What’s even funnier- is the amount of people in the comments here that perfectly illustrate the humor in the post without even understanding why.
I don’t see the problem. One can have unshakeable moral values they believe everyone should have while acknowledging those values may be a product of their upbringing and others’ lack of them the same.
I see no paradox here. Yes, the rubrics change over time, making morality relative, but the motivation (empathy) remains constant, meaning you can evaluate morality in absolute terms.
A simple analog can be found in chess, an old game that’s fairly well-defined and well-understood compared to ethics. Beginners in chess are sometimes confused when they hear masters evaluate moves using absolute terms — e.g. “this move is more accurate than that move.
Doesn’t that suggest a known optimum — i.e., the most accurate move? Of course it does, but we can’t actually know for sure what move is best until the game is near its end, because finding it is hard. Otherwise the “most accurate” move is never anything more than an educated guess made by the winningest minds/software of the day.
As a result, modern analysis is especially good at picking apart historic games, because it’s only after seeing the better move that we can understand the weaknesses of the one we once thought was best.
Ethical absolutism is similarly retrospective. Every paradigm ever proposed has flaws, but we absolutely can evaluate all of them comparatively by how well their outcomes express empathy. Let the kids cook.
To add to this, morality can be entirely subjective, but yeah, of course if I see someone kicking puppies in the street I’ll think: “That’s intrinsically morally wrong.” Before I try to play in the space of “there’s no true morality and their perspective is as valid as mine.”
If my subjective morality says that slavery is wrong, I don’t care what yours says. If you try to keep slaves in the society I live in as well I want you kicked out and ostracized.
Kids thinking anything goes while also being incredibly close-minded is not new.
*humans
There are no adults in the room.
Honestly, those two points don’t seem incompatible to me. For example:
Teaching the history of fashion to undergrads in 1985 is bizarre because:
- They insist that standards of dress are entirely relative. Being dressed decently is a cultural construct; some cultures wear hardly any clothing whatsoever and being nude is a completely normal, default way of presenting yourself.
- And yet when I walk into class with my dick and balls hanging out, they all get extremely offended and the coeds threaten to call the police.
(And yes I changed the year because I’m sick of so many of these issues being brought up as though “the kids these days” are the problem, when so often these are issues that have been around LITERALLY FOREVER.)
I’m not trying to dunk on this Henry Shelvin guy – I’m certain that he knows a lot more about philosophy than me, and has more interesting thoughts about morals than I do. And I’m also not going to judge someone based on a tweet…aside from the obvious judgement that they are using Twitter, lol. But as far as takes go, this one kinda sucks.
*edit: I’ll add that I hope this professor is taking this opportunity to explain what the difference is between morals being relative vs being subjective, which is an issue that has come up in this very thread. Especially since I bet a lot of his students have only heard the term “moral relativism” being used by religious conservatives who accuse you of being a moral relativist because you don’t live by the Bible. I know that was definitely the case for me.
No, that is not the direct equivalence. The direct equivalence for 2. Would be something like
“But then they insist that being naked is never acceptable and is grotesque, and anyone that disagrees is a gross pervert”
That’s where the inconsistency comes from
And yet when I walk into class with my dick and balls hanging out, they all get extremely offended and the coeds threaten to call the police.
Cancel culture today is out of control.
We used to have academic freedom. Now we just have sensitivity trainings and PANTS. SHACKLES OF THE MIND, I TELL YOU!
no, but the shackles of the mind also cover your genitals, at least in part.
Well because we have indecent exposure laws. Hanging your dick and balls out in public is not relevant to cancel culture or fashion.
The woke mind virus strikes again.
plenty of people violate laws without comment or condemnation all the time. nobody makes a fuss about someone going 5 mph over the speed limit, or doing a fuck-ton of sexual assault, and it’s really hard to get anyone to care. you’re an asshole if you make a big deal about someone doing some drugs.
laws and morality don’t really correlate.
you’re an asshole if you make a big deal about someone doing some drugs.
