Doomed: What the Buzzed Generation is Missing

by Caroline Sutton

Just as Americans pour another glass of pinot noir and assure themselves they'll live longer, so they welcomed Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You and plopped down with an easy conscience to watch another episode of CSI: Miami . Although Johnson concedes that books have their own time, place and value, he argues that pop culture—playing video games, watching TV, and cruising the web—makes us smarter. It would be nice to think so since we're swaddling our children in media from day one: according to a 2005 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a third of all kids younger than 7 have TVs in their bedrooms. That figure doubles for kids 8-18, and nearly half of this group have video game players at their bedside as well. On average they spend nearly 7 hours a day using media that has no relation to school, and multi-tasking is on the rise, with teenagers downloading music while watching TV, for example, or tackling a physics problem while IMing at a furious pace.

Reading, on the other hand, occupies a meager 43 minutes a day, and as a recent New York Times article pointed out, the anomalous surge in reading among middle schoolers is likely to peter out with the last of the Harry Potter series. The Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine reported in July that teens who play video games spend 30% less time reading and 40% less time doing homework than do their peers who don't play the games.

I teach high school English at a private school in Westchester , New York , and frequently hear my colleagues bemoaning the decline in reading ability that they witness first hand. Should they even attempt Jane Eyre, they wonder, a text my mother, born in 1918, read at age ten. National test scores corroborate what we see every day. In 2006 average SAT verbal scores dropped five points from the previous year to 503; according to the College Board, a critical reading section that replaced analogies accounted for most of the decline. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reported in 1999: “The ability to read and understand complicated information is important to success in college and, increasingly in the workplace. An analysis of the NAEP long-term reading assessments reveals that only half of all white 17 year olds, less than one-quarter of Latino 17 year olds, and less than one-fifth of African American 17 year olds can read at this level.” The results of a test assessing the ability to gain information from a specialized text, like the science section in a newspaper, were even more dismal: among 17 year olds, only1 in 12 Whites, 1 in 50 Latinos, and 1 in 100 African Americans could accomplish this task. According to NAEP, between 1992 and 2005 the percentage of 12th graders reading at a “proficient” level slipped from 40% to 35%, with proficient (the middle of three evaluative levels) defined as “demonstrating competency over challenging subject matter.” The class of kids equipped with the skills to tackle Jane Eyre is becoming increasingly rare.

Can we be reading less and still getting smarter? IQ test scores over the past century have risen about 3 points every ten years. Experts concede that the test does not measure “innate intelligence” alone, as it was originally intended to do, that in fact environmental conditions play a role in one's performance. Since media and pop culture saturate our environment, one could argue that they play a role in this seeming rise in intelligence. And what the IQ test evaluates quite efficiently is problem-solving skills, not unlike those needed to operate and enjoy the technology endemic to our lives. Yes, a kid today can pick up an I-phone and intuitively go on Facebook, take a picture, check e-mail, and call a friend while the quizzical parent presses the power button and looks terrified. (The fact that the I-pod came without any instructions is somewhat revealing about intended audience and expectations of technological proficiency.) Certainly there is value in problem solving, as well as the spatial logic and split-second decision-making required of the ace video game player, but when immersion in this sort of brain activity leaves no time for analysis of ideas or consideration of human relations and morality, a critical balance is lost, the seesaw doesn't move, and one side is left powerless in the air, legs flailing.

Video games are time consuming, even psychologically addictive, largely because they're based on a reward system. Within a simulated environment players face challenges, work to solve puzzles, and get rewarded for doing so. It's easy to see why players, including kids with short attention spans, stay hooked: if the search for rewards is external, the activity is basically escapist, and we know teenagers are into that. Teens who see video games, even subconsciously, as a paradigm for life are misled on two counts: they believe an answer exists and that it lies outside of themselves. The fact that Sony, producer of the PlayStation game console, advises kids to “Live in Your World. Play In Ours,” suggests their awareness of kids' tendency to blur the line between the two.

Granted, we immerse teenagers in a similar system of reward and punishment to get into college. Parents and college counselors advise them to take the most challenging courses possible, study the violin, get SAT tutoring, play three varsity sports, tutor kids in Bolivia , and write a novel, and they'll probably get in. My daughter's college advisor told her she had to take AP English and she had to eliminate all forms of fun for the fall of her senior year. Often such steps pay off; students are banking on that, and parents are likely to ground the kid who falls short or refuses to play the game.

