At age 80, I am an old man. I am also an experienced writer and voracious reader. I’ve been active in internet bulletin boards and social media interest groups since the 1980s—in what we used to call “users net” (USENET)—before the emergence of the World Wide Web.
In the 1980s, I briefly moderated a community on the internet called “Internet Village Elders.” The forum was intended to share information between librarians and others concerning the world’s largest information marketplace. We disbanded after a year. The explosion of information sources made it impossible to keep up. The emergence of internet search engines had also convinced large numbers of people that they could find anything they needed online, without us.
Missing from public perception then and today was a discomforting underlying reality: most internet users don’t know how to authenticate “information” (or invalidate misinformation) that they recover from online searches.
In 1992, I spoke of these realities before a faculty off-site conference at a university in Virginia. After I introduced myself, I asked the audience of 80 professors for a show of hands on a series of questions.
How many of you have faculty email accounts? (Almost all hands went up.)
How many also have personal email accounts? (Perhaps 50 out of 80.)
How many of you get a “you’ve got mail” alert when new email comes in to either of your accounts? (15.)
How many of you have published a research paper online, in collaboration with other investigators whom you have never met in person? (Only two hands.)
I looked across the audience and said, “I suggest that ten years from now, these two individuals will be the only members of junior faculty among you who will be under serious consideration for tenure.” You could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium before I proceeded with a review of internet information spaces and sources. My prediction has since been confirmed.
One of the points I made in that conference was this: “You are about to receive an incoming freshman class that will include many young people who believe they can find anything they need on the net and that all of it is true because it’s there. They are wrong.
“Job one for you as instructors will be to disabuse them of this silly notion. You need to learn enough about source verification to anticipate their misadventures. You will also need tools to detect plagiarism and misquotation of sources. And if you fail in this learning, then you will send many of your students into the larger world very ill-prepared to deal with its complexity and contention.”
Although I cannot say whether this particular academic audience got the message, the past 30 years convinces me that many others haven’t. Even college graduates these days are horribly naive about subjects of great import, to which their education has not exposed them. These include:
Basic economics: Within the next ten years, the U.S. Social Security and Medicare trust funds will become insolvent. For these systems to continue, either tax revenues must be raised or benefits must be reduced enough to cause widespread hardship for retired seniors. I am appalled by how often one reads the assertion today that “they can’t do this—I paid into the trust fund and I own my benefits.”
Reality is different: many Social Security recipients live long enough to collect substantially more in benefits than they and their employers paid into the trust fund while working. The ratio of working wage earners to retirees is dropping. In the face of this looming crisis, the U.S. Congress dithers and avoids engagement.
Health care: America has the highest health care costs in the world. Medical bills are a frequent cause of personal bankruptcy. But we do not have better health. Infant mortality rates in the U.S. rank 57th among 195 countries that measure such rates. Many U.S. deaths are caused by preventable diseases. Infectious diseases cause 22 percent of all deaths. Anti-vaxxers remain wedded to the lie that vaccinations “cause” autism, even as rates of childhood measles and whooping cough are again rising.
Smoking tobacco causes multiple types of cancers, and 13 percent of deaths are alcohol- and drug-related. Approximately 37 million Americans have diabetes, including about 300,000 children and adolescents. The majority of diagnosed cases are Type 2 diabetes, which is often associated with obesity.
As I have written elsewhere, “everything that the U.S. government thinks it knows about the opioid crisis is wrong.” Pain is the symptom that most often brings patients to a doctor’s office. But more than half of all U.S. community clinics are refusing new patients seeking pain management; law enforcement and state medical board intimidation have criminalized the practice of pain medicine, driving doctors out of medicine in droves. Likewise, the number of clinicians who have recent training in the evaluation of research protocols that lie behind the journal papers they read is minuscule.
Relationships and emotional life: We do an absolutely terrible job of educating our kids about the most important relationships in their adult lives. Over 50 percent of all U.S. first marriages and an even higher proportion of second and third marriages now end in divorce.
Although some form of sexual education on abstinence and prevention of human immuno-virus infection is almost universal in U.S. high schools, over 30 percent of U.S. teens receive no education in birth control methods. Approximately 9.1 million new cases of sexually transmitted disease (48 percent of all new cases) occurred among 15- to 24-year-olds in 2000. In 2020, young people accounted for 53 percent of new cases.
Approximately one in four girls and somewhat lower numbers of boys in the U.S. experience child sexual abuse. An estimated 560,000 children were victims of abuse and neglect in the U.S. in 2022. Between 15,000 and 50,000 women and children are forced into sex trafficking every year. But education on sex trafficking for teens is only beginning to get underway in most U.S. high schools.
Civics and politics (where do we begin?): Only a quarter of Americans can name all three branches of government, a significant decline from previous years. Public trust in government is less than 20 percent. Bad behavior and political corruption are not the only causes of this abysmal condition. Seven U.S. states presently do not require civics courses in high school, and 20 lack the requirement in middle school.
A third of Americans cannot name even one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition for grievances). Just over 70 percent know that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms. Many of those who are aware of that amendment seem disposed to ignore the high death toll among children and others murdered with assault weapons in mass shootings every year. Public knowledge drops significantly for the third through tenth amendments.
A 2006 National Geographic survey found that only about 50 percent of young Americans aged 18 to 24 could locate New York on a map. Informal online quizzes and surveys often show that the average American can name somewhere between 20 to 30 state capitals correctly. Even for their own state capital, many Americans have difficulty.
Is it any wonder that Americans are vulnerable to the focused efforts of multiple anti-democratic governments to sow disinformation and promote widening distrust of democratic institutions? Our educational system has failed us. Fixing it is going to be hard and contentious work. But until we do, we may be wise to pay heed to the words of the immortal cartoon character, Pogo, as written by Walt Kelly:
Richard A. Lawhern is a patient advocate.
