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Thursday, July 15, 2004

THE KIDS. The National Endowment for the Arts has issued a report that documents a continuing and accelerating decline in literary reading in all parts of the American population. Literary reading is defined as novels, plays, and poetry, although in the report's statistics a juvenile romance novel counts the same as Moby Dick. And to qualify as a literary reader, all you have to do is read one book in the course of a year. Here's the worst news:

The steepest decline -- and the one that the report notes with most alarm -- has occurred among young adults. In 1982, respondents ages 18 to 34 were the group most likely to report the recreational reading of literature. Over the intervening decades, they have become the group least likely to do so (except for some segments of the population over 65).

The change has been particularly striking among those ages 18 to 24. The report says that, over the past two decades, the share of the adult population engaged in literary reading declined by 18 points, from 56.9 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 2002. But for the 18-to-24 cohort, the drop has been faster, sinking from 59.8 percent to 42.8 percent, a decline of 28 percent.

"Reading at Risk" states that the trends among young readers (or, perhaps, nonreaders) suggest that "unless some effective solution is found, literary culture, and literacy in general, will continue to worsen."

"Indeed, at the current rate of loss," it says, "literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century."

The statistics aren't surprising, but they are stark. Close to 60 percent of the 18 to 24 crowd don't read even one book -- not a mystery, not a thriller, nada -- in a year.

Maybe they're tired out from all the schoolwork they've done to become so proficient at math and science. Since 1995, an organization called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMMS) has been monitoring and testing the proficiency of high school seniors in these subjects worldwide. The latest full study was conducted in 1998, when today's 24 year olds would have been taking the test. How did they do?

One of the more ominous findings in the latest study is that even the American students taking advanced courses could not measure up to students from other nations. In math, they ranked 15th out of 16 nations. In physics, U.S. seniors ranked dead last.

In general math and science, American seniors ranked near the bottom among 21 nations.

Japan and China, usually the gold-medal performers in past studies of younger grades, did not participate in the seniors' round of the multiyear study.

Instead, U.S. seniors were outgunned in basic math by Sweden, Switzerland and Germany, among others; creamed in science by Canada; and overpowered in physics by the very country that is supposed to be looking to the United States for scientific expertise, Russia.

Only 11 percent of U.S. seniors understood, for example, one of the most basic concepts of energy conservation: that the amount of light energy produced by a lamp is less than the amount of electrical energy used to power the lamp in the first place.

Of course, math and science aren't as interesting as some other subjects. You can be hopeless with a calculator and still have quite a powerful interest in, say, history. Or maybe it's better not to say history because the picture doesn't look good there, either. Apparently we haven't been teaching this subject to kids for quite a long time now, if these citations by the National History Day program are true:

• A 2000 Gallup Youth Survey shows that only 4 in 10 teenagers know that 1492 was the year that Columbus discovered America.
  

• The 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that only 17 percent of fourth graders, 14 percent of eighth graders, and 11 percent of twelfth graders were judged to be “proficient” in their knowledge of history. Over one-third of fourth and eighth graders failed to reach the “basic” level and more than half of the twelfth graders surveyed could not even achieve a “basic” understanding of the history of their own Nation.
  

• The 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that only 27 percent of America’s students knew what the U.S. Constitution was.
  

• A 2000 study done by American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that nearly 80 percent of graduating college seniors from the nation’s top 55 college and universities failed when asked questions from a basic high school history exam.

To be fair, there are many great academic minds who are working to eliminate this problem, For example, an education professor named Sam Wineburg wrote an article explaining that "American students have always performed dismally on history tests designed to gauge factual knowledge." A few more articles like his, and we should all be able to breathe easier. But our mission is to figure out what it is that young Americans are doing that leaves them no time or inclination for reading, and obviously history isn't it.

Maybe it's all the great quality family time we Americans enjoy, especially at the dinner hour when all kinds of fascinating topics can be chewed over with the rib roast. Except that's not happening either, according to a 2002 article in the Christian Science Monitor:

Thirty percent fewer families come together for dinner today than did 20 years ago, and fewer than 15 percent of today's American families eat supper regularly (five to seven times per week).

It's no wonder; families are tugged in dozens of directions these days. Even the most conscientious parents sometimes load kids into the car during dinner hour with a juice box and pizza slice in hand - or allow their teens to skip supper night after night.

But a recent survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) might make parents think twice.

According to the survey, teenagers are particularly vulnerable to skipped suppers. CASA found, for example, that teens from families who eat dinner together were less likely to use illegal drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes than teenagers who rarely eat dinner with parents.

