Via a link to a link to a link (beginning at In the Shadow of Mt Hollywood and contuing via this article in The Atlantic on “The Organization Kid,” I eventually got to this essay from 1991:
The Other Crisis in American Education – 91.11
They were interesting articles, and I was pondering my own educational experiences (which could best be described as “unmotivated boredom”) while reading them. I had been looking for a descriptive term for the kinds of over-scheduled kids that have become legion in middle-class American life; as a childfree adult I had looked on aghast at the ways parents over-orchestrate their kids’ development from the womb on, and “The Organization Kid” seems to be the result of this behavior.
Yeesh, they all sound very nice and bright and motivated, but as a rather dim unmotivated Late Boomer, it all started to sound very “Stepford Prep Elite” to me. The first article left me feeling a little chilled in the thoracic area and a bit worried about what society will be like if run like they live their lives… I fear the trains will run precisely on time and all will be in order, just as they did in other societies that were highly organized and conformist. Very scary, if you ask me.
The second article had a different perspective on education, being from a decade earlier and about a somewhat less motivated cohort of the post-Boom generations, but made interesting reading anyway.
Then I ran across this quote:
Essays in which the writer marshals evidence to support a coherent, logical argument are all too rare. Since that kind of exercise might dampen creativity, it must be minimized. The outcome is utterly predictable. “Analytic writing was difficult for students in all grades,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress noted in summarizing the results of its various writing tests in 1984, while students “had less difficulty with tasks requiring short responses based on personal experience.”
In sum, this is a generation whose members may be better equipped to track the progress of their souls in diaries than any group of Americans since the Puritans.
::double eyebrow Lindy hop::
And here we are, ten years later, all busily writing away. It seems the Internet took a while to catch up with the generational trend.
As a Late Boomer I’ve always felt much closer to the generations after mine than my own, although I have strong emotional ties to the important cultural benchmarks in the Boom psyche. I was a big Roy Roger fan, I remember Mitch Miller, I remember my dad snapping off the TV when the Beatles came on Ed Sullivan the very first time… my husband, only a few years younger, doesn’t have such connections to the past. What’s more, my education (what I can remember of it) was mostly solid, with many of the features called for as solutions in the article (year-long survey courses of American history and literature, geography, and so on). Utah being Utah, educational trends changed much more slowly there, although another area high school experimented with the shorter “module” system of scheduling, with a lot more electives. I believe my own old school finally got around to this system a few years later. I wonder if they’ve seen the same drop in SAT score averages.
I do remember that when I got to the University of Oregon, a school known more for being a sort of northern wildlife refuge of hippie culture and attitudes, my language and composition skills were more than up to the academic rigors of Duck U. I just didn’t want to do any work. 😉
O’course, that’s probably all changed now – probably not so many ur-hippies and proto-hippies and neo-hippies hanging around as there were in the late 70’s… or are there?
Hmm. I’m not even sure what my SAT score was. I know it was high on the verbal side, and low on the math side, because I slept or yakked my way through algebra and geometry, and had to take remedial algebra my freshman year of college. I was lucky enough to have an interesting and enegetic GTF who was stuck teaching that class, and I got through with a solid B grade in the end (although my slackness meant I was forever behind on homework, I always did well on the tests).
I had no problems comprehending the material, it just had to be presented in a way that made sense and was logical — and he was able to do that and make it fun, too.
And speaking of GTFs – at Oregon, they called themselves “Graduate Toilet Flushers” and had to bear the brunt of horrible teaching loads, disinterested faculty advisors, and a paucity of cash. It’s been interesting strolling through the various academic blogs (such as Caveat Lector and Mt Hollywood) lately and seeing how things are in that world. I’m tolerably familiar with it because I suffered with friends who were in the throes of getting their masters’ in German Lit or keeping their visa status up with enough “teaching and working” brownie points. However, I don’t regret not going on to graduate level… I do regret not getting the English degree, but I haven’t really felt the physical or economic lack of it in my life.