Did you respond to the wrong person? I was talking about displaying your cock and balls in public being illegal. Where did this come from?
laws and morality don’t really correlate.
ok. yes thats right. what are you talking about though? when did we start talking about morality?
I’ve had people, presumably young, argue with me on here about politics and morals. For example, I say the right to abortion is a political issue. Been screamed out that it’s not a political issue because a woman’s right to an abortion is a moral issue. Yeah, I agree, but the argument is still political. Some believe abortion is murder and that they’re right. That’s politics.
It’s like they have no sense that other views exist, and opposing views do not constitute politics. “I’m on the right side of this thing so it’s not politics!” As if I’m somehow lowering the debate to mere… something?
That was one of the first things I got confused by on lemmy. Am I making sense? Just crawled in from work and I’m wasted tired.
It’s like they have no sense that other views exist, and opposing views do not constitute politics.
I think they point they are trying to make is that once you are very very wrong about something (in their mind), it’s no longer a political position, it’s just an immoral position. And if that’s what they’re saying, I disagree with it.
I’m not saying that there are no immoral positions, I’m saying that a position can be completely immoral and still be political. I hate when people use the phrase “it’s just politics” as a shield, as though everyone else has to be OK with some incredibly shitty attitude they have, just because they have managed to also make it a political attitude.
And that’s such a terrible superpower to give to politics, too: the ability to instantly legitimize a position simply because it falls under the domain of politics.
Not to long ago, the question of “should white children and black children be allowed to go to school together” was a political issue in the U.S. And I’d say that’s still a political issue. It didn’t magically become some other type of issue just because a few decades passed and we now agree that one side was completely wrong. The fact that it isn’t actively being discussed anymore doesn’t change the fact that it falls under the umbrella of political issues. It means that someone can have a political opinion and they have to be a real piece of shit to hold that opinion.
The owning class wants to be the only class doing politics. So they brainwash the proles into thinking politics is bad.
not just bad, but extremely venal, petty, and a thing that happens in marble rooms you aren’t allowed to go in.
And making people believe preserving the status quo is not political but changing it is
But they are moral arguments, unless politics is added into the discussion. Let me give you a different example. If I believe people are entitled to the fruits of their labor then that’s a moral point. If I believe the government should enforce everyone getting their fruits, that’s political.
If I were to believe abortion is wrong then that can be a moral point. However if I think the government should take a stand on the matter, that’s political.
It’s also a health issue. It involves choices about life, not unlike someone in a coma or another situation where they are unable to make a conscious choice about whether to continue or deny treatment.
One argument in favor of abortion I recall reading was comparing it to donating an organ while you’re still alive. You are under no obligation of donating anything, of risking your life to save another, even if you are literally the only person on Earth that can save the other. If medical professionals have to respect those choices, they should also respect the choice of mothers who decide to end an undesired pregnancy
It’s even worse than that. You can’t even be forced to donate organs or blood after you’re dead. Most places are opt-in for organ donation. A few jurisdiction are opt-out. Nowhere has mandatory posthumous organ donation. Some despotic countries have apparently used force organ harvesting on political dissidents, but no country has ever established some broad rule, based on patriotism or some such, that everyone has to donate organs after death.
In red states, pregnant women literally have less bodily autonomy than corpses.
The point they were trying to make (I believe, and this specific argument) is that the entire basis of the opposing argument is entirely based on religion and pretty much by definition specious. There is no sky daddy looking over your shoulder, and this any morality you base on its existence is inheritetly flawed at best.
What there is are women who need timely access to medical care or their lives are at risk. This is a tangible and real threat.
So treating the issue as “Politics” only serves to dignify the flawed morality of one side while letting women die.
So treating the issue as “Politics” only serves to dignify the flawed morality of one side while letting women die.
Your earlier paragraphs don’t provide any evidence for this point.
Hah! Cool to see Henry pop up on my feed. I knew this guy back when he was a grad student. And as somebody that also teaches ethics, he is dead on. Undergrads are not only believe all morality is relative and that this is necessary for tolerance and pluralism (it’s not), but are also insanely judgmental if something contradicts their basic sense of morality.
