In this 20-part series, I explore the root causes and effects of academic disengagement in K-12 learners and explore the factors driving American society ever closer to being a nation that lacks intellectualism, or the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
The 20th century saw the rise of a new sort of anti-intellectualism in America, one stemming from a nationalist perspective. The idea that love of country trumped all other ideas and ideals was popularized during both World Wars, and exacerbated by the Communist paranoia and McCarthyism in the decades that followed. Speaking out against war or showing sympathy with other countries at odds with the U.S. was frowned upon, and sometimes outright condemned. Questioning the reasoning of war as a concept was seen as direct disloyalty to the country.
Even today movies that showcase nationalist perspectives, like 1995’s classic Braveheart, remain popular with Americans, despite the fact that nationalism was not actually a European philosophy until the 18th century. It is more likely that 13th-century William Wallace performed his feats of bravery (much exaggerated in the Hollywood version) out of loyalty to his individual tribe rather than a grandiose faithfulness to Scotland. Still, the American tendency to cover all sins with flag-waving patriotism found its roots in the 20th century and still exists today.
Love, Loyalty and Loss of Debate
That school of nationalist thought which was widely accepted following the two world wars came into question as anti-war protests grew in strength during the Vietnam War. The anti-war demonstrations that surrounded the Vietnam War were met with counter-attacks by pseudo-intellectuals like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Though he attempted to explain the rationale behind the alarming number of U.S. casualties in intellectual terms, the American public saw through his attempt at dumbing down the realities of the war. For demonstrators who spoke out against the Vietnam War, fighting was a poor substitute for the harder work of actually seeking out true change.
Many of the soldiers in Vietnam were the sons of World War I and World War II veterans who were witnessing the cyclical nature of wars that seemingly had no end. As the soldiers from the 1940s and 1950s aged, it is reasonable to assume that at least some of them experienced a feeling of helplessness, believing their sacrifices really had not made enough of an impact, since their own children were back fighting the same battles under a new banner. Even today, as struggles in the Middle East stretch across two decades, Americans have become desensitized to what the ongoing loss of life means in a world that seems unable ever to be truly at peace.
This nationalist challenge to intellectualism, like the fundamentalist challenge discussed earlier, is based on an orthodoxy which forbids questioning and reasoned disagreement. While it is less pronounced than in previous generations, it still exists and integrates itself in our schools.
But are we building a spirit of national camaraderie at the expense of intellectualist thought?
If you have children, you are likely to worry about their safety – you show them safe places in your neighborhood and you teach them to watch out for lurking dangers.
But you may not be aware of some online dangers to which they are exposed through their schools.
There is a good chance that people and organizations you don’t know are collecting information about them while they are doing their schoolwork. And they may be using this information for purposes that you know nothing about.
In the U.S. and around the world, millions of digital data points are collected daily from children by private companies that provide educational technologies to teachers and schools. Once data are collected, there is little in law or policy that prevents companies from using the information for almost any purpose they wish.
Our research explores how corporate entities use their involvement with schools to gather and use data about students. We find that often these companies use the data they collect to market products, such as junk food, to children.
For example, “Adaptive learning” technologies record students’ keystrokes, answers and response times. On-line surveys collect information about students’ personalities. Communication software stores the communications between students, parents and teachers; and presentation software stores students’ work and their communications about it.
In addition, teachers and schools may direct children to work on branded apps or websites that may collect, or allow third parties to collect, IP addresses and other information from students. This could include the ads children click on, what they download, what games they play, and so on.
How student data are used
When “screen time” is required for school, parents cannot limit or control it. Companies use this time to find out more about children’s preferences, so they they can target children with advertising and other content with a personalized appeal.
Children might see ads while they are working in educational apps. In other cases, data might be collected while students complete their assignments. Information might also be stored and used to better target them later.
For instance, a website might allow a third party to collect information, including the type of browser used, the time and date, and the subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over by a child. The third party could then use that information to target the child with advertisements later.
We have found that companies use the data to serve ads (for food, clothing, games, etc.) to the children via their computers. This repeated, personalized advertising is designed specifically to manipulate children to want and buy more things.
Indeed, over time this kind of advertising can threaten children’s physical and psychological well-being.