Aha. Drugs. That must be it. That's where the time goes. Only -- according to the experts -- it isn't where the time goes. Drug use trends for the younger generation are headed downward. A December 2003 announcement by the Department of Health & Human Services was full of good news:

HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson and John P. Walters, Director of National Drug Control Policy, today released results of the 2003 Monitoring the Future survey, showing an 11 percent decline in drug use by 8th, 10th, and 12th grade students over the past two years. The finding translates into 400,000 fewer teen drug users over two years... Current use (past 30 days) of any illicit drug between 2001 and 2003 among students declined 11 percent, from 19.4 percent to 17.3 percent. Similar declines were seen for past year use (11%, from 31.8% to 28.3%) and lifetime use (9%, from 41.0% to 37.4%).

The survey indicated that alcohol use is also declining modestly, although no percentages were offered of usage levels or changes. It's probably safe to assume there's still quite a bit of drinking going on, and cynics might point out that 17 percent of youngsters engaged in illicit drug use of any kind isn't a cause for celebration even if the overall trends seem favorable. At least some of the time spent not reading is likely being allocated to partying.

Where are we? There don't seem to be any intellectual pursuits to speak of in the younger crowd. No reading, no math or scientific interests, no historical curiosity, no long family talks by the fireplace. There is time required, of course, for work or school. Where else does the time go?

One big part of the answer is participating in the pop culture. This involves shopping, watching TV, surfing the Internet, and listening to music. Here's a hodgepodge of statistics cited by Media Scope:

• Teenage boys spend about $84 a week, girls $83; boys spend more of their own money each week than do girls while girls spend more of their parents' money than do guys.
• Teens spend more than 90% of their earnings, or about $67 a week, on merchandise, health and beauty aids, and entertainment.
• Each year, teenage girls spend over $4 billion on cosmetics.
• 35% of teens are interested in getting a credit card; 32% of teens already have personal credit cards; 9% of teens have access to their parent's credit card.
• The average American spends 9.2 hours each day using consumer media.
• More households report having video game equipment (62%), than having a subscription to a daily newspaper (50%). Of those U.S. homes with children, 70% own video game systems
• 18% of teenagers 13-17 read "often," 50% read "sometimes" and 32% "never" read.
• American children who have home video games play with them about 90 minutes a day.
• Teenagers spend an average of 2.5 weekday hours on a home computer
• 66% of U.S. children have a television set in their bedrooms.
• Children spend about 28 hours per week watching television. Over the course of a year, this is twice as much time as they spend in school.
• Teenage boys spend nearly twice as much time watching MTV as reading for pleasure.
• 2.5% of 12- to 17-year-olds watch network news.
• Teens ages 12-20 make up 16% of the population, but purchase 26% of movie tickets.
• 63% of kids ages 9-17 say that seeing the latest movies is important.
• 54% of kids view a movie on a VCR three or more days a week and 47% see a movie in a theater at least once a month.
• American teenagers listen to an estimated 10,500 hours of rock music between the 7th and 12th grades-- just 500 fewer hours than they spend in school over twelve years.
• 80% of 12- to 14-year-olds and 75% of 9- to 12- year-olds watch music videos.

Given these little nuggets of information, it's hardly a shock that when some masochist compared kids' knowledge of pop culture with, well, anything, pop culture won. In a 1998 survey sponsored by the National Constitution Center, it was established that more American teenagers:

• can name three of the Three Stooges than can name the three branches of government (59% to 41%)
  
• know the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air than know the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (94.7% to 2.2%)
  
• know which city has the zip code "90210" than the city in which the US Constitution was written (75% to 25%), and
  
• know the star of the motion picture "Titanic" than know the Vice President of the United States (90% to 74%).

These would be the same folks who are now setting records for not reading as young adults. What do we know about them for sure? They're spending machines. They're pop culture junkies. They have probably spent more time listening to pop music than engaging in anything that could reasonably be called conversation, and they don't have much of a clue about where the advanced civilization they live in came from. For them, it's all just there. But they're very good at shopping, playing video games, watching TV, and -- one more thing -- sex.

Back in the late 1990s, Media Scope reported:

• Nationwide, nearly half (48.4%) of high school students have had sexual intercourse at least once.
• Only 13% of 13-to 15-year-olds have had sex, as compared to 38% of 16-to 17- year-olds.
• By senior year of high school, two-thirds of students have had intercourse.
• 7.2% of all students initiated sexual intercourse before 13 years of age. 21.7% percent of black adolescents lost their virginity before age 13, as did 4% of whites and 7.7% of Latinos.
• Almost one million teenagers become pregnant every year; more than half of these pregnancies are carried to term.
• 2% of teenagers say abortion or pregnancy is the biggest problem facing teens.

