Essay 1:Letter to U.S. Secretary of Education

Essay 1: Thoughts on Civic Literacy

            I wrote this essay as a letter to Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education.  Duncan, appointed by President Barack Obama, heads up the U.S. Department of Education.  The language I used is appropriate for the formality necessary in addressing one of the president’s cabinetry members.  My tone conveys concern for the state of education in this country and I used the articles and studies we’ve read so far to back up my claims.

Secretary Arne Duncan,

            As technology, media, and culture affect large changes in our society, our educational system must adapt and transform along with.  Over the past decades, our society has seen many new developments.  The Internet and the computer were some of the most influential inventions of the 20^th century.  Their creation and expansion up to this point have created millions of jobs, innovative ways of sharing and storing information, and new methods of communication. 

Nicholas Carr writes in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid? about the creation of the printing press, “Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.” (7)  Carr goes on to quote that these concerns were mostly correct but the ‘doomsayers’ were unable to predict the vast benefits of the press.  Without reservation, I’d argue that computer technology has brought us to a further civilized state and its benefits are infinite.  At the same time, however, it is changing how we access and receive information.  Many printed newspapers have gone out of business; others have had to change their business strategy to stay afloat.  One of the largest bookstore chains, Borders, filed for bankruptcy and liquidated its assets.  It was unable to keep up with online book sales and e-books.  These occurrences reflect large changes in our society. 

We’ve become a culture obsessed with TV and computer screens.  Recent generations figure out how to play a game on an iPhone years before they are able to read.  Older generations are changing the way they intake information.  While the past required that lengthy research be completed, the present provides information with the click of a mouse button.  The ability we have to access so much information with ease is making us lazy.  Carr quotes Bruce Friedman, ““I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” (2)  But what do these changes mean for the education of our youth?  With the creation of the printing press, more people had access to books and the literacy of the world grew exponentially.  With the creation of the Internet and more access to articles, statistics, facts and information, literacy should have again gone up.  This isn’t the case for our society and many around the world.  The Internet isn’t the problem but how we use it is.  Chris Hedges writes in his article America the Illiterate, “There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year.” (1)  The Internet is having a profound effect on the literacy of this country in particular.  We cannot go back and eliminate the web, nor would we want to.  It has had uncountable benefits for our society.

Our educational systems have to adapt to confront the problems that the Internet has created in our society.  As the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, I have no doubt that you are confronted with problems in our public educational system every day.  As congress allocates trillions of tax dollars to the military and other sectors of government, education is often given the leftovers.  As the U.S. loses many of its manufacturing jobs to China and other countries, we must focus on creating smart individuals.  Without doing this, the U.S. will continue to lessen its importance in the world.  Our public education system must begin to create a larger number of engaged and inspired students.  The problem currently is that the way high school teachers are teaching subjects doesn’t line up with way students are learning information elsewhere.  The way that classes are taught has changed very little over the past century.  Teachers must forget the traditional methods of teaching and create new methods to engage with their students.

High school students are no lazier today than those of the past.  It can be argued that they have more distractions but mostly they are used to accessing information fast and moving through it as quick as their Internet connection.  Its impossible to expect that a brain trained to intake information in that way will do well reading a 20 page long article.  Information on the Internet is summarized down to what is useful.  For most of us, minus the journalism majors and law students, that’s completely acceptable. 

If teachers want to inspire their students, they must stop teaching them the way that they were taught.  Clive Thompson writes in his article Clive Thompson on the New Literacy about Andrea Lunsford’s study of Stanford Students, “The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them.” (1)  Most of the writing students do today is over texts, facebook messages and writing online.  This writing is different from the writing in a formal research paper but it is not less important.  Lunsford explained in her study, “The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.” (1)  If teachers gave their students a sense of purpose in their writing, they would find their students engaging and learning more.  I don’t mean to say that teachers are the problem.  Rather the system is currently the problem and the teachers can be the solution.  As human beings, we must feel as though we have a strong purpose.  Even in the small example of writing an essay, if the purpose is something more than getting a good grade, students will put more effort into their work.

With the creation of blogging, online forums and chat rooms, the spread of information has become more of a conversation.  While people used to read the same newspaper or watch the nightly news everyday for their information, people today can access information wherever links take them.  People are faced with more perspectives and faster updates on news stories.  What information they are given is not always true but many don’t take the time to verify it.  Most Internet users don’t read past the headlines if they even get to a news related site.  Other information is passed through their friends and acquaintances on sites like Facebook.  Chris Hedges writes in his article America the Illiterate, “In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek or want honesty. We ask to be indulged and entertained.” (2)  Much of the U.S. population isn’t prepared to sift through articles and read for hours, making their own opinions.  Most of them get their opinions from the images and propaganda that they are faced with.  Education today must face these issues if it wants to create engaged citizens.  There are ways for teachers to show their students how to involve themselves in the online conversations and I imagine those students will learn more from doing that than they would in skimming a long article.  Blogs and forums can be great sources of information for students.  They are able to see all perspectives and can find links to websites that back up the information they are presented with.  It won’t all be true, but if taught correctly, students will figure out how to learn on their own.

Teachers right now are given all the responsibility for what students must learn.  They are required to assign articles, textbook excerpts, and give out tests.  All of which perpetuates the idea that all students need to learn is what their teachers tell them to.  In an era of technology with so much information immediately accessible, teachers must stop telling students what to learn and instead teach them how.  To create engaged citizens and smart individuals in this country, teachers must focus and teaching younger generations how to use the Internet effectively.  A lot of teenager’s lives currently revolve around technology but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.  In altering the system, we can morph using the Internet into a productive, learning activity.