Consequences of targeted advertising
Food is the most heavily advertised class of products to children. The heavy digital promotion of “junk” food is associated with negative health outcomes such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes.
Additionally, advertising, regardless of the particular product it may sell, also “sells” to children the idea that products can make them happy.
Research shows that children who buy into this materialist worldview are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression and other psychological distress.
Teenagers who adopt this worldview are more likely to smoke, drink and skip school. One set of studies showed that advertising makes children feel far from their ideals for themselves in terms of how good a life they lead and what their bodies look like.
Additionally, nearly 300 software companies signed a self-regulatory Student Privacy Pledge to safeguard student privacy regarding the collection, maintenance and use of student personal information.
First of all, most laws, including the Student Privacy Pledge, focus on Personally Identifiable Information (PII). PII includes information that can be used to determine a person’s identity, such as that person’s name, social security number or biometric information.
Companies can address privacy concerns by making digital data anonymous (i.e., not including PII in the data that are collected, stored or shared). However, data can easily be “de-anonymized.” And, children don’t need to be identified with PII in order for their online behavior to be tracked.
Second, bills designed to protect student privacy sometimes expressly preserve the ability of an operator to use student information for adaptive or personalized learning purposes. In order to personalize the assignments that a program gives a student, it must by necessity track that student’s behavior.
This weakens the privacy protections the bills otherwise offer. Although it protects companies that collect data for adaptive learning purposes only, it also provides a loophole that enables data collection.
While education technologies show promise in some areas, they also hold the potential to harm students profoundly if they are not properly understood, thoughtfully managed and carefully controlled.
Parents, teachers and administrators, who serve as the closest protectors of children’s privacy at their schools, and legislators responsible for enacting relevant policy, need to recognize the threats of such data tracking.
The first step toward protecting children is to know that that such targeted marketing is going on while children do their schoolwork. And that it is powerful.
In this 20-part series, I explore the root causes and effects of academic disengagement in K-12 learners and explore the factors driving American society ever closer to being a nation that lacks intellectualism, or the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
It is easy to blame the rise of anti-intellectualism on the vagaries of the digital age, but in fact anti-intellectualism has been present in America from the beginning of our national history, and its roots lie in other civilizations.
The Roman Republic had anti-intellectual overtones, particularly when it came to assimilation of new cultures. Roman culture was seen as providing a model of the “right” way to live, speak and practice religion. Questioning, dissent and rational analysis were no more welcome in ancient Rome than in certain radical groups of contemporary Americans. Deportation of “dangerous” free-thinking groups was a common practice in Rome. The Roman fear of letting in outsiders, thus exposing Roman-born citizens to the danger of becoming the minority, is reminiscent of some American sentiments regarding immigration reform today. As the Romans learned, and as Americans have discovered, fear-driven resistance to outside change cannot keep change from happening sooner or later. The idea that control of movement over a particular group can and should be mandated by any government entity is an old one, but alive and well in American culture still.
Fear of outside influences was not the only hallmark of anti-intellectualism in America. As early as colonial times, influential men wrote about the danger of a public educated in progressive thought. The famous Puritan John Cotton spoke out against too much education, saying it made the learned “more fit to act for Satan” and therefore a danger to society.
Another problem for intellectuals in the early days of American colonialism was that they were considered less valuable than those with practical skills like farming, construction or other hands-on tasks. Lofty thoughts without clear application to the practical side of life were seen as irrelevant to the physical tasks of building a new nation. Furthermore, most of the people who arrived in early America were not part of the so-called intellectual group of Europeans. They were working folks who had reason to flee their home countries in pursuit of freedom from persecution. They possessed a type of intellectual thought that cannot be taught, but lacked the education which might have enabled them to relate those thoughts to other revolutionary and intellectual ideas in history.
Jeffersonian Contradictions
Thomas Jefferson has long been described in history books as an intellectual who was partially responsible for founding America on concepts of equality. Contemporary history, however, paints a different picture of Jefferson as a man who owned slaves and fathered illegitimate children through abuse of his master status. Jefferson didn’t actually believe in equality for all; he actually believed in limited equality as long as it benefitted his own gains. Jefferson used his education and position in society to justify his own misdeeds when it came to slavery and general treatment of people in lower classes.
