The Deception of the Thrush

So, here's a quote from a Time magazine article from a few weeks back, on bad parent-teacher relationships:

A teacher at a Tennessee elementary school slips on her kid gloves each morning as she contends with parents who insist, in writing, that their children are never to be reprimanded or even corrected. When she started teaching 31 years ago, she says, "I could make objective observations about my kids without parents getting offended. But now we handle parents a lot more delicately. We handle children a lot more delicately. They feel good about themselves for no reason. We've given them this cotton-candy sense of self with no basis in reality. We don't emphasize what's best for the greater good of society or even the classroom."

That's a gusty statement, and a strong one. At first it was very satisfying. But then I have to step back: She can't speak for all kids. We don't know how kids are treated in their homes, amongst their peers, in the community...there's lots of stressors out there and people who are perfectly happy to squash your ego. So I think her statement goes a little too far.

But I think kids, and maybe even some no-longer-kids, have plenty of reason to become over-confident with respect to their intellectual development and knowledge base. A recent, widely distributed news story pointed out that college has come to entail little work and easy grades. I know my GPA was well-inflated, though that was in part due to the nature of my home departments (Psychology and Spanish professors just don't have the heart to go below a B, I don't think.)

This phenomenon is not restricted to undergraduate education. I think we're projecting onto the young ones a concern that is equally relevant to our own self-evaluation. Information has just become too accessible and comes in a variety of easy-to-read formats. One can Google "Fast Fourier Transform", skim the resulting finds, and have something of a sense of "Hey, yeah, my buddy Fourier, sure, I know all that." Sure you do. I mean, you can make it work for you at the click of a button on your analysis software. And no one keeps you honest, sees if you really know it or not.

The accessibility of information can make you feel like you know anything better than you do. Sure I know the current Lebanese crisis, I just read an article from one of their English newspapers online. Sure I understand all the metaphors and allusions underlying The Wasteland, I read the hyperlinked-footnote edition.

Gone are the days when you have to learn these things by formal training, or at least by having the motivation to sacrifice a sunny day by sitting in a dusty library corner with a pile of books with disintegrating orange binding. No longer must you type at a typewriter, or perform analyses on turtle-slow mainframes. PDF's download within seconds and complex stats are spat out in an instant. As researchers and scholars in this world, we are faster. But are we better? Or in some counterintuitive way, is this speed hurting us? Are we thinking too fast, and blowing past our errors? Are we building an illusion of accomplishment and discovery that later generations will uncover as a fraud?

So, this rant was equally fast and poorly thought. Feel free to present a different perspective. I'm going to go make some tea.