The 10th anniversary of the Mindset List is a milestone for a famous thought experiment.
| Illustration by Michael Morgenstern |
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It has always worked like this: Suppose we compose a list that reflects the cultural horizons of entering college students. Suppose we imagine, through their eyes, what has always seemed to be true, what they take for granted as having always been. Suppose we take their 18 years of life in order to illustrate how fast things have changed, and how quickly the years have passed for those of us who are older.
Suppose, in other words, that they’ve never dialed a telephone and have no experience of what it meant to do so. Suppose that Paul Newman is just the guy on the salad dressing label, or that with their ever-present earplugs they’ve never had to entertain themselves on cross-country trips by playing “license plate games.” Suppose they met Jack Nicholson not as a brooding private eye or wild and wooly mental patient but as the Joker in Batman.
This experiment has intrigued people all over the world.
Three Headlines
What conclusions could we draw from such a thought experiment after a decade? Here are three big ones:
- Our culture changes very quickly indeed. Beloit graduates in their mid- to late-20s say that recent Mindset Lists make even them feel old. After all, if you’re 29 years old, you might have actually learned to type on a typewriter! For a while your parents might not have even had voice mail!
- Technology has been the major agent of change. When historians study this age, they might find that more subtle change, such as global warming or the gap between rich and poor, were the real stories of this period. On the surface, however—and certainly as experienced by the young—this is an age of Instant Messenger, text-messaging, iPods: of being wireless but always connected, of being plugged in but always unplugged, of multi-tasking (e.g., downloading tunes while doing one’s homework online).
- The young have mostly known an apparently successful society in the United States. Yes, far too many of them have had to endure divorce and poverty, but the last 10 classes of entering college students have known a society that produces great wealth, has found new and prosperous places for women and minorities, and has won the Cold War. It is a society of instant communications and far-reaching mobility and transportation, where writing to a Norwegian exchange student in real time and flying to Seoul in a day are not unusual.
Students of history may look back and see matters differently, and the story isn’t over. But America’s young have avoided, in record numbers, the wrenching problems of impoverishment, war, nuclear terror, and adult-enforced repression. They have not had to fight wars as draftees or economic depressions as young job-seekers. They have not had to fight their elders about sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. They have not had to hide under their school desks as practice in case of atomic attack by the Soviet Union.
Born in Irony
Every generation can look back after 20 or 30 years and see three things clearly: What existed when they were young; what was at least imaginable; and what was totally unimaginable. In his brilliant new novel On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan portrays this last category. It is the story of a young couple on their honeymoon in a resort hotel in England in 1962. They are finishing dinner. In theory, they could then go down to the beach, McEwan writes, take their shoes off and soak their feet in the ocean. But that was unimaginable for those of their class in 1962 England, so they couldn’t really do it. The newly married woman would have liked to have a candid conversation about sex, but that too wasn’t permitted in 1962 Britain, even though she could at least imagine it. Up in Liverpool was a four-man band entertaining club audiences with “fey three-minute music hall ditties,” but no one could imagine that in two years they would be thrilling the world. Above all, “This was still the era—it would end later in that famous decade—when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.”
In 30 years this generation may look back and say that in 2007 they could at least imagine that they’d be able to enter houses and turn on the lights without flicking a single switch. They might say that they could dimly imagine booking a tour of outer space for themselves and their families. They might have been able to imagine that tribal war in Nigeria would throw the world into an energy panic or that New York City would be frantically building seawalls against the day when the polar ice cap melted entirely.
But there will be other things that they will look back upon and realize that, at the time, they were the sorts of things that could not be imagined. They will be a bit like Oedipus, who could not imagine how a killing and a marriage, when he was so young, would ruin everything for him later. The ancient Greeks also knew the irony of generations.
After all, in the years just before they were born, how many of us thought the Berlin Wall would be torn down soon, or that China would become a market economy? How many realized that in not too many years all of us—with cell phones and iPods and BlackBerrys and Global Positioning Systems—would enjoy a high technology that exceeds the bizarre gimmicks in the James Bond films of the 1960s? How many of us thought that Islamic terrorists would become the major new threat to North America and Europe?
Thus every generation is born in irony and lives in it. One hopes the irony isn’t too painful.