While his writings contribute greatly to the causes of reason and equality, his life seems to have offered some justification for the anti-intellectual tendencies of many of his contemporary compatriots.
In this 20-part series, I explore the root causes and effects of academic disengagement in K-12 learners and explore the factors driving American society ever closer to being a nation that lacks intellectualism, or the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
Americans pride themselves on their high ideals. On national holidays Americans delight in quoting phrases like “all men are created equal” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The ideologies of freedom of religion, democratic government, and socio-economic mobility are ingrained in American children beginning in pre-K educational settings. While these ideologies are admired from a distance, real progress in reaching these goals is undercut by a growing national trend: anti-intellectualism.
The Why of Academic Disengagement
College students today are more academically disengaged than ever before, and this is a direct result of their K-12 classroom experiences. A UCLA survey found that college freshmen in 1997 had spent less time than any previous freshman class on homework and extracurricular activities when they were in high school. K-12 students are shaped by a media-frenzied society which promotes instant gratification and by an educational system that tries simultaneously to compete with attention-grabbing media and to keep all students on the same plane by watering lessons down. The outcome is a growing group of students who know much less than their ancestors did, and who care very little for educational pursuits that do not immediately affect their day-to-day lifestyles.
Academic disengagement does not discriminate. In his book Beyond the Classroom, researcher Laurence Steinberg finds that economic status, race and ethnicity do not have a much of an impact on K-12 student engagement. Steinberg concludes that anti-intellectualism and the accompanying disinterest in educational pursuits is a nationwide epidemic and that the number of students who simply do not care about what is being taught has never been higher. This is what might be expected from students who approach educational pursuits with a feeling of entitlement based on years of low expectations in education settings. When students encounter a teacher who demands more than some of their previous instructors they become resentful and feel they should not be asked to do so much. A course with difficult requirements is written off by students as being “unfair.”
A Nation of Slackers?
Though the “slacker” mentality certainly affects students in other countries, American students are the poster children for this syndrome. More American children are attending college than ever before, but these students are less interested in what is being taught than their predecessors were. The push for equality in education, starting with the youngest pre-K students, has devalued educational content. Instead of raising the standards for all children, the US has lowered the educational bar under the guise of giving everyone a fair shot. But in fact equality in educational opportunities and the demands placed on students are not necessarily correlated; difficulty and complexity of education need not suffer in order to promote equal opportunity. Dumbing down American students is not a formula for progress in future generations.
The U.S. has been affected by anti-rationalism and by self-contradiction from its earliest days. The founding fathers wrote movingly about inalienable rights and freedom from persecution, but they avoided outlawing slavery or giving women a share in the governance of the new country when they signed their names to formative documents. The liberties they outlined could be afforded only if they did not stand in the way of personal gain.
This is not to say that the signers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were completely devoid of intellectualism or that they were narrow-minded. They poured over documents like the 13th century Magna Carta and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 Of the Social Contract to seek guidance for setting up a fair government that blended the best of what was already in existence with fresh, all-American ideas.
There was really no way in which the elite group of men entrusted with writing the country’s blueprints could have addressed every political or social issue with surety, but thankfully they knew enough to include reasonable avenues for change in the future. That “open for interpretation” mentality, however, has handicapped intellectual pursuits since the dawning of this great nation.
Roots in Anti-Intellectualism
From America’s earliest days as a nation to the present day a war between intellectualism, defined by the Oxford Dictionary as the “theory that knowledge is wholly or mainly derived from pure reason,” and its enemy anti-intellectualism, often entrenched with deep emotional and spiritual attachments, has raged. Though less vehement during certain periods of time, particularly prosperous ones, the battle for the adaptation of rational thought in American society has always been present.
It would seem, however, that the nation in the first quarter of the 21st century is in a particularly heightened state of polarization in the intellectualism spectrum. Despite attempts to broaden their world view, and expanding ability to communicate beyond the barriers of the past, Americans seem to be trending toward further division when it comes to the controversial issues of the day. Consider creationism versus evolutionary theory – one is based solely on faith and the other on science, yes the latter is still called into question when taught in certain areas of the country.
So how can the pursuit of intellectual knowledge be regained in our K-12 classrooms? Or is it past the point of no return?
