Chapter 1, he used Jay Leno’s show as empirical evidence….
He even recognized that the Jay Walking segment is edited and that the presence of a camera alters people’s responses.
Everybody likes the "Jaywalking" segment on The Tonight Show.With mike in hand and camera ready, host Jay Leno leaves the studio and hits the sidewalks of L.A., grabbing pedestrians for a quick test of their factual knowledge. "How many stars are on the American flag?" he asks. "Where was Jesus born? Who is Tony Blair?" Leno plays his role expertly, slipping into game-show patter and lightly mocking the "contestants." Sometimes he allows them to select the grade level of the questions, offering a choice from eighth-grade, sixth-grade, fourth-grade, and second-grade primers. A few of his best guests reappear on a mock quiz show presented on the Tonight Show stage. The respondents tend toward the younger ages, a sign that their elders perform better at recall. It's the 20-year-olds who make the comedy, and keep "Jaywalking"a standard set piece on the air. Here are some snippets:
"Do you remember the last book you read?" Leno queries a young man."Do magazines count?" he wonders. Moments later, a long haired guy replies,"Maybe a comic book."
Another:
"Where does the Pope live?" "England.""Where in England?" Leno follows, keeping a straight face."Ummm, Paris."
And:
"Who made the first electric lightbulb?""Uh," a college student ponders, "Thomas Edison." Leno congratulates the student until he adds, 'Yeah, with the kite." Leno corrects him, "That's Ben Franklin."
And:
"Do you ever read any of the classics?" Leno inquires. The guest draws a blank."Anything by Charles Dickens?"Another blank. "A Christmas Carol?""I saw the movie," she blurts out. "I liked the one with Scrooge McDuck better."
The ignorance is hard to believe. Before a national audience and beside a celebrity, the camera magnifying their mental labor, interviewees giggle and mumble, throwing out replies with the tentative upward lilt of a question. Stars on the flag: "Fifty-two?" Tenure of a Supreme Court judge: "I'm guessing four years?" They laugh at them selves, and sometimes, more hilariously, they challenge the content. On the mock-game-show set, Leno quizzes, "What's another name for the War Between the States?" "Are we supposed to know this off the top of our heads?" one contestant protests. "What kind of question is this?"The comedy runs deeper, though, than the bare display of young people embarrassed not to know a common fact. Something unnerving surfaces in the exchanges, something outside the normal course of conversation. Simply put, it is the astonishing life world of someone who can't answer these simple queries. Think of how many things you must do in order nor to know the year 1776 or the British prime minister or the Fifth Amendment. At the start, you must forget the lessons of school—history class, social studies, government, geography, English, philosophy,and art history. You must care nothing about current events, elections, foreign policy, and war. No newspapers, no political magazines, no NPR or Rush Limbaugh, no CNN, Fox News, network news, or NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
No books on the Cold War or the Founding, no biographies, nothing on Bush or Hillary, terrorism or religion, Europe or the Middle East. No political activity and no community activism. And your friends must act the same way, never letting a historical fact or current affair slip into a cell phone exchange.It isn't enough to say that these young people are uninterested in world realities.They are actively cut off from them. Or a better way to put it is to say that they areen cased in more immediate realities that shut out conditions beyond—friends,work, clothes, cars, pop music, sitcoms, Facebook.
Each day, the information they receive and the interactions they have must be so local or superficial that the facts of government, foreign and domestic affairs, the historical past, and the fine arts never slip through. How do they do it? It sounds hard, especially in an age of so much information, so many screens and streams in private and public places, and we might assume that the guests on "Jaywalking" represent but a tiny portion of the rising generation. No doubt
The Tonight Show edits the footage and keeps the most humiliating cases, leaving the smart respondents in the cutting room. Leno's out for laughter, not representative data. In truth, we might ask, what does a cherry-picked interview on Santa Monica Boulevard at 9 P.M. on a Saturday night say about the 60 million Americans in their teens and twenties?
A lot, it turns out. That's the conclusion drawn by a host of experts who in the last10 years have directed large-scale surveys and studies of teen and young adult knowledge, skills, and intellectual habits. Working for government agencies,professional guilds, private foundations, academic centers, testing services, and polling firms, they have designed and implemented assessments, surveys, and interviews of young people to measure their academic progress, determine their intellectual tastes, and detail their understanding of important facts and ideas. They don't despise American youth, nor do they idealize it. Instead, they conduct objective, ongoing research into the young American mind. Their focus extends from a teen or 20-year-old's familiarity' with liberal arts learning (history, literature,civics . . .) to calculations of how young adults spend their time (watching TV,surfing the Web, reading . . .). They probe a broad range of attitudes and aptitudes,interests and erudition, college and workplace "readiness." Much of the inquiry centers precisely on the kinds of knowledge (under)represented in the "Jaywalking"segments.The better-known examples of monitoring include the SAT and ACT tests, whose annual results appear in every newspaper as each state in the Union reckons where it stands in the national rankings. Nielsen ratings for television and radio shows provide a familiar index of youth tastes, while every election season raises doubts about the youth vote—where does it fall, will it turn out . . . ? Added to these measures are dozens of lesser-known projects that chart the intellectual traits of young Americans. Some of them excel in the scope and consistency of their coverage:
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
links allowed, because I can feel myself getting dumber as I read this book. I can't keep doing this, I just can't.