Turns out, ordinary people’s metaethics are highly irrational.
I just commented elsewhere in this thread, but isn’t moral realism a thing for this exact situation? Is his post not a self report on his inability to identify a moral framework that fits his students worldview, or at least to explain the harm that arises if one has a self contradictory worldview and help them realize that and potentially arrive at a more consistent view? Seems like this comment section is filled with a lot of people that understand their moral framework more than this professor, but obviously are not in the field. Can you please elaborate on the issues here? Like I think abortions are fine, but I understand that others think it’s murder. I don’t think they’re bad people for that, but I understand if they think I’m a bad person for my views. How we deal with it on a societal level is obviously even more complicated. I don’t see how there’s a problem there.
It seems like ALL is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment. Do they really believe ALL morality is relative and are also always insanely judgy if things contradict their beliefs?
I think the issue is that students aren’t consistent. They’ll fall back on relativism or subjectivism when they don’t really have a strong opinion, or perceive there to be a lot of controversy about the subject that they don’t want to have to argue about. But fundamentally, whether there’s an objective and universal answer to some moral question or not really doesn’t depend on whether there’s controversy about it, or whether it’s convenient or cool to argue about.
I think that there are parts of morality that really are culturally relative and subjective, and parts that aren’t. Variation in cultural norms is totally okay, as long as we don’t sacrifice the objective, universal stuff. (Like don’t harm people unnecessarily, etc.). The contours of the former and the latter are up for debate, and we shouldn’t presume that anybody knows the exact boundary.
Your beliefs seem to align with what the students are saying and generally with moral realism.
You just said “I think that there are parts of morality that really are culturally relative and subjective, and parts that aren’t.” so you can view some morality as subjective and some as necessarily universal. That is what most people default to and what you seem to saying is wrong with the students. You state they aren’t consistent, but you’re also not consistent. Sometimes subjectivity is right sometimes it’s not. I’m not seeing a distinction, so please elaborate on it if I’m missing it.
post-structuralism has done a lot to attack the basic idea that something like “right” and “wrong” even exist in the first place, outside of the mind of the observer.
I’m kinda pissed about that btw.
Even if all morality is subjective or inter-subjective I have some very strong opinions about tabs vs spaces
Morality is, and always has been, built entirely upon empathy. Understanding how someone else feels and considering the greater implications beyond yourself is the fundamental building block to living a moral life. If you’re willing to condemn the world to your shitty code just because the tab key is quicker, you’re a selfish monster who deserves hyponichial splinters. See also: double spaces after a period.
The correct answer is to map tab to spaces in your IDE.
Morality is, and always has been, built entirely upon empathy. Understanding how someone else feels and considering the greater implications beyond yourself is the fundamental building block to living a moral life.
Stoning people to death for mixing fabrics was based on morality too.
Nah, the probibitions against mixed fabrics, and who can be considered holy, and how to pray and to whom, all of those are edicts designed to exert control. It has nothing to do with morality.
Who did that? Jewish people who wore mixed fabrics were unclean and had to cleanse themselves. Who murdered people for that?
Oh no, my half remembered example of overly violent reactions to breaking moral traditions might not be literally accurate!
Did religions include extremely harsh punishments for breaking moral codes? Yes. That is the point even if the details aren’t exactly right.
You can hold to an ethical code while breaking your moral code. This seems to be an example of that, and my frustration with ethics codes of many professional societies/organizations. You can be entirely ethical yet still spend your life crating efficient life ending tools.
This is gonna get out of hand.
ANNNND
Fuck you, nuh uh
As I have learned today: “tabstospaces”: true
My heart goes out to those who suffer with poor editors where this is a problem. I do empathize with them. It’s important to love others and help. That’s the code for my life: love others. Except vim users. Straight to jail.
People who use tabs are monsters
Tabs are the one true way! All those who blaspheme against the might tab will be regex’d into compliance.
<overly dramatic threat of violence here>
Vertical or horizontal tabs? And I don’t mean browser tabs.
Tabs. F alignment for aesthetic purposes
Morality is subjective. Ethics are an attempt to quanitify/codify popular/common moral beliefs.