Mack and Mike
The Mindset List over the past decade has provided simple but profound clues about the future of higher education. The Big Idea could be labeled Mack and Mike: Mack for “macro” and Mike for “micro.” It’s obvious that educators cannot let its young citizenry go on thinking that the Soviet Union has never existed or that Walter Cronkite has never been important or that people didn’t always have iPods. One day a Beloit first-year student was shown an old “portable” record player and asked how one carried it around when jogging. It seems apparent that this sort of thing cannot be permitted to go on. Citizens need the long view. They need history. They need references in order to learn other references, and they need other references in order to make sense of arguments and ideas. Macro-education—in the form of general courses in art history, classics, literature, physics, and so forth—is as important as ever. It’s a matter of how to organize these courses: what to include, what to exclude, and how to place “local” (for instance, American) cultural information in larger (including global) contexts. It’s also a matter of how to help students connect the information they get in art history, for example, with the information they get in literature or sociology. These are tough questions. Mack has a lot to worry about.
| Illustration by Michael Morgenstern |
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But it’s even harder than that, for Mack without Mike won’t be enough. Mack and Mike must be siblings. There can be no “only children” in the education of the future. The list also indicates how specialized and “micro” knowledge has become—not only the specialized knowledge necessary for new technology to be invented and implemented but also the specialized knowledge made possible by the World Wide Web. Do we need future courses in “Information Studies?” Do students need courses specifically geared to the discovery and assessment of information in general?
The answer is no. But broad courses in cultural literacy won’t be enough. Students also need courses that require them to research archival information in order to answer specific questions and solve particular problems. They need courses that will help them learn how to approach these questions and answers collaboratively, because this is how the world’s work is getting done. The courses need not be in “Information Studies.” They can be in history, art history, sociology, psychology, geology, or Spanish. There is also room for students coming from different majors or backgrounds to work together on broader questions—as often happens in our First-Year Initiatives (FYI) seminars. For undergraduates, it’s not just a question of learning a particular method or becoming well-informed on a particular topic. It’s also a matter of cultivating a temperament: a comfort level with patient and complex research done collaboratively with others in order to form specific, if often tentative, answers to concrete questions.
At Beloit we have both types of courses. Mack is present in nuanced survey courses while Mike is increasingly alive in small research seminars where faculty and students, as well as students and students, work together on smaller projects. But the distinction cannot remain simple. As more and more information becomes available, Mack is going to have a tougher time figuring out what to leave in and what to leave out, and how to update survey information in light of ever new information and approaches. And Mike will have to worry about whether or not students have sufficient conceptual background in an Information Age to carry out research effectively. Mack and Mike themselves will have to collaborate!
Ovr 2 Thm
Mack and Mike will be concerned as well with this year’s class. The class of 2011, born in 1988-89, has always known presidents named Bush or Clinton—and their streak might well continue until they are in their mid-20s. They were born the year the Berlin Wall came down. Hard-core Communism has always for them been confined to Cuba and North Korea (even the Chinese are capitalists).
They learned to type on a computer keyboard and have scant knowledge of how people communicated before cell phones and email. Carrying quarters around for payphones, writing lots of letters with pen and ink, and slipping notes under someone’s door in order to get in touch with them—all these modes of communication are utterly alien to them.
The more affluent of them rarely need cash and always slide by on plastic. Hasn’t it always been that way? They have known a world in which there is no end to the ability of entrepreneurs to find a market for new needs, whether it be in the new fields of “voluntary tourism” or pet psychiatry or online education. They get far more information from Facebook than from newspapers. They expect to be changing jobs and locations many, many times in their lives. They expect to be getting most of their DVDs online, and YouTube is at least as important as the movie theatre. Women’s studies have always been college majors, and women have always been police chiefs in major cities.
This generation may become known as the Generation of The Long Tail, a term used by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 issue of Wired magazine. Anderson meant that companies such as Amazon and Netflix were the waves of the future because they could sell small numbers of hard-to-get items, rather than large numbers of popular items, and still make a profit. This suggests that the new generations will be ever more decentralized and specialized in their tastes. As the class of 2011 enters college, fewer than 50 percent of televisions are tuned into the major, non-cable networks. These new college students have their own favorite blogs and personal space online. The Long Tail seems unstoppable, and much of its reality is virtual.
Maybe someday they’ll never have to leave the house for anything!
Oh, and they’ve never had to perform the arduous task of rolling down a car window. They are not rebellious, yet they seem to be a constructive generation, concerned about improving local institutions—especially on campus or at school—and about the organic future of the planet. They seem to sense, already, that pensions, health care, changing careers, and worrying about global warning will be their challenges. Already they know that before too terribly long the older generation will say—if they could write in textspeak—“ovr 2 u.”
Tom McBride is the Gayle and William Keefer Professor of the Humanities and co-author of the Beloit College Mindset List.
