the words decay and fall

[freckles_and_doubt]

Interesting article in the M&G this week, nicked from The Guardian: last week Susan Greenfield gave an address to the House of Lords, questioning the effect of media society on learning patterns and brain activity. (She's a neurobiologist). The paragraph that really caught my attention:

[Greenfield] begins by analysing the process of traditional book-reading, which involves following an author through a series of interconnected steps in a logical fashion. We read other narratives and compare them, and so "build up a conceptual framework that enables us to evaluate further journeys... One might argue that this is the basis of education ... It is the building up of a personalised conceptual framework, where we can relate incoming information to what we know already. We can place an isolated fact in a context that gives it significance." Traditional education, she says, enables us to "turn information into knowledge."

This hits home, because I've spent a lot of the weekend marking second-year essays, and have had my nose forcibly re-rubbed in the perennial and increasing problem that undergrads have no idea how to structure an argument, to relate concepts logically. They don't read, and therefore text, particularly in large, literate quantities, is monstrously alienating to them. Increasingly, year after year, their essays are cobbled-together Frankenstein's monsters of quotes, details and plot descriptions, lurching around in circles with no underlying coherence at all.

We all know how this ends. Torches and pitchforks, and those of us who represent the last bastion of literacy (and a slew of really low essay marks) looking on apprehensively as the mob swarms up the hill.

Comments

[herne-kzn.livejournal.com]

Curiously, I was having this conversation in Pick & Pay yesterday evening. The meataphor used by Zoey was that their intelligence is like shards of glass, some brilliant individual pieces but with no coherence, so they can be quite impressive until you talk to them for more than 5 minutes.
Am getting stuck into marking 1st year essays at the moment, 45 phil-101s by friday, another 25 by monday, then onto the Myth-201s which will hopefully be less distressing.
The interesting thing was that Zoey was looking at this specifically from her dept (Media Studies, though she's secretly a Lit person) and saying that interdisciplinary fields are particularly problematic from this perspective. Deep disciplinary study is (we think) better at building that framework, but they seem less and less keen to do that.

Youth of today....