Even “murder is wrong” is not a moral absolute. I consider it highly immoral to deny murder to someone in pain begging for another person like a physician to murder them painlessly simply because of a dogmatic “murder is wrong” stance.
in fact, that “murder is wrong” in in fact not a universally held belief. 20 billion animals wait solely sothat we can murder them eventually to consume their physical remains.
i consider this specific example to also be an issue of language, which is in itself a construct.
Murder as a word has meaning based in law, which is another construct.
If you were to switch out “murder” for “killing” the outcome remains the same (cessation of life by another party) but the ethical and moral connotations are different.
Some people use murder when they mean killing and vice versa which adds a layer of complexity and confusion.
Though all of that could just be me venturing into pedant country.
It’s even worse than that. It floors me that it’s widely accepted that soldiers murdering soldiers in war isn’t murder. It’s murder when a contract killer murders by order and gets paid, the fact that a government is paying the contract and giving you a spiffy Lil wardrobe to do it in is a really arbitrary line. They don’t even have a proper word for it, they just say “it’s not murder… IT’S WAR!” What a lazy non-argument. It doesn’t count because we’re doing murder Costco style, in bulk?
I mean yeah, it’s people killing people that don’t want to die on the behalf of people paying them to either gain something or secure what they have. It’s more cut and dry than my first example, where you could argue that if the party to be murdered consents to be murdered, it no longer fits the definition.
As George Carlin said, the word is avoided to soften what needs to be done, to defang language until it is robbed of the emotional weight of what is happening. Target neutralized doesn’t have the baggage of human murdered. Don’t want those soldiers in the field to internalize the weight of what they’re doing, or they won’t comply as reliably!
and this is exactly my point, the definition of the word generally points directly to it being killing in a fashion that is unlawful which rests on the applicable law in the context.
Nation state soldiers killing enemy combatants doesn’t fit this description in most circumstances. (There are of course rules and exceptions etc etc)
I’m not arguing the morality, I’m arguing the factual definition and it’s the reason why i said the language causes it’s own issues.
floors me that it’s widely accepted that soldiers murdering soldiers in war isn’t murder
Because it’s not. Murder is one sided. War, you are fighting. It’s not 1 sided. It’s killing, and can easily and is often morally reprehensible. But that does not make it murder. Civilian deaths are still murder in a war.
It’s not defanging language. Its using it as it is.
I would argue that’s because murder is generally understood to be tangential to state authority where state is defined as the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Killing for the state is war or exercising sovereignty or whatever the reason is, but it’s the state’s reason and it’s weird to call state sanctioned genocide murder even when you acknowledge it as evil and unlawful. Killing against state authority is revolutionary action and while inherently unlawful is also rarely seen as murder. So it makes sense that a state sactioning the killing of actors of another state isn’t seen as murder and instead has its own term for the whole tragic situation.
People have been arguing about whether morality is subjective, and writing dissertations about that subject, for thousands of years. Is any of us really familiar enough with that very detailed debate to render a judgment like “morality is subjective” as though it’s an obvious fact? Does anybody who just flatly says morality is subjective understand just how complex metaethics is?
https://images.app.goo.gl/fBQbi2J5osxuFmvt7
I think “morality is subjective” is just something we hear apparently worldly people say all the time, and nobody really has any idea.
By the way, I have a PhD in ethics and wrote my dissertation on the objectivity/subjectivity of ethics. Long story short, we don’t know shit!
“Morality is subjective” is the inevitable conclusion of a secular, empiricalistic worldview.
Essentially, now that we are in a scientific world disagreement is resolved through experiment.
Disagreement not resolvable through experiment is removed from the realm of science, and is called falsifiable and is seen as subjective.
If you and I disagree, there are no scientific tests we can run to resolve moral issues.
And since we can’t point to a God or objective moral laws, it doesn’t even matter if one theoretically exists because it’s inaccessible and infalsifiable. Effectively it doesn’t exist for us.
Both of us are following different moral standards, the “rules” in your head are not the same rules that I’m subjective to.
