Is the Mindset List still relevant?

by: Ian Crouch

This week, as they have done each August since 1998, Tom McBride and Ron Nief released the Beloit College Mindset List, a pithy, gently condescending review of the historical touchstones that define this year’s incoming class of college freshmen (or “first years,” or whatever they’re called now). The list figures that most of these students were born in 1992, and if they stay on course, they will graduate in 2014, which is an astounding number to look at. (Surely we’ll be in flying cars by then.) Here’s a sampling of what students know and don’t know:

2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.
12. Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.
32. Czechoslovakia has never existed.
58. Beethoven has always been a good name for a dog.
64. The U.S, Canada, and Mexico have always agreed to trade freely.

Some facts on the 2014 list stand out as evocative, wistful moments of nostalgia: “19. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.” While others seem that they might have been true in any era: “69. It seems the Post Office has always been going broke,” and “71. The nation has never approved of the job Congress is doing.”

The list has never been particularly concerned with literature—based on the principle, perhaps, that eighteen-year-olds haven’t had much time to read, so busy are they messing around with whatever new items of technology have defined their lives. Instead, its recurring preoccupations over the years have included the Soviets, Ross Perot, and “Beavis and Butt-head” (a pair that always mattered more to adults than to kids). Recently, when the list has included books, they’ve been children’s books—”Goosebumps” (2012), “The Baby-sitters Club,” (2011), “Waldo” (2010)—with a stray reference to Salman Rushdie (2009) or Robert Ludlum (2002). This year’s list does, however, begin with this bold claim about the life of letters: “1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.”

The list was conceived as a reminder to professors to keep their patter up to date, and this year’s list, at times, retains its original usefulness, as in: “18. Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess.” Yet the list has changed over the years, being distributed ever more widely, and becoming, as the maker’s put it, a “guide to the intelligent but unprepared adolescent consciousness.” Defining “adolescent consciousness” is a broad and thankless responsibility—one I suspect that the creators of the list do more in good humor than in seriousness. Nevertheless they introduce this year’s list with an earnest, panoramic portrait of American youth:

They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone
call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now
be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information
and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them. A generation
accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship.
They will discover how to research information in books and journals and not
just on-line.

The Beloit list has always been a bit musty, often trading in cultural totems as stale as coffee in a faculty longue. (See all the lists here.) The reader—young or old, hip or otherwise—can’t help but squirm at lines like: “70. The artist formerly known as Snoop Doggy Dogg has always been rapping.” But for the class of 2014, for whom “‘digital’ has always been in the cultural DNA,” the list seems particularly outmoded. If nothing else, I suspect that kids now know more, rather than less, about these types of cultural trivia and historical fragments, because as each year passes, the information becomes so much easier to obtain. The Internet encourages so many moments of “accidental knowledge.” I’m thinking of the hours I’ve passed absently following links on Wikipedia, where one link leads to another, and another, and then another—from Justin Bieber to the history of Italian castrati, by way of Michael Jackson. The Web floods us with trivia; I’d be surprised if an eighteen-year-old today is as ignorant of the Cold War, Sam Walton, the racial politics of Los Angeles, or the filmography of Woody Allen, as the list-makers assume. Just as listening to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” in 1989 could serve as some kind of five-minute history lesson (and teacher’s have used this song as a syllabus) the Internet is an ongoing, shallow but broad compilation of, and lesson in, popular culture.

What the list’s authors are correct in worrying about, though, is not the absence of this kind of superficial “knowledge” of names, and dates, and places, but the threat that this thin understanding has on serious study. It’s easier now than ever to “know” about something and then never really think about it again. They are right, I think, that their newest students will have to “acquire the patience of scholarship.” We’re all still working on that.

From: New Yorker