Students lost in digital wasteland

For the past five years I’ve been teaching writing and literature to freshman students at several Georgia colleges, but I’ve had enough. I’m leaving the profession and heading for the woods, where I can get my soul back.

To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, today’s students are a “lost generation”; unfortunately, lost in the hard glare of technology, blinded by the promise of cyber salvation on a distracted globe.

What I used to take for granted — an engaged core of students who could think, read and write—has morphed into an assembly line of packaged minds fresh off the factory farm of iPod, “American Idol” and Facebook, a vast herd of electronic sheep stuffed with fast facts and establishment filler.

Of course, not all students succumb to the temptations of easy technology where, for a few taps on the laptop and a quick cut and paste, a research paper is born. There are still those who enter the library to engage the true road of hard work, where knowledge gained and won is not solely for the purpose of getting a degree and a high-paying job, but also for the wisdom imparted, the perspective widened, the awareness deepened, the values strengthened, and ultimately, for the simple human pleasure that comes with discovering something new for yourself.

Yet the process of technological entrapment is daunting. To stand at the portals of the Internet and graze the vast electronic landscape where all the world’s knowledge throbs at your fingertips is a bargain even the strongest skeptic of the digital dream might find compelling. Still, because of its promise to retrieve libraries of information at the click of a key, the Internet fosters impatience, fractures time, distorts context and fulfills our desire for instant gratification; in short, it makes us lazy.

Many students have no desire to think for themselves; they don’t have to — their cyber buddies do it for them. With their cognitive paradigms of electronic learning embedded deep in the brains, they see book reading as a waste of time, an impingement on their rights to distract themselves in the wasteland of electronica.

But at a price. If you are what you read, and you read nothing, then your mind withers in the wind of white noise blowing through your ears. Ambiguity, irony, paradox and wit go out the window, and wisdom becomes a useless construct of an unexamined mind blithely marching off into the American sunset without the slightest spark of imagination to grace its exit.

All this saddens me tremendously because I used to enjoy teaching; I used to enjoy expanding awareness and watching a student grow. But the educational system is broken, and the fix is not even part of the lexis to address the issue.

I don’t know what the fix is, but it is not more standardized testing, nor is it the training of teachers to teach students how to take such tests. I’ve seen the results; they are frightening.

Perhaps, after some time, I can come out of the woods and find a landscape revitalized by common sense and passion, where the great book of human wisdom beats loud and strong against the backwash of the digital stream.

Eric Fox of Marietta is a former adjunct professor of English at two public colleges.