You’re morals are subjective to your experience, it simply is a fact.
A lot of what you said here is an implication of subjectivism, but not an argument for it. Subjectivism about morality is no more an implication of an empiricist worldview than subjectivism about the shape of the Earth.
What you’re suggesting here sounds a lot like the logical positivists’ position on ethics. The descriptive is falsifiable, the normative is not, so it must be subjective. The problem with that view is that we can’t draw neat lines between the normative and the descriptive. If I’m attempting to model the world descriptively, I’m still going to be guided by normative considerations about what constitutes a good model. Science is not purely empirical, and ethics is not purely normative. Philosophy in general is not a discrete subject, separate from science. The two are continuous.
And we’ve known since Plato that God doesn’t play into it, one way or the other.
My dude, Kant refuted that over two centuries ago. There’s no need to invoke a deity or require pure empiricism for morality. Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Can you elaborate?
I don’t believe that’s possible unless you take an axiomatic approach which would obviously be a moral relativist approach since we can just disagree on the choice of axioms themselves and prevent any deduction.
How do you overcome the is-ought problem?
the regress problem states that all human knowledge is axiomatic. this is a big ol nothing-burger of a refutation, it is true for literally every single possible proposition.
asking him to overcome this problem is so fucking far outside the scope of what you’re arguing about as to be ridiculous, you look silly.
Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Not really. Best practices based on a set of goals and priorities can be discovered logically. The sticking point is that people can have very wildly different goals and priorities, and even small changes to that starting point can cause a huge difference in the resulting best practices.
Goals and priorities might differ a lot between an ant and a human but not so much between two humans. At least not enough to not get at least a few rules for behavior.
Just because its easy to get a bunch of humans to agree say murder is wrong, doesn’t mean you can call that objective.
The reason humans and ants differ so much in morality is because of the difference in the subjective experience of being a person versus being an ant.
If morality is subjective, you’d expect creatures with similar subjective experiences to agree with each other.
You’d expect one subjective blob of rules to conform to human biology/sociology and a separate blob of subjective rules to apply to antkind with no real way to interface between the two.
and you base that expectation on what?
hopes and dreams?
The reason humans and ants differ so much in morality is because of the difference in the subjective experience of being a person versus being an ant.
this is predicated on a false assumption. you don’t know ants and humans experience different subjective experiences, you just strongly suspect it. knowing =/= suspecting. which is why you follow this illogic down to an incorrect conclusion of your “expectation.”
the greatest challenge of our age is dispelling the victorian myth that knowledge of the real world is untouchable to us. the distinction between you and other does exist, but we are not locked out of the world. we can deduce real facts about things outside our perception.
Yet you, and every other human still engage in moral behaviors. You have some prescriptive intuition buried deep inside you. The ability to describe the components, inputs and outputs of that intuition is the entire conversation.
Yet you, and every other human still engage in moral behaviors.
Just human? I mean, sure do, but we’re leaving out a huge array of animals who also engage in rudimentary moral behavior.
You have some prescriptive intuition buried deep inside you.
Of course, we evolved to be social animals did we not? What else would you expect but inate instinctual “rules” when they’d lead to a clearly fitter society.
The ability to describe the components, inputs and outputs of that intuition is the entire conversation.
Right, and just like the variation in genetic material this variation in inputs and outputs that we all have which are wholly unique to us as individuals and while remarkably similar to others raised in similar environments, also remarkably unique in subtle ways.
I agree this is the entire conversation. And the obviousness of this fact, that moral expression is subtly unique to each individual, is the ultimate answer to the question.
If you are raised in a subjectively different environment, then the rules you learn to behave by will be subjective to that environment.
“murder is wrong” is a moral absolute if you adopt the deontological viewpoint. It’s not if you adopt the teleological approach. Discussing these things is literally what I learnt in the very short Ethics course I had in third year uni (while in France that sort of stuff was much much earlier during Philosophy class…)
Edit : and to be clear, I think absolute opinions are the province of the philosopher and the fanatic. Real life tends to be a bit more messy. But that’s why it’s important to sort of know what the options are and how difficult the choices can be (again, for real human beings who struggle with dilemmas ; fanatics tend to eachew all that and I’d say that’s how you can spot them).
