I am not sure why it took me so long to become so skeptical regarding the bright future neuroscience could plot for education. With hindsight, this is particularly puzzling since my observations of the growing learning difficulties experienced by my students were supplemented by other worrying signs that should have given me pause.
After I became a parent and a full-time college teacher in the late 1990s, I started to pay more attention to the usual complaints that something in the way children and adolescents were growing up was terribly amiss. I was reading or hearing about numerous incidents indicating that this time around maybe the kids weren’t alright. I also witnessed a few episodes when children and adolescents seemed to behave more badly than the kids I had played with back in the 1970s. But those concerns and impressions somehow did not strike a sufficiently strong chord—until one encounter with a group of Bulgarian teenagers which shook me out of this complacency.
Still in elementary school, our daughter Gali was developing a mild obsession with Rihanna, as well as some of the knee-jerk skepticism typical of our native country (and nuclear family). As a result, she had no hope of seeing Rihanna in concert in Sofia (Bulgaria’s capital) before they had both grown up. Gali thus went truly ecstatic when in the fall of 2007 she heard that Rihanna was to perform at a free concert in the city’s central square, courtesy of a cell phone company vying for the hearts of young users. How, then, could we refuse when Gali begged us to take her to the concert?
We arrived an hour early in order to secure a better observation spot. As we were approaching the venue, we passed by groups of 14-15-year-old girls who were milling around and chatting. Many had bottles of beer in their hands, and some were also smoking. In Bulgaria, teenage rebellion has made such casual, public consumption of alcohol and nicotine by teenagers the new normal.1 So we tried to laugh it off with a few sarcastic remarks. What followed, though, was a lot more difficult to take in stride.
In the middle of the crowd, there was a minivan unwisely left by its owners in the square (which is normally used as a public parking lot). A group of girls and a few boys who wanted to get a better view of the stage quickly climbed on top of the vehicle. As they heated up to the loud music, they started to bounce up and down upon that improvised dancing platform. A few adults tried sternly to cool them down, or even urged them to climb down from the gyrating minivan.
The teenagers cheerfully rose to that challenge. They responded to the criticisms directed at them with utter self-confidence, composure, and a sense of humor. They taunted and heckled the adults, occasionally entering into mock arguments with them. They also made a few vague threats. The adolescents laughed back at warnings that the police would be called in. They did not for a moment consider surrendering their elevated position.
What seemed most unsettling in the behavior of the whole gang was not any deliberate effort to challenge adult authority. Rather, it was the complete absence of any palpable awareness that such authority could exist, even hypothetically. The teenagers did not seem to sense that since the people they were addressing were 20 or 30 years their senior, they might deserve some basic respect and courtesy. They talked back and hurled mock insults in the way I imagined they would respond to classmates who teased or challenged them in the school yard.
During the family debriefing we conducted after the concert, Gali reminded me of stories she had told me about her classmates since kindergarten. There was the six-year old boy who had angrily berated his teacher: “Don’t look at me like that!” And when she asked a bit surprised, “Are you talking to me?” he retorted, “Yes, if you aren’t deaf!” And the eight-year-old boy who was brought to the Stalinist school principal to be disciplined for punching another boy hard in the stomach; and who instead lectured her self-assuredly about his own emotional needs. And the classmates who could not sit still in class, so would get up from their seats, talk loudly and laugh, and ignore the half-hearted attempts of the teacher to get them to observe the most basic rules. All this should have convinced me that the behavior I had observed was quite unexceptional. Still, the scene seemed inordinately distressing.
A few weeks later, I witnessed a similar incident. Six teenagers (four boys and two girls, maybe 15 years old) were riding on a Sofia tram. They were talking and laughing quite loudly. At some point, one of the boys dropped a large plastic bottle of beer, which was left to roll around on the floor for a while. Two elderly women tried to scold the youngsters mildly before getting off the tram. Their remarks were met with casual derision. Then two of the boys started boasting how they would never validate a ticket on public transport, and would never ever pay the fine if caught. The rest laughed with knowing approval.
