Ignorance in the Information Age

Posted on April 10, 2008
Filed Under Education |

It is very unfortunate but in the Information Age the vast majority of American youth are as ignorant as they can possibly be. More interested in what celebrities do than what is really going on in the World. Ted Gup of the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote an interesting article based on his experiences interacting with young people in his class. Their ignorance (a products of the educational system and mass media) becomes apparent to him every year when he administers an easy test on national and world affairs.

Nearly half of a recent class could not name a single country that bordered Israel. In an introductory journalism class, 11 of 18 students could not name what country Kabul was in, although we have been at war there for half a decade. Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries— China, Cuba, India, and Japan— not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses— half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn’t pretty.

That’s just sad. It takes just a few keystrokes to find information on the Internet and yet students don’t seem to bother. And when they do bother to look things up, it usually involves reading about celebrities and sports stars and whatever trouble they get in their miserable little lives. Needless to say, the students are not the ones to blame entirely. The mass media specifically promotes these stories in order to keep people in the dark. Keep them distracted from the real issues in life. Keep them buying whatever overpriced crap they are selling.

I don’t know what is worst. The fact that young people are like this today or that we allowed it to get this bad?

Read more: So Much for the Information Age :Today’s college students have tuned out the world, and it’s partly our fault

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