Sunday, March 8, 2009

I read a fascinating article about a year ago from the Atlantic Monthly called Is Google Making Us Stupid?. Nicholas Carr candidly admitted an increasing inability to concentrate for very long while reading. It got me to thinking about my own tendencies. I too, have been experiencing something eerily similar to Carr's own difficulties in concentration. Like him, after a few pages in the best of books, I become antsy and lose attention. I close the book, get up, do something else, and try to refocus. I flip through a few pages and ask myself "how long is this chapter?" Fifteen minutes later it happens again.
Contrast this with my own wife who can sit through Dickens, Bronte, Austen, or Eliot for hours on end.
Carr spends much time on-line doing research for his own calling. So do I. We both see the sirens luring us into the rocks. Information is cut and pasted in short bites, with little proof or "unnecessary" detail, uncluttered by evidence, and loaded with bright colors and images.
Yep, Bright lights, big city.
And it's turning my brain to mush.
I'm beginning to understand what my students go through when they open works which they are cordially demanded to absorb. And although I have adjusted to life on the web, they have grown up with it and have been (mal)nourished by it.
Carr's gut reaction (and that of others he has spoken with) is that our brains are actually being rewired in ways that change the way we think and process information. His article reminded me of an updated version of Neil Postman's classic Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Now, of course, I know that there are some procedural methods of ensuring that our students don't overuse the web in research - limit the number of internet sources, teach them how to identify evidence, and how to think critically. Beyond these, how do we help our students and ourselves to renew rather than rewire their minds from the dangers of the google monster?

Your truth place or mine?

I know this doesn't have much to do with history or social studies but it has been on my heart recently.

I recently did an in-service with the teachers at the small Christian school where I teach. One point I wanted to emphasize was the link between our thinking and our actions a la Francis Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live theme verse "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." Why is there statistically such a small margin of difference between the way our churched students behave and the way unchurched young people act? Part of the answer, I think, lies in the post-modernist tendency to relativize truth to "what matters to me." In doing so, we can then justify our behavior that "I felt like God wanted me to do this or that." or I felt that what I was doing was alright." Worse yet, it's the student who gossips in the hallway right after the lesson I gave on how to show love by the way we talk.

I marvel at the tendency of modern American Christians to think that we can arrive at biblical truth through a kind of osmosis. Josh McDowell noted in a recent video that Bible studies for the over-25 crowd seem to start with the question "what does this passage mean to me?" without first asking "what does the passage say," followed by "what did the passage mean at the time it was written (interpretation).

Perhaps part of the problem may be what Os Guiness pointed out in his book "Fit Bodies Flabby Minds." In the US particularly, there has been the tendency since the Second Great Awakening, to allow everyman to be his own interpreter, cast off all past wisdom, and even become proud of his/her spirituality in doing so. It's when you ask a person "what does your church believe?" and are met with the response "Oh, we just preach the Bible." I don't think any of us can interpret the scriptures so objectively completely free from cultural or personal biases. At worst, such a belief invites arrogance. At best, it leads to sloppy thinking.

I know part of this seems to be disconnected. But does anyone else sense that our Christian students have completely different notions of what constitutes truth than do we?