Yeah, that’s because moral relativism is cool when you live in a free and decent society.
The irony is that you can afford to debate morality when society is moral and you’re not facing an onslaught of inhumanity in the form of fascism and unchecked greed that’s threatening any hope for a future.
But when shit hits the fan, morality becomes pretty fucking clear. And that’s what’s happening right now. Philosophical debates about morality are out the window when you’re facing an existential threat.
They used to be the case that just calling your political opponents evil was oversimplifying. But these days? They literally are just evil in the most cruel ways imaginable to the point where there’s nothing to debate, and people who do so are doing so in bad faith most of the time. I think that’s another dimension of the situation, a poorly moderate websites like Twitter make it so that people are constantly in a hostile environment where good faith cannot be assumed so you have to learn to operate in that kind of environment
I think the person replying to you actually just outlined the point the post made. You can frame all of these views for both sides, and could let two people on both side argue about who is actually trying to be cruel.
As much as I’d agree so much evil shit is going in, it’s a good point about how perceptions from others don’t change our own views lately and we aren’t even interested in discussing them. I also understand your point of there being no reason to try discussing them, but that’s the view the people on the other side have had for the past 9 years now, and that’s why we’re where we are. I’m not American but I truly wonder if there’s a way that people can capitulate to each other without having to start a civil war.
When the other side is doing stuff like Mass deportation ASMR videos you’re past the point where it’s a reasonable debate about the exact level of income tax or whatever. Actual cartoon villains wouldn’t dare behave this badly
I mean yeah, the democrats are violent, authoritarian, and and generally awful.
True. Just ask someone from Gaza
This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors.
deleted by creator
viewing disagreement as moral monstrosity
This should be the slogan of public social media.
Parallel: Teaching contemporary American literature to undergrads in 2019 was utterly bizarre because they hadn’t lived through 9/11. So much stuff went over their heads. There’s just a disconnect you’re always going to have because of lived experience and cultural changes. It’s your job, especially in a philosophy course, to orient them to differing schools of thought and go “oh, I didn’t think about it that way.” And correct them on Nietzsche, because they’re always fucking wrong about Nietzsche.
Gesundheit!
I’ve been a College and University prof for the past 6 years. I’m in my young 40s, and I just don’t understand most of the people in their 20s. I get that we grew up in really different times, but I wouldn’t have thought there would be such a big clash between them and me. I teach about sound and music, and I simply cannot catch the interest of most of them, no matter what I try. To the point were I’m no sure I want to keep doing this. Maybe I’m already too old school for them but I wonder who will want to teach anymore…
I wonder how much of that is a change in who is going to college and why, and what the requirements are. More people are being funneled into colleges that previously would have gone directly into the workforce or into an apprenticeship. Is your class a gen ed? Gen Ed’s have really expanded and if you listen to bleeding hearts like me it’s a good thing because it exposes people to new things, but I think it’s actually so poorly managed that people end up taking the classes they think will be the least rigorous regardless of their actual interest just to get them over with.
That is the same sentiment my music teacher had 15 years ago and the same sentiment his music teacher did before that. I don’t think it’s illustrating the times as much as just that teaching is a tough and thankless job and most people aren’t interested in learning
I could get that at the grade school level, but at the university/college level those students are choosing the music classes. To be that disengaged for a course you picked is a bit different than a student who is forced to take a course.
That being said, if the course is a requirement that does change things a bit.
Yeah, I’m not sure I agree with this. I’ve always said to myself that I didn’t want to fall into this old-versus-young rhetoric, but I think the situation is different. The world and technologies are changing faster than our ability to integrate them. The world in which my father lived wasn’t that different from his father’s, and neither was mine. But young people, born into the digital age, have been the guinea pigs of social media and the gafam ecosystem, which seems to have radically altered their ability to concentrate (even watching a short film is a challenge), as well as their interest in learning. They see school, even higher education, as a constraint rather than an opportunity. I have the impression that they don’t see the point of learning when a Google search or ai answers everything, and that retaining things is useless. That’s my 2 cents…
I’ll chime in and say that math teachers have said similar things about calculators/graphing calculators for 25+ years. This is most definitely you getting “old”. It’s okay—it happens to all of us.