At that point, the group was approached by a ticket inspector. It turned out that four of the teenagers had, after all, valid passes provided by their less rebellious parents. The two boys who prided themselves on always traveling gratis did take crumpled tickets out of their pockets. Laughing loudly, they punched those before the eyes of the resigned official, and requested with mock respect to have them checked. One boy took his cell phone to take a picture of—allegedly—the only ticket he had punched in his life. After the inspector walked away shaking his head, they continued to laugh and shout, with one of the girls sitting on the lap of one of the boys (without any sign that they were romantically involved).
A few days later, my anxieties were reinforced further by an exercise of deliberative democracy on Bulgaria’s state-owned TV channel. It aired a discussion related to the plans of the Bulgarian ministry of education to introduce a new set of national tests for graduating high school students. The main participants were the minister of education (a self-assured lawyer in his late 40s), a deputy-rector of Sofia University (an academic in his 50s), a prominent Bulgarian sociologist-turned-pollster-turned-pundit (probably close to 60 at the time), and a group of five high-school students.
The group of students included four young women and only one young man whose grotesque behavior seemed truly out of place. He was constantly interrupting the adults with derogatory remarks. At one point he started waving an improvised cartoon illustrating the problematic pedagogical doctrine and practices promoted by the ministry of education. He then stood up and took the cartoon to the government minister, lambasting him for his ostensible failure to give satisfactory answers to the students’ questions.
Throughout the debate, the young man was behaving like a clown, full of—and utterly pleased with—himself. He might have been right regarding some of the deeper problems besetting Bulgarian education. Incidentally, his own cognitive difficulties were a good illustration of those, for he proved clearly incapable of following and addressing the arguments directed at him and the other students. But his inability to sustain coherent conversation was obscured by his complete failure to recognize that the situation required him to show some respect, or at least minimal politeness.
Following those incidents, I wrote an anguished op-ed piece for a Bulgarian paper linking the crisis of secondary education in Bulgaria (confirmed by many international studies2) to the collapse of propriety and respect for adult authority I had witnessed. Still, I did not quite see the implications of the attitude and behavioral problems I described for college education. It took another two years or so for a new flash of insight to really change my perspective.
Part of the reason why that did not happen faster is that most of my friends and intellectually significant others did not share my concerns regarding the examples of gratuitous misbehavior I had observed. Most of them thought I was overreacting to the understandable—and perennial–teenage penchant to push the boundaries and challenge adult authority. I, somehow, could not embrace the idea that the scenes I had witnessed were just innocent illustrations of what had always been transitory, maybe even necessary stages in the healthy development of youngsters seeking to push back against overbearing adult authority—maybe because as a teenager I had never felt a need to do this in the stereotypical way.
The sympathetic view of youth rebellion I encountered is, in fact, quite common. It is often supported with references to a few quotes which are splattered all over the Internet:
I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [clever] and impatient of restraint.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress.
These laments seem to raise some fairly recent concerns. But though not securely dated, they apparently all have a distant origin.
The first quote ostensibly comes from Hesiod, a Greek oral poet who probably lived in the 8th century BC. The second one is often attributed to Socrates, but its source is similarly uncertain. The third is said to originate from a sermon delivered by Peter the Hermit, a fiery French priest whose eventful life ended in the early 12th century AD. While these attributions are questionable, the quotes are used to illustrate that worries about the young are probably older than the mini-skirt, the hippy outfit, the punk haircut, the multiple piercings and tattoos, and the raucous behaviors associated with spoiled youth since the 1960s. The idea is that complaints about the young generation have always been around, and the kids have still turned out all right—as is likely to be the case now.
Before the youth rebellion of the 1960s, some earlier social critics had already greeted with apprehension the cultural and generational shifts accompanying the wave of industrialization, the rapid expansion of the market economy, and the accompanying spread of liberal ideas and attitudes in the 19th century. Such apprehension, even stronger and more pointed than the ancient and medieval examples cited above, was evident in the writings of prominent British cultural conservatives like Samuel T. Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Gilbert K. Chesterton. At that time, there were particular fears that boys and young men were becoming weak and effeminate. As a countermeasure, in the late 19th century Baron Pierre de Coubertin launched the modern Olympics. Those were billed as a reincarnation of the ancient Greek games, and de Coubertin was particularly inspired by the love of sports he had observed in Britain. But apparently boys there were in trouble, too. So a few years later British general Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scout movement, which quickly spread to the United States and other countries.
