Flying with a student yesterday, we had a 13-year-old passenger in the back of the helicopter. I thought “wouldn’t it be fun to take this kid right over his house” so asked him where he lived. “Needham,” he replied. Inside or outside of 128? [Our state highway 128 coincides in this area with Interstate 95, a ring highway around Boston] “I’m not sure. Inside, I think,” he said. Perhaps he didn’t understand the concept of a ring highway, so I asked whether 128 was to the west or east of his house. He didn’t know (which means he can work for T-Mobile in Framingham). Most of Needham is outside of 128, so despite his statement that his house was inside, I directed the student to fly towards the Needham town center. After 15 minutes of orbiting, our passenger finally located his house, about 5 miles west (outside) of 128.
The kid goes to a private school inside of 128. Thus every day he fails to notice that he must cross a six-lane superhighway in order to get to school. Every day he fails to notice the massive green signs with “I-95” painted on them and exotic destinations such as Providence, Rhode Island. Every day he fails to notice the “paid for by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” signs. His father called me later to thank me for taking his son up in the helicopter. My response was “It made me wonder whether anyone from this generation will be able to find his ass with both hands once we are dead and gone.”
Growing up in Bethesda, Maryland, back in the 1960s and early 1970s, I don’t remember any of us kids having trouble understanding the difference between going into the city (further inside the Beltway) and traveling onto or outside of I-495. I wonder if one difference is that we traveled in an unairconditioned Chevy station wagon with the windows open and no entertainment options other than punching siblings. If alone with a parent, we occupied the front seat supplemented by a booster seat. Today’s children, by contrast, travel in armored SUVs and sit in the back with the windows rolled up and the air conditioner on. Instead of looking out the windows at the “now crossing I-95” signs, they can look inside at a movie playing on an LCD screen or at a text message from a friend.
[Yes, I know that this post officially makes me an ancient curmudgeon.]
I’ve read your rants on geographic illiteracy with great interest due to my own experiences with it. When my 20 year old daughter was in high school, I would call her friends for directions to pick her up from the houses she was visiting. A surprising number were unable to give directions to their homes. I note proudly that my kids also found this incomprehensible.
Two years ago I met the beautiful and talented love of my life a Chinese national. She constantly gets lost when driving, even with a GPS. I chalked this up to the difficulties of navigating when written Chinese is your first written language. However, when we go to the supermarket, which exits to a small mall which also has two exits, she regularly doesn’t know which of the two exits to leave by. I am left with the conclusion that this otherwise wildly talented woman has a terrible sense of direction.
Finally, this article “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1 in the NY Times arrives. A quote:
But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”
First I read and say, “there goes Phil with the compass rose again”. Then I get to thinking, if Phil is worried about our next generation of orienteers, I am worried that we are raising several generations of – the- un-knowing – they don’t want to know how tings work, they hand things to specialists to get them repaired, and increasingly, the specialists don’t know how the devices they work on – work!
I hung out in high school with amateur radio clubs, PDP-8 programmers, and kids that went to the radio and industrial junk stores on Cambridge St. Some went to become great scientists. I was a bass player, built and repaired my own amps, did not go to college, fixed two way radios and eventually a career in Audio Repair, then onto interactive publishing and here I am, a mid level tech analyst, the shame of it all but I am paying my rent.
So, I worry when I see the generations a growing to take the helm, and they cant plug in a plug or express ideas of technology the way that people of the middle ages described magic.
If it were not for the grass roots robotics and maker fair type events where I do see bright and curious young people (young women too), that I get a little calmer.
I dont give a crap if they know that their house is in 495 or out – geez phil, where do ya get these benchmarks?
Reminds me of last year when I took my sons, then 10 and 12, on a car trip to Washington, DC, and back. We drove back home to Indiana on the old National Road (more or less US 40). They were impatient and irritated when I’d make them put down their Nintendo DSes to take in the beautiful scenery, especially in Maryland. It is a constant battle to encourage them to have a world larger than one foot away from their body.
This is why the small-screen time is limited during our trips. And why I make the boys walk places. And sometimes force THEM to make the navigation decisions, or tell me WHERE we are, where is their cousins’ house from here? Their school?
You are correct, that we are isolating this generation from the outside world, so they will be lost when they finally confront it. But Maps.Google will be overlayed on their contact lenses, so it will be okay (until the 6g network goes down).
I guess after applying it to tmobile employees and 13 year olds, I see a trend where you are using the “where are you relative to your local highway” question as a turing test. This may be appropriate since today’s young-uns may qualify as the first semi artificial life forms since they say they would “just die” without their ipods/smartphones/gameboys etc that they are permanently attached to 😉
I hate to tell you this folks, but the problem was there at least 60 years ago. I remember friends in the Navy complaining that as they drove across this beautiful country from one station to another that their kids in the back seats wouldn’t look up from their comic books.
and an even longer time ago (the 20’s), my grandfather was most frustrated by the fact that his brood could not be bothered coming above as their cruise went by the Lorelei rock- they were too busy playing cards to be the least bit interested in the Rhine, the legends, or navigation. and all of the aforementioned kids ended up being literature teachers/professors….. and some of them ended up as private plane pilots………..
Before he could read, my first son directed his grandmother how to drive across Los Angeles & well into Orange County to pick up a piece of sports equipment he had forgotten at a relative’s house, whose spoken address he did not know.
My second son has navigated across the Pacific by the stars several times, on boats he helped build.
So I can relate. WYSIWYG. Some people have the qualities we personally connect with & some do not. Since I also empathize with all young people emerging, I wonder what actually does interest the kid you describe? To cover all the bases, I am especially interested in “late bloomers” of note. 🙂
What was the youngsters’ father’s reaction to your comments?