But my students, through literature, have come to see that life problems are often far more complex than those in the video game world, that objectives can be murky and solutions not easy to define, much less find. When ninth graders read The Catcher in the Rye , I give them a map of New York City and ask them to chart where the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, goes after he flunks out of his prep school and, on impulse, leaves a few days before winter break. I want them to see just how much he wanders. These maps wind up looking like a head of hair first thing in the morning, and students start drawing in different colored ink in an attempt to make some sense of it. In the end I ask them, “What is Holden looking for?” Often there's a silence, a few looks of sudden bewilderment on the faces of those who thought they had Holden pegged.

“Money?”

“No,” some retort, “he gives away his money to the nuns.”

“ Yeah, but he asks his sister for some.”

“And feels terrible about it.”

There's a pause in our discussions, my role being facilitator here, not provider of answers. Other suggestions arise: security, love, innocence.

“Yes that's what he wants,” some echo. “That's why he likes children.”

“And does he find these things?” I ask.

Holden has some stunted conversations with cabbies, a confounding experience with a teacher whose sexual intentions remain ambiguous, a relatively benign confrontation with a pimp, and a humiliating experience with a prostitute. His brother is dead, his parents aloof, his teachers for the most part oblivious to his state of mind; before him stretches a life of opportunism and inauthenticity. No, the students sigh, I guess not. Holden's environment (unlike those in the world of video games) can't supply him with what he's looking for, and it's not going to change. Some student will inevitably back this up by saying, “Yeah, he can't ever erase all the "fuck you's" on all the walls in New York City .” Holden needs to get his act together, they decide. How? The climax of the novel, Holden's revelation as he watches his sister ride the carrousel in the rain, is obviously not the carrousel itself but the understanding it triggers in him. Had he seen it three days earlier, it might well have sparked nothing. What Holden arrives at is greater understanding of himself and the world, but no easy tricks about how to survive in it. Students typically feel frustrated by the end of the novel because of its ambiguity. Many want Holden to do well in school and become a lawyer like his father and live happily ever after, with all his rewards. But others realize he needs to question what he's pursuing and why —as do they. To do this they need to know themselves, and they of all members of our society, witness daily just how slippery identity can be.

As characters, the figures in video games are immaterial and often absurd. Consider, Guntilda Winkybunion, the stereotypical witch from Banjo-Kazooie, or the kick-ass space marine in Doom who can don a “berserk pack,” go into “berserk mode,” and splatter creatures with his fists at rocket launcher levels. Those in literature, or the best literature, nearly convince us that they breathe, love, suffer, think, and dream. (Faulkner noted that while he was writing a novel his characters would come to his bedside at night and talk to him.) Mimesis, according to Aristotle, is at the heart of literature. It is also a cornerstone of learning -- consider our delight when a baby first returns our smile. Students can find meaning in a novel because it reflects their own emotional and psychological conflicts, or introduces a plausible view of the world they had not considered. This, I think, will make them “smarter,” more sensitive and perceptive human beings than can the two-dimensional, fantastical world of Banjo-Kazooie.

F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” By analogy, one of the most crucial goals in the classroom is teaching kids to explore and to weigh different perspectives. When their minds percolate and the discussion soars, they're usually uncovering different angles to an issue or problem, a process antithetical to the video game player who is only in search of the right answer.

A few years ago my small town on the Hudson River was sizzling with a local scandal, and my students were perplexed. The minister in a local Presbyterian church, himself married, had an affair with a woman who was, the community thought, happily married. She was the mother of two teenage boys who attended the public school. Being broad minded, engaging, and concerned with social causes, the minister had enormous charisma in our liberal community. How could he also be a family breaker, we wondered. The congregation was divided on whether or not he should retain his position, and the arguments were vehement on both sides, both believing in their own moral rectitude. Coincidentally, my class was reading Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter at the time, a tale of adultery in which the Reverend Dimmesdale, loved and revered by his puritan congregation, has an affair with a young married woman, Hester Prynne, but refuses to reveal his identity and assume his role as father of their illegitimate child. Should he let down his community by admitting the disgrace?

