09 March 2010

41. Othering Students [the "digital native" conspiracy]

a "chapter" from a bizarre, long paper I wrote titled "Literacy (as) Tyranny," perhaps best described by one reviewer as a "precious polemic." (There are thirteen chapters, but these are given random prime numbers for reasons I will not detail here.) re: This NYT Idea of the Day


“As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.” – Motoko Rich in The New York Times, 27 June 2008.[1]

Standardized. Enemy. Precious. Common culture. Only.

While oral culture has a rich immediacy that is not to be dismissed, and electronic media offer the considerable advantages of diversity and access, print culture affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible. To lose such intellectual capability – and the many sorts of human continuity it allows – would constitute a vast cultural impoverishment.” – Dana Gioia, Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts in the preface to Reading at Risk, 2008.[2]

Irreplaceable. Focused. Contemplation. Complex communications and insights. Intellectual capability. Human continuity. Impoverishment.

"I cannot live without books," Thomas Jefferson wrote to Adams late in life, knowing Adams would understand perfectly. Adams read everything --Shakespeare and the Bible over and over, and the Psalms especially. He read poetry, fiction, history. Always carry a book with you on your travels he advised his son, John Quincy. "You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. In a single year, according to the U.S. Department of Education, among all Americans with a college education, fully a third read not one novel or short story or poem. Don't be one of those, you of the Class of 2008. Make the love of learning central to your life. What a difference it can mean. If your experience is anything like mine, the books that will mean the most to you, books that will change your life, are still to come. And remember, as someone said, even the oldest book is brand new for the reader who opens it for the first time. You have had the great privilege of attending one of the finest colleges in the nation, where dedication to classical learning and to the arts and sciences has long been manifest. If what you have learned here makes you want to learn more, well that's the point. Read. Read, read!” – David McCullough, Address to the Graduates, Commencement Exercises, Boston College, 19 May 2008.[3]

Cannot live without. Always. Central to your life. Read. Read!

We are clearly in grave danger. Let us, for a moment, skip over the fact that neither McCullough nor Gioia, or even The New York Times, can define, or be bothered to attempt to define, “reading.” Let us simply focus on the overwrought panic expressed above. This is not just language normally associated with grave security threats, it is the language of crusaders. Failure to stop the drift of our children away from books and toward digital screens is every bit as imperative as victory at the Battle of Tours (or we might say, Battle of Poitiers, or, in Arabic: معركة بلاط الشهداء ‎ (ma‘arakat Balâ ash-Shuhadâ’) the Battle of Court of The Martyrs[4]), the A.D. 732 battle for the soul of Europe.

Standardized. Enemy. Precious. Common culture. Only. Irreplaceable. Focused. Contemplation. Complex communications and insights. Intellectual capability. Human continuity. Impoverishment. Cannot live without. Always. Central to your life. Read. Read!

On the side of the printed and ‘legitimately’ published book – on the side of light – we have standards, culture, commonality. Focus, human continuity, complex communications, and intellectual capability. While in the dark flicker rate of the computer or mobile phone screen we have impoverishment and our mutual destruction.

If this sounds familiar, it is because it is the constant refrain of much of our literary canon. As Joseph Conrad saw the creeping threat of the non-literate natives in The Secret Agent and Heart of Darkness, and the even more powerful threat created when those from our “common culture” become entwined in that darkness,[5] (Young, 1995) so we are now being told that our culture is being threatened by a powerful invader and those traitors who have aligned with them. They will as surely destroy our libraries and the fabric of our lives as the barbarian Norsemen destroyed the abbeys and libraries of ninth century England.

The threat, of course, is from our children, and we can argue (Rich), wail (Gioia), or pray and plead for conversion (McCullough), but the threat is real, the threat is imminent. Our future has become our destruction.

Standing at the gates of our civilization is a horde: Simply take the reverse of Gioia’s words about the literate society he sees as lost – unfocused, uncontemplative, simplistically communicative, with no insight, no intellectual capability, and no interest in human continuity. With this view in mind, we would certainly expect our classroom interactions to be a battle.

And it is a battle with an alien force. ‘“Nobody has taught a single kid to text message,” said Carol Jago of the National Council of Teachers of English and a member of the testing guidelines committee [said in Motoko Rich’s New York Times article]. “Kids are smart. When they want to do something, schools don’t have to get involved.”[6]

“You see them everywhere,” John Palfrey and Urs Gasser write in the excerpt from their book Born Digital that they have chosen to post on their website. “The teenage girl with the iPod, sitting across from you on the subway, frenetically typing messages into her cell phone. The whiz kid summer intern in your office who knows what to do when your e-mail client crashes. The eight-year-old who can beat you at any video game on the market—and types faster than you do, too. Even your niece’s newborn baby in London, whom you’ve never met, but with whom you have bonded nonetheless, owing to the new batch of baby photos that arrive each week. All of them are “Digital Natives.” They were all born after 1980, when social digital technologies, such as Usenet and bulletin board systems, came online. They all have access to networked digital technologies. And they all have the skills to use those technologies. (Except for the baby—but she’ll learn soon enough.)”[7]

Palfrey and Gasser add these sentences: “Maybe you’re even a bit frightened by these Digital Natives.” “There is one thing you know for sure: These kids are different. They study, work, write, and interact with each other in ways that are very different from the ways that you did growing up.” “Digital Natives are tremendously creative.”[8] “Digital Natives perceive information to be malleable; it is something they can control and reshape in new and interesting ways.”[9]


