OF A GOLDEN AGE

My beloved alma mater (Beloit College), and my beloved advisor (Tom McBride), each year release the Mindset List, a hilarious and insulting rigmarole of what this year’s entering students don’t know about. With such startling revelations as “55. Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties,” the list reads like an annual scanning of the “Events of 1992″ page on Wikipedia.

I hate this list and it makes me mad, mostly because it doesn’t actually build the understanding it pretends to aim toward. More and more people have no guilt or shame whatsoever in their total lack of knowledge of what came before they were born, and have a borderline-adversarial relationship with the interests of their parents or other adults. We build more lateral connections, with peers and friends and even trusted strangers via blogs or TV, than we do vertical connections, with relatives, educators, and so forth.

The list’s makers insist it is only to give a frame of reference to adults who do not wish to sound irrelevant to the young people in their lives. Yet all the list does is remind everyone how old they are and subtly imply that young people are worse off for their level of knowledge. It makes both sides defensive and both take issue with the items on the list.

The New Yorker asks if the Mindset List is still relevant:

The Beloit list has always been a bit musty, often trading in cultural totems as stale as coffee in a faculty lounge. (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.

I wouldn’t go that far. But I do question the list’s relevance every year. Even if a few people my age at Beloit thought of Paul Newman as “the salad dressing guy” (an item of note on our list), that made me feel deeply embarrassed by their ignorance. The Beloit students I know are also embarrassed that the Mindset List is our college’s only entrance into the national consciousness.

no responses