By all accounts, those earlier grumbles had proven a bit overblown. Could, then, current concerns about the young generation be as misplaced? This is the view taken by most liberal academics. They habitually describe excessive worries about youth misbehavior as instances of unwarranted “moral panics,” whipped up by conservatives clinging to an outdated model of oppressive authority. Such fear-mongering is dismissed as a conspiracy sometimes assisted—knowingly or unknowingly—by other interest groups and the sensationalizing media.3
Consider, for example, the birth of a British baby in early 2009. The father was initially thought to be a 13-year-old babyfaced boy who stood four feet (122 cm) tall and appeared even younger than his age. He had been only 12 at the time of conception, and the mother was a 15-year old girl who looked in photos as if she could be his mother. The young dad’s sister had herself given birth at 13, and his father had left the family a couple of years earlier for a teenage girlfriend. Both young parents came from families living on welfare, and the boy was getting a small allowance. He had only the vaguest grasp of his looming parental responsibilities, yet announced he was ready to assume these. The pictures of the new “family” were splashed all over Britain’s infamous tabloids. It later turned out that the real father of the baby was another, 14-year-old, boy.4 Still, the whole affair provoked the predictable howls from social conservatives about the plight of “broken Britain.”
This ominously alliterated catchphrase seemed to capture a host of rising concerns regarding objectionable behaviors by children and teenagers in Britain, as well as in other countries. Recent years have seen a flurry of publications raising worries about all kinds of related problems: from increased impulsivity and distractibility, to aggressiveness, “anti-social behavior,” self-injury and a stubborn unwillingness to grow up.5 Such stories do reflect wider public concerns. A few years ago an opinion poll in the United States found that “relatively few parents believe they have been successful in teaching their children many of the values they consider ‘absolutely essential’.” Most respondents “describe[d] teens and children with words like ‘lazy’ and ‘irresponsible’,” and few of them agreed it was “very common to find young people who are friendly and respectful.” About a third agreed that the younger generation were “spoiled.”6
Most liberal academics and intellectuals have one common response to all similar concerns. Hand-wringing about youth crime and anti-social behavior? Apprehensions regarding the violence, profanity, or sexualization permeating TV shows, music video clips, video games, and pop culture in general? Worries about the rising numbers of disorganized and apathetic students, mostly boys, who have lost all motivation for learning and even social success? Worries about vicious bullying and physical aggression, girls fighting like boys, sexually active adolescents, teenage pregnancy, and sexually-transmitted diseases? Concerns about an “obesity pandemic”? Any other alarmist howls? They all reflect attempts to whip “moral panics” in response to innocent or even liberating challenges to social prohibitions, with the thinly veiled intention of keeping oppressed groups—and children—down. Such panics are said to be fanned despite much scientific data establishing that, in fact, youth crime, “anti-social behavior,” pregnancy rates, etc. have declined, and teenagers have in many respects become more conservative than their own parents had been. And exceptions like the young British parents (who had perhaps not received proper sexual education) can only serve to prove the rule.
This upbeat approach is aptly illustrated by the work of two Australian sociologists who designed a clever “moral panic neutralization project.”7 They offered their support to an “outlaw motorcycle club” whose members’ allegedly rowdy behavior had been met by a predictable campaign to drum up a “moral panic” in the local media. Multiple news stories and opinion pieces had identified the bikers as “folk devils,” scapegoats onto whom journalists and the public could project broader social anxieties. The authors went ahead to form a coalition with the alleged “folk devils.” As part of an integrated “action research process,” they launched a vigorous counter-scapegoating media campaign. The brave fight they put up ostensibly helped produce a dramatic reversal of attitudes in editorials and among the concerned public. According to the authors, this happy ending provided “an example of a macrolevel intervention through which liberation from oppression was affected.”