“No,” said some of my students. “ He's putting his town and religion first and that's a noble thing to do.”

“He's a Christ figure,” others asserted. “He could have all that love and sex and comfort, but he's doing his job.”

Others violently disagreed. “Are you kidding? He's totally selfish. He just wants power.”

“What a coward.”

“Think about Hester. How would you feel? She's a single parent.”

“And her kid has no idea who her father is. That's why she's so nuts.”

While the novel was not exactly analogous to the current scene in the town, it brought home to the class just how difficult it can be to determine right and wrong, categorically. The students were forced to consider multiple factors, including time, place, value systems, religious dogma, and gender roles, as well as attempt to empathize with very different characters; the last, I think, is key not only to reading fiction but also to maintaining balanced relationships in life. I then asked the class, “Who is the greatest sinner in the novel?” After a few gave their own opinions, according to their own moral schema, others piped up, “But who would the puritans think is the greatest sinner?” And from there we tried to figure out Hawthorne 's perspective too (deliberately ambiguous as he is), and the likely response of his 19th century audience. From the concrete situation, the students were realizing the relativity of moral codes and, I hoped, would go on to question how they made choices in their own lives and who determined their value systems, be it themselves, their parents, their god, whoever. These kids were thinking, and this thinking was not limited to or defined by the ability to make the “right” decisions.

If video games themselves promote a fairly narrow range of cognition, the many guides kids can read to help them navigate the games are even narrower. They provide a kind of hand holding that is comforting, but reductive. Johnson says “the closest cultural form to the game guide is the august tradition of CliffsNotes marketed as readers' supplements to the Great Books." I suspect he's being sardonic in his use of “august,” but he never explains. In my school, kids risk suspension for using Spark Notes, CliffsNotes and the assorted study guides now readily available on line, but we didn't arrive at this policy easily. We argued the topic at our department meetings for several years. What if the student is having so much trouble with Shakespearean language, for instance, that he really can't get a foothold without some scaffolding, some understanding of the basic plot and identification of characters? The responses varied. Some argued that if the student had access to the guides, he'd never read the real thing, which is most likely true; others said relying on the guides would not let the student develop the reading skills to tackle the next Shakespeare play, and still others felt that if the student couldn't read the texts in our curriculum, maybe he shouldn't be in the school. What do I tell the kids? I might spend half a class period explaining why they're cheating themselves when they turn to these guides. “I want you to think for yourselves,” I tell them, “and you're probably smarter than the people who write the guides.” A few look up from doodling in their notebooks—they love this idea.

By the time my students are juniors, I often ask them to come up with their own topic for a paper. At first they're thrilled—hey, free lunch, really, whatever we want? Then they realize the challenge, and some even ask me for a topic, but I just say, “Come see me and we'll brainstorm.” Before writing they have to submit two theses for me to approve, and we talk one-on-one about which will result in the more successful paper. “Don't just regurgitate something we've covered in class,” I tell them. Part of the grade depends on their original thinking; this cognitive skill appears on the assessment chart that we fill out at the end of each semester, clearly indicating the value we place on it. And where would entrepreneurial America be without original thinkers?

Instead of buying guides to video games, some kids rely on “cheat codes” to beat the system. Passed around by word of mouth or on-line, these codes basically alter the rules of the game. In his article, “What Kids Learn That's POSITIVE From Playing Video Games,” Marc Prensky maintains that this is a good life lesson since business books exhort “managers to ‘change the rules of the game.'” The difference between the two scenarios is that the managers make the rules in the first place, students don't.

Video game enthusiasts and experts in the industry also claim that decision-making skills fostered by video games are useful in business. I don't doubt that this is true, especially for future Wall Street stock and bond traders, but rapid-fire decision making (evinced by the frenzy of button pushing) is exactly what I don't want my students to do. As students come barreling in from their previous class, unpack their bags, get out homework, shift their cognitive gears from molecular biology to notions of identity in Invisible Man, my primary task is to slow them down. So I usually start small and specific, which will make the students look at the text rather than whip out an overarching comment about themes (which might have come from CliffsNotes). “What do you think of Ellison's description of the blonde in the Battle Royal?” I might ask. In this scene the narrator, a young African American in the early 20th century South, is sucked into fighting for the entertainment of the powerful whites of the town. Also included in the show is a white stripper, who is described through a range of analogies that include a circus kewpie doll and an abstract mask; her eyes are “the color of a baboon's butt”, and her breasts like the “domes of East Indian temples." The students start looking at the weird imagery and thinking what it might suggest.

