By Spencer Michlin, KERA 90.1 commentator.
Dallas, TX – Last week I gave my class of SMU seniors a list of 100 names to identify - people mostly, with a few objects and concepts thrown in. These were hardly all obscure names, and since the list included Nathan Hale, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ella Fitzgerald, Jim Jeffords, Cassius Clay, Gloria Steinem, and both Thomas and Tom Wolfe, it's not entirely fair to refer to the exercise as a trivia quiz.
Whatever you want to call it, the results were pretty grim. The best score was 39 correct answers, the worst: 6. By definition, this is a group of high school graduates. Why then could only three of them define the word "hypotenuse?"
The subject of the course is Advertising Copywriting, an endeavor based on ideas. It's my contention that ideas come from making connections among disparate things, so the more disparate things available to one's brain, the greater the quantity and quality of ideas. Besides, an educated person simply ought to know who Charlie Mingus and Douglas MacArthur were.
Oddly and wonderfully, all but two of the students correctly identified Rosa Parks, a genuine American heroine. But what kink in their educations caused almost all of them to know her and almost none of them to know Sigmund Freud, Margaret Thatcher, or Sonny Bono? Sonny Bono? Don't laugh, if they hadn't heard of him as Cher's ex-husband and TV foil from before they were born, why didn't they know him as a Congressman famously killed in a freak skiing accident just a few years ago?
To be sure, there were some amusing guesses. Abbie Hoffman was identified as Dustin's wife and Sam Rayburn, correctly, sort of, as a reservoir. Presumably the young man was kidding when he answered that Lady Bird Johnson was the offspring of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. And some of the limitations of search engines were revealed when the students were given the chance to redo the answers at home: "Horsefeathers" became, not the movie but "the greatest eatery in the Mt. Washington Valley." One assumes that the proprietor is a Marx Brothers fan. And I learned that apparently there's some kind of software called Sam Spade.
If you've ever seen Jay Leno's Jaywalking segments on NBC, in which breathtakingly stupid people are unable to identify photos of George Bush or give the location of the Pacific Ocean, then you know how bad it can get. But those are people ostensibly chosen at random at some tourist attraction, and one assumes that any intelligent answers are edited out for the sake of the gag. And while SMU may not be Yale, it is reasonably selective and these are students who are about to graduate. Luckily for them, there's nothing I can do about it except complain, because if I were in charge of such matters, those who couldn't pass this test would be forbidden to drive or vote.
The SAT's have been dumbed down several times over the last few decades, and I suppose that my students' lack of cultural literacy symbolizes both cause and effect. Oh, these kids today! I'd predict that it will all end badly but then you might mistake me for Cassandra. You remember her. She starred in all those movies with Troy Donohue.
Spencer Michlin is a writer in Dallas.