, the new College of Florida, where you know what you're not letting kids get away with. That, if they're going to be in a seat, they got to think right and with parents' reluctance now to use the screen time, I do see that it is turning away. It's not going to be an easy turn because, like you said, there are forces in our society that really enjoyed manipulating children at an early age.

Speaker 1:

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but sometimes I am, yeah, and it was easy enough to keep children from being educated, pouring ideas into their brain that would make them more amenable to certain agendas. So I do believe that has happened, that it is happening, but I definitely see that there is a turn away from that on a small scale. That will spread as it does in American society, but as adults, we have to be vigilant. We have to read to children, we have to privilege reading as something that is is expected. As for adults, for maturity, for success, these are slow steps but, like I said, education it's not fast. Good education is slow and developmentally slow right, right, that's right.

Speaker 1:

So I hope there's people like you and people like First Things that are keeping the intellectual level at a high level here in this country, and that is also actually really important because you're fighting back the forces of screen time and news time and media.

Speaker 2:

They have a lot of money.

Speaker 1:

Yes, they do. They have a lot of money and they're interested in keeping their money. We want our money too. That's right, that's exactly. But to be smart consumers and smart consumers not only of products but of news and media, that is, the informed citizen. There's some great books coming out now that where people are saying, whoa, wait a minute. You know Jonathan Turley's, the Indispensable Right about free speech, the I mean, there's too many to name right now, but people they're on this now and understand what is going on. So one of the good things about the media or about screen time is, I think people can't get away with what they used to get away with too.

Speaker 2:

They're on the defensive. They should be on the defensive. The promoters of the tools were giving us a fake and a lot of us were duped by it at the time. But yeah, the evidence is in. It's very clear how damaging these tools are at this point, and that's why a lot of school systems are banning the phones, and these are liberal school systems like Los Angeles and New York City, as well as some more conservative places like the classical schools, which they were banning this from the very start, as they rightly should. More conservative places like the classical schools, which they were banning this from the very start, as they rightly should. But it's not even a political issue anymore.

Speaker 2:

People see the damage at this point, even at the elite schools like Columbia, which was the place closely profiled in that story about kids not reading books in college. It's everywhere, and I think you're right. We will look back on history and see this time as boy oh boy. This never should have happened. I think we're largely there at this point. We should praise the classical programs Recognizing this from the very beginning. Let's have every classical school kid memorize and recite the Sermon on the Mount. How's that?

Speaker 1:

That would be a great start. Yeah, that would probably change our society, to tell you the truth, right? So, yeah, that is a good start, my goodness. Well, mark, it has been a real pleasure speaking with you and I have followed your work for years. I encourage people to go to First Things to read your very erudite articles, articles that challenge, articles that are actually very relevant in society, in Christianity, in Catholicism today, and I really congratulate you on your work.

Speaker 2:

Thank you. Thank you for what you're doing, Michelle.

Speaker 1:

You've been listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and you can find out more about me and my podcast at bookcluescom or xmichellemacaloon1, cluescom or X Michelle McAloon one truth social. Michelle McAloon one or on Facebook. Thank you for listening and if you liked it, please like and subscribe, and I wish you a very pleasant day. Thank you.