“The girl must be really out of reach,” they surmise. “Distant, mystical.”

“”What's with the baboon?”

“Pretty surreal.”

“The narrator is spaced out.”

“And the doll? He's objectifying women, don't you think?”

“Maybe all white women are distant and unreal to him.”

“Why are there so many contradictory images associated with her, something bestial and something heavenly?”

“He says he wants ‘to love her and murder her.'”

They puzzle over the image of the American flag on her belly and begin to wonder if the narrator is trying to suggest something about the country itself. Or is it Ellison who's doing the suggesting? Are he and his readers more aware than his narrator?

By this time a good fifteen or twenty minutes might have passed and they're on the verge of some great insights about the use of metaphor, point of view, the nature of surrealism, and themes of racism and the American Dream. And we've only looked at one passage in the assigned reading of forty pages. Some have been chafing, restless to jump to another page and proffer the insight they had the previous night. Their tendency is to move quickly, like the pace of the media they're so accustomed to; my task is to have them discover for themselves the value of probing a single topic in more depth than they had considered possible or desirable. One of my best teaching moments came when a student suggested that we all meet for a picnic lunch to carry on the discussion because, she said, “We never have enough time.”

As a teacher, I want my students to want to know. This quality is one of the hardest to teach but probably one of the most vital if education is going to continue after a student leaves the school, diploma in hand. A recent trend in TV dramas runs counter to this ethos. Many shows rely on arcane dialogue, or technical shoptalk, to give an illusion of reality. Medical jargon, for instance, makes us believe we're in a hospital listening to real doctors, but we're not even supposed to understand what they're saying. We're supposed to be content to let it fly right past us, the idea being don't worry, you won't get this, but it's OK, this is how it is. Can this intended response promote anything except apathy? What is the advantage of brushing off a good part of the show as stuff you can't possibly understand and don't need or want to? And would that process make us smarter? If we adapted this viewing approach to reading, we'd probably skip the descriptions of ships in Moby Dick . Well, that's understandable, but here's a better example: one ADD student asked what Fitzgerald meant by describing Gatsby's lawn as “jumping over sundials,” then quickly withdrew, muttering, “Oh, it's probably not important,” to which another student said, “Everything's important. You know how many times Fitzgerald revised that book? Everything is there for a reason.” That student wasn't going to come to class and say, “Yeah I skimmed it. I got the gist.” And she'd know there was value in rereading the book (even though she knew how it turned out) a year or ten years later when she would undoubtedly find things she'd missed. My son's English teacher told the class he would stop teaching a novel once he no longer found something new in it; he'd been teaching Invisible Man for eleven years.

We may be inspired to re-read because of an author's use of ambiguity. Does James Gatsby, for instance, the quintessential dreamer, lose his dream at the end of the novel, or does Nick Carraway simply suspect that he does? My students have fervid debates about this, leading to scrutiny of Nick's rhetoric and Gatsby's actions, and varying conclusions about what either answer says about both characters. In his discussion of the background banter on TV, Johnson notes the audience of ER 's “tolerance for planned ambiguity,” but he is commenting on their willingness to remain in the dark. The power of ambiguity lies in the deliberate suggestion of multiple meanings-- not no meaning. We need to teach kids not a particular meaning, but the value of seeking meaning and avenues for doing so. Given the cynicism of students about political corruption, terrorism, and war, the need is more critical than ever.

The reasons that media occupies so much of our time are, of course, multitudinous and complex. For one, we're used to it. More than half of 4-6 year olds say they'd rather watch TV than spend time with their fathers, and chances are, more of them do spend more time in front of the tube than tossing a baseball with Dad. Perhaps another reason is that, like cigarettes, many TV shows are designed to keep us coming back for more, in fact, we won't understand what's going on if we don't. A dizzying array of characters and quickly shifting scenes lend an illusion of complexity, but the idea that this makes the show intelligent, or that you need real intelligence to follow it, is a fallacy. Keeping up with the characters isn't so much a matter of intelligence as of loyalty to the show, a commercial ploy to make sure you're hooked.