As far as attention span, that has been an equally common refrain—going back to people complaining that radio has reduced kids attention spans.
Interesting points. I don’t think calculators are equivalent to having the sum of humanity’s knowledge, AI, and infinite content in you pocket tho. There’s a limit to how much fun you can have with a calculator… The same goes for attention in class. Not so long ago, if the class bored you, you had to wait while scribbling in a notepad. Now you can doom scroll anywhere anytime. These kids have been test subjects for ipad, youtube content and smartphone,I don’t blame them, I blame capitalism who made them addicted to social media and their parents who didn’t protect them.
I also want to add that I have some great students, invested in their studies and super bright. It’s just that a majority of them now seems to be incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes.
Calculators, computers, either way the kids going to finish looking at BOOBS.
We all do.
It’s just that a majority of them now seems to be incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes.
I teach chemistry at a college and I don’t think it’s any different than the past; it’s just more obvious. When I was in middle school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I brought shitty fantasy novels to read under the desk. In high-school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I would just leave or draw band logos. In undergrad, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I doodled or wrote song lyrics in the margins of my notebook. Even in grad school, i would frequently just straight disassociate my way through lectures when I ran out of attention span (so every 5 minutes or so).
There’s tons of pedagogy and andragogy research that shows that humans in general only focus for 10-15 minutes at a time (and it’s even shorter for teens and males in their early 20’s), and that’s remarkably consistent across generations. I don’t think people actually have shorter attention spans; they just have an easy way to mindlessly fill that void that is harder to come back from without an interruption. Frankly, my students from Gen X all the way to Gen Alpha students do pretty good at paying attention, but even my best students still zone out every few minutes, and that’s fine. It’s just human nature and the limitations of the way our brains are structured.
Pretty much. I think a lot of the anger over phones is that it makes it real obvious when someone doesn’t care what you’re saying. You’re right that you used to look out into the classroom and couldn’t really tell who was focusing or zoned out
As someone who is young but old enough to remember when boredom was a thing let me tell you boredom sucked. There wasn’t really anything to it worth keeping. Yeah sometimes I go for a walk and have a think but that’s intentional. Being bored when you’re stuck in line or something is just painful and has no redeeming qualities
100%. The only redeeming quality of boredom is that it encourages you to go out and gain other interests and skills in the absence of other entertainment, but that’s more in the “I’m done with my homework and have nothing to do for the next 2 hours until dinner” sense. And even before smartphones, TV, booze, and weed easily filled that niche if you weren’t careful.
I’m pretty sure it’s always been the case that most students didn’t care, because they’re forced to be there. I don’t even remember being awake for the majority of precalc because first period is just too early in the day.
Maybe. But when you go study sound tech at college, I would have believe you would be interested to hear about sound stuff… Especially since the application process is pretty heavy and only half of the applicants get in.
I’m not sure that tech is really changing all that fast. In the 1990s a good desktop computer had 40 MB of HDD space and 2 MB of RAM. In the 2000s the hard drives were already 1000x as big, and people had hundreds of MB of RAM. That’s a massive amount of change in just a decade. In the early 1990s nobody had heard of the Internet. By the 2000s it was everywhere.
Sure, these days a low-end phone has much higher specs than that. But, has the phone-using experience really changed much in the last decade? Even the last 2? Specs have gotten better, but it hasn’t really opened up new ways of using the device. Yes, in some ways things are still moving quickly, but it’s always been like that. Some things change rapidly, other things slow down.
I agree that people’s ability to concentrate has been affected. The fact that “attention” has been turned into a kind of currency means that people seem to have lost the ability to focus on one thing for an extended period. That’s something that’s unique to the last 1-2 decades. But, I don’t think people’s interest in learning has changed. It’s just that the traditional way of learning in a classroom is much harder if your attention span is shot. It was never easy, most classes were always boring, but people could get through it because they were still able to focus for extended periods.
