From My Corner of the Café
- G. Clarence Whippington
Harvard law professor John Palfrey’s new book, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, crashed bookstore shelves this summer (and ironically enough, hardback copies – with pages and all that other cumbersome “book” stuff – are selling briskly). Excerpts which I have read so far suggest to me that we older adults, especially parents and teachers, are in need of help in “connecting with” younger people who know no other world than one in which personal computers, IPods, I-phones, Kindles, Blackberries, and the internet in general rule over all. We doddering folks, it seems, who can look back mistily at typewriters, rotary phones, and yes, stereos, are like old babies who must be led, if not kicking and screaming then certainly griping and mumbling, into the Digital Age. We long ago forgot that we could not figure out how to run the VCR, for now this world is filled with many, many more things we cannot figure out. We are like late-18th century farmers who gazed at factory smokestacks on the horizon and foresaw only doom. Our children, even the grown-up ones, are sharper than we are, cleverer, as they navigate – nay, as they commandeer the modern world with little darting gestures and the language of the clicking keypad.
Department of Education officials in states around the country are giving in to this new kind of generation gap. Almost desperately, they are ordering their befuddled teachers into technology training workshops, and like lemmings, the teachers go. “Train us, oh, wise Computer Guy, for we know nothing. Your ways are mysterious to us.” Beyond that, many school districts are placing laptops on the laps of teenagers (except for that ever-growing percentage of obese children who are, of course, sans laps) in the naïve belief that they will use them for academic purposes. And robotically, sounding himself very much like the automated voice in your computer, the superintendent says, “We ought to be preparing our children for the future – 2010, 2020, 2030…”
I beg to differ. We ought to be preparing our children for thinking and problem-solving skills, because problems themselves never really go away. As much as we human beings might have achieved on our relatively short ride so far, I believe there is something fundamentally wrong with us. Socrates, in his tedious and annoying manner, began to get at a few answers, and the Assembly voted for his execution. In more recent times, Martin Luther King, Jr., offered us the very simple solution of peace, brotherhood, compassion, and he was soon felled by the bitterness which festers in the human soul. And Jesus Christ… well, I need not go on.
In any case, I would rather know that my own son and daughter are in classrooms in which they are engaging in thoughtful discussions and lively exchanges of ideas, and for which they are writing wonderful arguments which turn out to be expressions of their own minds at work and not the cuttings and pastings of someone else’s blog. Certainly, they will use computers to assist them, just as we used the library stacks, dictionaries, and typewriters. Admittedly, the rapidity with which information can be accessed today is thrilling, but that only means that the journey of becoming educated is a bit easier at certain junctures, but the quest itself remains arduous. Otherwise, we are merely rushing into a void. Answers which are too easily had will never be worth as much as those which take a lifetime of seeking.
So, am I as sharp as the so-called digital native, or am I merely a poor digital moron, fumbling my way toward a grave which will swallow me and all of my worn-out mythology and quaint philosophy? Well, let us see: I can spell reasonably well all by myself, without being “chekked.” And I can do most of a New York Times crossword without looking the answers up online. And I can talk knowledgably and without risk of embarrassing myself about things I have learned from a number of books that I regard as great works. And I have seen the Sistine Chapel and the Prado in Madrid and a hundred other amazing places which in my log of sensory experience are anything but digital – they are whole, round, and full of wonder.
But some of the best ones are the simplest. I remember that when I was little my father had a big, old cabinet-style stereo. Sometimes he would allow me to carefully remove an LP record from its cardboard cover and then from its thin paper sleeve. The cherry-red label seemed to promise rich sound. And then he would instruct me (“Easy, now, Clarence. Go easy.”) as I reached down into the deep recess of the cabinet, smelling the polished wood, placing the hole in the record carefully onto the protruding spindle; and then the critical part which, or so it seemed to me at the time, required surgical precision – I would place the turntable’s needle on the edge of the LP, and success would be met with that small hissing sound and then the first exhilarating notes of Ray Charles or Floyd Cramer or Duke Ellington…but failure was mortifying, that awful pop and scratch as the needle skidded across the record’s grooves… and the expression on my father’s face.
Plugging in an IPod just doesn’t do it for me, I guess.
Anyway, that’s the way things look from my corner of the café.
- G. Clarence Whippington
Monday, August 24th marked the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year for students of Hendricks Avenue Elementary School and Julia Landon College Preparatory and Leadership Development School. Parents and children arrived to the schools with bags of school supplies, seeking out their new classrooms and teachers. The first day of school brought out many emotions for students, parents and teachers.
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