I gotta say, I see my own knowledge of places diminish from GPS, but is it worth the frustration of getting lost to learn the of geography near a Target in FL?
Mimsey: There don’t seem to be that many jobs for literature teachers and professors these days. Young folks 50+ years ago didn’t have to compete too hard for jobs. Nearly anyone with a college degree could get a good job and, in fact, a lot of college professors were able to teach without a Ph.D. Today there might be 1000 Ph.D.s applying for each literature teacher job.
Dave: The father acknowledged that his kid knew almost nothing about geography. It didn’t concern him, though. I think that wealthy suburban parents believe that by saving a fat nest egg for their kids they are ensuring that those kids’ futures will be bright. That might not be the case for this father, though. It could simply be that he doesn’t think having a high-level knowledge of local geography will be an important skill in the future (and in fact we’ve seen that T-Mobile is very happy to hire employees who are unashamedly ignorant of the difference between north and south). I’m not convinced that technology should make kids less aware of geography. Google Maps and Google Earth, for example, are much more available and interesting to browse than paper maps. It can only be a lack of curiosity that would cause a kid not to look. (In http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/05/AR2010090502817.html Robert J. Samuelson argues that schools are failing not because the teachers are incompetent and unmotivated union clock-punchers, but because, in part, today’s kids aren’t as curious as kids of decades past.)
I don’t think this is a particularly new phenomenon. When I was a kid, I didn’t know how to get anywhere because I always read books in the car. Once I had to drive myself, I had to learn fast, since I didn’t have GPS to fall back on. I did however look up when there was beautiful scenery to look at. I remember on one family vacation complaining that I didn’t get any reading done because there was so much to see.
I don’t know if I’m within this supposed dumb generation or on it’s fringes at the age of 25. In my household, rotary telephones, paper maps, using the sunset to determine west from east and remembering large amounts of phone numbers were still common place, even in the 90’s. Our household getting a computer in 2001 seemed to really change things though. We all seemed to enjoy printing the maps more then marking a giant one with a pen. Getting a cell phone in 2002 also was a big jump, we no longer had to remember numbers. We were not wealthy so both items were shared extensively and bought only because the prices had finally come within our range. We did not understand their utility completely until we finally got them. Now they are so cheap, we can afford to get new ones every two years.
Did it all make me dumber? Kind of. I no longer remember those giant lists of numbers. I no longer remember detailed geographies as well. At the age of 25, technology may affect me more than someone in their 40’s and 50’s who has more solid experience without it. My dad can remember vast freeway junctions and phone numbers much better than I can recall.
However, in terms of managing gigabytes of info, I am far superior. From afar, I manage his computer and all the info he must store on it now. My siblings and I feel more comfortable talking to each other over a playstation network connection and leaving photos on facebook to update each other. The gatherings every few months are enough for me and my siblings to enjoy time together. However, the older generation feel isolated and alone because they don’t understand the new ways of interacting. I hope my generation can figure out how to survive though. They are increasingly unemployed on a constant basis, despite all their technology.
Libertardian: Maybe the older generation are isolated and alone because their kids can’t navigate to their houses 🙂
No need for directions, since many are unemployed. They don’t even have the funds to leave the house most days, so they are keeping their parents company.
Me and my siblings are lucky, we are employed far way and have no way of finding our way home without GPS. However, our employment is because of three government jobs, LOL 🙂 . The unemployed youngsters may not have the guts to swallow their pride and take that govt job, finally admitting they are nothing and nobody like us, like the FAA employee.
Re: “today’s kids aren’t as curious as kids of decades past”
As you well know, one of the big differences is the level of information available and the ease with which it can be obtained. Anyone over the age of 38 (or so) probably made it through much of high school without using a computer outside of “computer class.” For them even in the first year or two of college the card catalog at the library was still the place to find books. It was a real pain to find useful information to complete a research paper.
The challenges faced by teens today are much different on the information front. IMO, their biggest challenge is sorting too much information and not obtaining new, hard-to-find information. The sorting process also includes validation; it used to be “hard” to publish a book so there was some automated correctness attributed to the printed word. Obviously it is trivial to publish a website.
I’m not sure the response to overwhelming stream of information is lack of curiosity as much as survival. 🙂
Just look at the average person’s ability to do arithmetic these days. I’d say calculators and other “math machines” have made most people rather clueless about how to do math. GPS technology is doing the same for people’s sense of direction and navigation for sure.
Humanity offloads skills to technology on an ongoing basis and in doing so, fosters a strong dependency upon it. It is how our species grapples with the the increasing complexity of civilization.
You are correct in observing that this process causes people to lose a great deal of understanding of what is behind those technologies. But the inverse is frequently true. New technologies often baffle those who aren’t exposed to it while growing up.
So people do get stupid in some ways because of new technologies, but sometimes people get smarter in other ways. Sometimes.
It’s good to keep in mind that it’s very easy for us to judge how people are dumber than us, but it’s frequently impossible to recognize when they are smarter. And there are different kinds of intelligences. That’s why us older folks frequently think everyone around us is getting dumber, and the young people think older people can’t learn anything current. That complaint is hardly a new thing.
Alex: I didn’t say that the kid was stupid. He’s probably way quicker than I am at a lot of stuff (other than finding his house). If we assume that young Americans are in fact smarter and better than old Americans, I guess the geography ignorance shows that the human brain is not infinitely expandable. The kids today know a lot more about videogames and Facebook, but they had to give some stuff up.