School was also always a constraint for most people. People who could go to school for the love of learning rather than as a means to an end were always a lucky minority. If you were really lucky you got a teacher / prof / teaching assistant who could make things interesting. But, in most cases they droned through the required material and you tried to absorb it.
I agree that now that searching the Internet is easier, certain methods of learning / teaching are outdated and haven’t been adapted yet. Memorizing facts was always stupid, but at least when it took a while to look it up in a paper encyclopedia you could just vaguely see the value. But, these days it’s so obviously absurd – yet that’s still what a lot of teachers focus on. It’s not to blame the teachers though. They often don’t have the freedom to change the way they teach, especially today now that there are so many standardized tests. But, memorizing facts about history, for example, is just ridiculous in a world where looking up those facts even with a vague search like “french guy who tried to attack moscow” will take you right to Napoleon.
Some of the most useful classes I ever had were the ones that taught me to analyze and understand information. For example, a philosophy class on analyzing arguments and identifying logical fallacies has been incredibly useful, and only more useful in an age of misinformation and disinformation. Then there were engineering courses that taught how to estimate. Science courses that taught significant figures and error analysis is extremely important when you have calculators / programs that can spit out an answer to dozens of decimal places when the values you supply are approximate. These sorts of things are incredibly useful in a world where a magic machine can spit out an answer and you need to think about whether that answer is reasonable or not.
Looking at music, there’s so much that I’ve learned outside of school that I never learned in school. I stopped taking music classes at the end of high school, and wasn’t all that interested in music for a while. But, since then I’ve become more interested. And, there’s so much that’s not easy to learn just using the Internet. Like, trying to understand the circle of fifths, or the various musical modes, or how to spot certain pop/rock songs as using various 8 or 12 bar blues patterns. I’m lucky because I have a friend who has a PhD in musicology who is willing to chat with me about things I find interesting and want to know more about.
Anyhow, my main points is that I don’t think that kids today are really any different from any other kids throughout history with two main exceptions: their attention span and the immediacy of information on the Internet. Concentrating in school has always been extremely hard, but at least when I was young I hadn’t been trained from age 3 to doom scroll. That means that staying focused through a 1 hour class, which was a chore for me, is a near impossibility for a kid weaned on a smartphone or tablet. As for memorizing, even when I was young, memorizing facts seemed like a waste of time. But, these days it’s clearly ridiculous, but the approach to education hasn’t fully adapted yet. Really, kids in elementary school should be learning how to fact check, how to cross-verify, how to identify misinformation, etc. But, even if teachers know that, they’re boxed in.
Best of luck to you though, it’s good that at least you want to jam information into some brains.
For me personally, life stress and exhaustion are bigger focus inhibitors. I agree that school is largely obsolete and I don’t really blame kids for checking out
I think this is less time-specific, and more just people not being terribly interested in learning.
For example, a professor who specialized in virology was explaining everything about how pathogens spillover between species, using a 2010s ebola outbreak as an example. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time because it was as fascinating as a true horror movie, and yet other students were totally zoned out on Facebook a few rows ahead of me. While the professor was talking about organs dissolving due to the disease and the fecal-oral (and other liquids) route of ebola, which wasn’t exactly a dry subject, lol.
Rinse and repeat for courses on macro/micro economics, mirror neurons, psychology classes on kink, even coding classes.
Either I’m fascinated by stuff most people find boring, or a lot of people just hate learning. I’m thinking it’s the latter, since this stuff encompassed a wide range of really interesting subjects from profs who were really excited about what they taught.
I miss them a lot, I used to corner various profs and TAs and ask them questions about time fluctuations around black holes, rare succulent growing tips in the plant growth center, and biotechnology. It was fun having access to such vibrant people :)
Do a class about sounds of tiktok reels that will be a hit.
I actually do sometimes incorporates memes and stuff from tiktok and other social media in my classes.