Although The Sopranos is a glaring exception, many shows on TV sacrifice depth for breadth. Large social networks with ever changing relationships can reduce people to a name, a position on the game board, and reflect, I think, the nature of the relationships fostered by MySpace and Facebook. Through these networks, teenagers know about hordes of other teenagers--what they like, where they are, what they did over the weekend, and whom they did it with—random information that gives a certain illusion of knowing the person, or at least all you want to know.

Admittedly, I don't tackle War and Peace with my classes, a novel with enough characters to fill a dozen TV dramas, but my ninth graders read The Odyssey. Not only do they keep running lists of all the characters but, more important, they try to figure out the connections between characters, the reason for seemingly disparate stories, and personality traits of the main players.

“Why,” I ask, “do we keep reading about Agamemnon and what happened to him when he got home from war? Isn't the story about Odysseus trying to get home?”

A long silence usually follows. Students look around at one another, getting edgy, wanting someone to have an answer, the answer.

“What kind of woman is Clytemnestra?” I ask.

“Powerful,” a girl remarks while twirling the ends of her hair.

“Well, she's having an affair,” a short girl wearing a sweatshirt out of dress code comments. “She's pretty liberated or maybe immoral, I'm not sure.”

“Wouldn't you?” a lanky boy quips, relieved to be able to relate. “I mean, have an affair, if your husband were gone for ten years.”

“She's still married. And she let someone take her husband's throne.”

“Maybe she couldn't handle it all by herself.”

“Penelope does.”

“No, the palace is a wreck. Look at all those suitors gorging themselves and sleeping with the maids.”

“But she's not doing that.”

“Oh.”

The students look at one another around our seminar table.

“Maybe Clytemnestra is in there to make Penelope look better.”

“And Penelope's been waiting twenty years.”

“So what can we deduce about her?” I ask.

After we come to some conclusions about her will power and fidelity, her loneliness and endurance, someone in the class inevitably pipes up, “Yeah, she's better than Odysseus too. He's running around sleeping with nymphs and hanging out on remote islands.”

“Greek men were allowed to do that.”

“What a double standard.”

“Well, he's trying to get home. He's stuck on that island. See Homer says he's crying all the time and looking out to sea.”

“What a wimp.”

“Not exactly. Do you think Calypso can force him to have sex?”

They glance at each other, smirk, imagine.

The students have lighted unwittingly on a writer's use of a foil. They've also begun some character analysis with attention to cultural context, gender roles, and social class. I'm always interested to see that, as casual as they might be about their own sex lives, they get pretty heated about Odysseus's infidelity. But as they realize the complexity of his situation, they often pause, reconsider, shift their perspective, and struggle to create an effective argument, all of which, I think, makes them smarter.

There are different kinds of intelligence, of course, and different ways to measure it—IQ, EQ, AQ (autism quotient), SATs, ACTs, to name a few. It seems reasonable to assume there are also numerous ways to sharpen that intelligence. I don't doubt that rescuing your sister in the Zelda game The Wind Waker requires memory, reason, and the ability to make decisions. But when that's just about all you do—as statistics on kids' use of media reveals—other avenues are lost and, in turn, other human faculties. Who, after all, is monitoring those TVs and game players conveniently stashed in kids' rooms? And who is ensuring that reading doesn't fall off a kid's radar screen, which seems to be the case when he or she reaches high school? Not only do parents need to set limits; now, more than ever, teachers need to consider how to nurture this increasingly endangered activity.

I'll still sip my pinot noir, well aware I'm killing some brain cells and adding some calories, but if I'm not too groggy tomorrow, I'll read a good book.

Caroline Sutton has been teaching English at The Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York, for the past twelve years. Before that she was an editor at Charles Scribner's Sons and at Hilltown Press. She is the author of three popular reference books published by William Morrow, and her poetry and personal essays have appeared in several literary magazines, including Iconoclast, The Rambler, and The Literary Review. Her e-mail address is cdumaine@themastersschool.com.