This commitment to the liberation of oppressed groups is commonly shared by liberal intellectuals and academics. The tendency is well illustrated by a study of the “moral panic” around the alleged spread of violent and aggressive behavior among Canadian teenage girls in the late 1990s.8 That panic was stirred by a much discussed TV documentary and an avalanche of news stories decrying the exploits of “nasty girls.” These accounts appeared in the aftermath of the highly publicized killing in 1997 of a teenage girl by a group of classmates, mostly girls. They had accused the victim of gossiping about one of them, talking to the boyfriend of another, and snooping into the address book of a third.
Obsession with this and a few other horror stories had spread—despite reliable evidence that the number of girls charged for murder and attempted murder had remained at a constant low since the 1970s, and youth violent crime in general had declined slightly in Canada. According to the authors’ diagnosis, “the moral panic over the Nasty Girl is part of a backlash against feminism.”9 In their view, such overblown alarmism “over the statistically insignificant Nasty Girl is a projection of a desire to retrieve a patriarchal social order characterized by gender conformity.”10 Curiously, such “liberal” arguments are endorsed by right-wing libertarians, like those writing for Reason or the anonymous authors of The Economist.11 They typically have a hard time mustering much moral outrage, and worry that concerns over youth misbehavior can be used to justify unwarranted government overreach across many areas.
Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Among commentators in the media, Virginia Heffernan seems to have the least patience for any alarmist, morally-tinged hand-wringing. A case in point is a review she wrote for an HBO documentary series, Addiction, which in 2007 sought to dramatize the effects of various kinds of substance abuse in the United States. Heffernan ridiculed the morbid fascination of Americans with alleged addiction epidemics, fed in this case by an authoritarian TV channel bent on sensationalist fear-mongering. On the surface, her sarcasm was directed against the overall message of the documentary that “drug and alcohol addiction are diseases of the brain, and they can be treated, at least partly, with medicine.” But the way Heffernan satirized an ostensible public “addiction” to addiction documentaries implies that she has a more general problem with the dire warnings they contain:
Pseudoscientists don’t know yet whether drug-documentary addicts are hooked by the gruesomely thrilling scenes of tourniquets and needles, the photos of pre-Vicodin fifth graders or the promise of redemption through higher powers. But something definitely sets the brain reeling with manic questions: How could they fall so far? How could so many of us? Whom will addiction strike next, and will the culprit be the demon rum or the demon OxyContin? … The blunt title holds promise. As a story, addiction to drugs and alcohol has a chilling and ritualistic arc. Typically, the variable is the drug. Some viewers go for the methamphetamine documentaries, with their slightly high-handed attitude toward the Midwest, their contested statistics and their focus on dental issues. Other viewers prefer the shadowy, stylish heroin ones, with the sexy, skinny children and “Requiem for a Dream” fashion.12
These arguments may seem quite logical. But, as I already indicated, there is much brain research indicating that our embrace of ideas, values, political platforms, and candidates is not a matter of pure logic. Instead, it is driven largely by automatic affective reactions, or “gut feelings”—or a (near) lack of such neurosomatic responses.13 Musing about my own intellectual evolution, I have come to see myself as a prime example of this tendency. The night of the Rihanna concert, something broke in me; and that sinking feeling has not left me ever since. I knew very well that the behavior I had observed was quite innocuous compared, for example, to the varieties of “anti-social behavior” often reported in the British press (sometimes involving unprovoked, vicious attacks on adults by adolescents). Still, there was something that struck me as profoundly odd in the behavior of the Bulgarian teenagers I had observed—their total lack of awareness of any vertical social distance between themselves and the adults they were confronting with casual nonchalance.
Following that incident, I found it increasingly difficult to shrug off the defiant youth language and behavior I observed, heard of, or read about as representing an unexceptional, passing stage in a process of overall personal maturation. And I did drift toward the conclusion that 1) the adolescent attitudes and behavior I started to find so disturbing, and 2) the cognitive problems I was observing among my students, were somehow related. In making this connection, I did not have in mind the usual understanding that some students with learning or behavioral problems could have more general difficulties sustaining their attention and controlling erratic impulses. Rather, I had a growing sense that there was something a lot deeper connecting these two tendencies. For a time, I could not quite put a conceptual finger on it. Until it all clicked together in a flash of insight one evening in May 2011, as I was unwinding from grading final exams.