Choose Your Future Thoughts

Garbage in, garbage out

“Kids these days” is a common lament throughout history. Older people have worried about the norms of young people, who then go on to criticize the generations that come after them.

I generally find Gen Z (born 1995-2012) to be refreshing. A recent article, however, led me to have some concerns for young people and what it might mean for our collective future.

Rose Horowitch’s recent article in The Atlantic, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” generated much buzz.

She highlights Nicholas Dames, a Columbia University professor who has been teaching a great books course since 1998. Horowitz reports that Dames’s students — at an Ivy League university — “seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester.”

Dames’s jaw dropped one day when a student told him that she had never been required to read an entire book in high school.

Arthur Schopenhauer argued in the nineteenth century that “one can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.”

Now, I'm all for good books, but I wonder whether even reading the Twilight series may be better than our current situation.

The media we consume shapes our future thinking. Young people are delightful in so many ways, but based on the current content consumption, our future thinking is going to be different.