Palfrey and Gasser are not being negative. Their entire book is about promise: “And Digital Natives have every chance of propelling society further forward in myriad ways—if we let them.”[10] And yet they choose to describe “Digital Natives” as unitary, born differently, and completely outside “our” experience. They begin by describing an entire complex generation as outside of society-as-we-know-it. “Native” – as a word - carries significant connotations in American culture and American literature. The Visual Thesaurus[11] links it to words like “aboriginal” and “indigenous.” Wikipedia says, “However, in the context of colonialism - in particular, British colonialism - the term "natives", as applied to the inhabitants of colonies, assumed a disparaging and patronising sense, implying that the people concerned were incapable of taking care of themselves and in need of Europeans to administer their lives; therefore, these people resent the use of the term and consider it insulting, and at present Europeans usually avoid using it.”[12]  It should be fair to assume that two Harvard University law professors[13] did not choose this term out of naiveté. 

These “natives” use odd and simplistic communication structures. They do not speak in grammatically (for English) correct sentences. Rather they “text” and “IM” and “tweet.” They lack sophisticated language and rely instead on ideograms, whether “lmao” or ;-) or even J. They lack the intellectual focus necessary for sustained straight line study. And, they are “born” to all this. In other words, they are exactly like the Native Americans and enslaved Africans white Europeans encountered in eighteenth and nineteenth century North America. Exotic, strange, and while interesting, dangerous. Surely no complex culture could be lying among those painted buffalo blankets or recursive stories told on the plains. Surely, if Africans are to display any possible intellectual heft they must learn to dress and speak like an Englishman.

Let’s go back to Carol Jago of the National Council of Teachers of English. Does she actually believe that, “Nobody has taught a single kid to text message”? Her statement seems to imply that she believes these children are indeed, “born digital,” and that these actions are genetically determined instincts, and not a skill set. This is a surprising view of Darwinist Theory indeed, but perhaps not unexpected in an educational system in which it is often accepted that “success in mathematics depends on some innate ability” (New Jersey Mathematics Coalition 1996)[14] Whether this “genetic origin” notion is used as praise (‘Asian students do so well in math.’) or slur (‘Black students will never go to college.’) the goal is to eliminate performance incentive for the teachers by creating a “nothing I can do” paradigm.

Carol Jago does not want to teach text-messaging, or she is incapable of teaching text-messaging, but her assertion that the teaching of how best to use a communication tool is unnecessary is absurd. We “teach” many things, from how to throw a ball more accurately to how to read specific genres to how to write more clearly. We teach them even if students arrive at school having learned about these things in other contexts.

“Ultimately, like other forms of marketing rhetoric, the discourse of the “digital generation” is precisely an attempt to construct the object of which it purports to speak,” says David Buckingham in a paper written for the Macarthur Foundation. “It represents not a description of what children or young people actually are, but a set of imperatives about what they should be or what they need to become.” [15]

Those who speak of the “digital generation” and of “being born digital” and of “digital natives” are not choosing a unique path. Much literature has been created defining “generation gaps” throughout US history, and the process of “othering” children (Howe and Strauss 1992). Surely the communications battle between the “Missionary” and “Lost” Generations, between those raised with books and newspapers and those raised on film and radio, between the earnest intentions of Upton Sinclair and the creative freedom of Fitzgerald and Dos Passos,[16] parallels the arguments we see today. But the lack of uniqueness can not be equated with a lack of destructiveness.

In an educational system that has consistently struggled with “the other” (Lareau 2000, Tatum 1997, Macleod 1987, 1995), embracing a notion which makes all students “alien” carries with it the likelihood of a complete classroom communications breakdown. And there is no faster way to create that sense of alienation than by othering the language of any group not holding power.


Creative Commons License
Othering Students by Ira David Socol is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

[1] Rich, M. (2008) Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? The New York Times, 27 June 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html
[2] Gioia, D, (2008) Preface to Reading at Risk. National Endowment for the Arts.Washington DC. p. vii
[3] McCullough, D. (2008) Address to the Graduates, Commencement Exercises, Boston College, 19 May 2008. http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/08/McCullough_BCCommencement08.pdf
[5] Young, R. (1995) Colonial Desire. Routledge. London. p. 2
[6] Rich, M. (2008) Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? The New York Times, 27 June 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html
[7] Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2007) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. Basic Books, New York.  http://borndigitalbook.com/excerpt.php
[8] Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2007) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. Basic Books, New York.  http://borndigitalbook.com/excerpt.php
[9] Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2007) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. Basic Books, New York.  http://borndigitalbook.com/excerpt-2.php
[10] Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2007) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. Basic Books, New York.  http://borndigitalbook.com/excerpt-3.php
[14] New Jersey Mathematics Coalition (1996) New Jersey’s Mathematics Standards. http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/nj_math_coalition/framework/standards/std_vision.html
[15] Buckingham, D. (2008) Introducing Identity. In Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. MacArthur Foundation paper. p. 15
[16] Howe, N. and Strauss, W. (1992) The new generation gap. The Atlantic. December 1992. http://www.etext.org/Politics/Progressive.Sociologists/marthas-corner/Generation_Gap--Atlantic.Dec92

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