A more recent report (2001) shows that these levels of sexual activity are increasing:


Innocent is hardly a word that can be used at all with respect to this group. The National Coalition of Parents, Children & Families {NCPCF) has accumulated the following sourced statistics:

• Three million of the visitors to adult web sites in September 2000 were age 17 or younger
  
• Sex is the number 1 topic searched on the internet
• “For the 20-year-old kid, porn stars have kind of replaced what models used to represent.”
• 39 million homes receive the adult channels in scrambled form, while the number of children with potential exposure to such images is about 29 million
• 21 percent of teens say they have looked at something on the Internet that they wouldn’t want their parents to know
• A survey of 600 households conducted by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children found that 20% of parents do not know any of their children’s Internet passwords, instant messaging nicknames or email addresses.
• Only 5% of parents recognized the acronym POS (parent over shoulder) and only 1% could identify WTGP (want to go private?), both of which are used frequently by teens when instant messaging
• Median age for the first use of pornography: boys: 11-13 girls: 12-14
• An estimated 18% of girls who are 15 years old will have a baby before age 20
• In grades 7-12, 23.4% of first sexual relationships are one-night stands
• 33 percent of guys and 23% of girls feel some or a lot of pressure to have sex
• Women ages 20-24 obtain 32% of all abortions
• 82 percent of teens did not use birth control pills during last sexual intercourse
• Approximately 19 million new cases of STDs occurred in 2000, of which 9.1 million (48%) were among young people ages 15-24
• 78 percent of new cases of genital herpes were caused by a virus found chiefly in the mouths of 16-21 year olds
• 65 percent of all sexually transmitted infections contracted by Americans in one single year will occur in people under age 24

That last statistic comes from our happy group of nonreaders. Where did they get all these salacious ideas in the first place?

• 75 percent of prime time television in the 1999-2000 season included sexual content
  
• 23 percent of couples in scenes with intercourse appeared to be ages 18-24.
• Movies have an 87% likelihood of presenting sexual material
  
• The average American adolescent will view nearly 14,000 sexual references per year.

But the extraordinarily precocious sexual activity we see in the younger generation is not strictly the result of TV and movie depictions of sex. Corporate hucksters -- principally advertisers and retailers -- have also worked hard to awaken the sexual identity of children at younger and younger ages for the purpose of selling them more products. Here's the lede of a recent story at ABCnews.com:


One major retailer went so far with its sexually based marketing as to be accused of selling pornography:

A case in point is the recent brouhaha over Abercrombie & Fitch's peddling of sexually suggestive thong underwear to young girls.

The rear-less underwear, decorated with pictures of cherries and catchphrases like "kiss me," "wink wink" and "eye candy," sparked an outcry from conservative groups when it hit store shelves earlier this year.

But seven isn't much younger than the age at which some parents take their kids to see supposedly wholesome performers like Janet Jackson and Britney Spears, who have become role models (NSFW) to little girls who want to know how they should dress, speak, and behave. The boys have role models too: foul-mouthed rappers who shout doggerel about pimps, ho's, guns, and violence. And this is no passing fad. Rap has been with us so long that graying veterans like Snoop Dogg have become acceptable as advertising icons and television hosts. Snoop Dogg was asked to host Saturday Night Live even though one of his sideline businesses makes what many people would call pornographic movies.

Now: does anyone want to wonder why the Internet is knee deep in child pornography? (It is impossible to do a search for information about pre-teen sexual activity without turning up more invitations to predophile sites than sources of research data, as I learned in preparing this entry.) And does anyone dare to ask who is making the pornography? Why, it's our kids. Many if not most of the webcam girls are college students, working their way through school: set up a live sex website and put your marketing major to good use. In just the past year the University of Indiana has played host to a porn producer who used IU students in a sex film shot on campus, Penn State University has sponsored an event called Cuntfest, hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of college girls on spring break have contributed amateur performances to dozens of video products (NSFW) featuring nudity and sexual antics, and dozens of college "humor" websites propagate pornographic materials (NSFW) that couldn't exist without willing (or at least susceptible) participants.

What have we prepared these youngsters to be? Porn performers and porn purveyors. If the rundown of their attainments enumerated above can be read like a resume, what else would you hire the kids of today to do? We began by considering the distressing phenomenon that literature is dying through inattention. Kids who won't read literature are certainly never going to write it. Their interest, to the extent that they have any, lies in the exact opposite direction. Because pornography in its many forms is the exact opposite of real art. Its purpose is not to elevate, illuminate, and inspire, but to drive from the mind all thought that does not pertain to sex. What other kind of thought have we equipped these children to entertain? And who will we have to blame when they leave their great monument behind -- a multimedia mountain of prurient crap that will finally bury the literature we never taught them to read or appreciate.

Do you have the nerve to look inside the box and see what is being created there? Our beloved American kids are destined to be porn stars. Aren't you proud of what so much emphasis on self-esteem and self-actualization has wrought. I know I am.

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