Why Many Students are Not Learning, Part 2

This essay continues the analysis presented in my book Changing Attitudes, published in 1998 and even more relevant in 2025.

A recent cartoon showed a blackboard with “A, B, C. D. E. F. G” written on it. The teacher stood with chalk in her hand, having just been interrupted by the little boy standing nearby. “I hope that’s about all of them,” he said. “I’m starting to lose interest.” 

Every teacher knows that beneath the humor lies the depressing reality that many students share the little boy’s perspective. For them schoolwork is a useless distraction from the unceasing enjoyment they believe to be everyone’s birthright. Their lack of motivation prevents them from acquiring basic skills and knowledge. as well as from developing the habits of dependability and persistence necessary for success in school and in life. They attend class irregularly, refuse to do homework, and are contemptuous, if not downright hostile toward their teachers and peers.

Pundits are generally oblivious to the problem posed by such behaviors, no doubt because they are busy reciting the old accusatory litany, “If the students haven’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.” Or they blame parents for being too permissive or indulgent, and more interested in defending their children than teaching them good habits.

No doubt some parents fit that description. But many others share the teachers’ values but have the same difficulty teachers do in passing them on.

What values do teachers and parents tend to have in common? The following ones, among others:

Wanting young people to be active participants in learning and in life.

Understanding that truth is discovered by study and reflection.

Believing that the essential ingredient in achievement is effort.

Believing that informed opinions are superior to uninformed ones.

Believing that a sound moral standard is based on more than personal preference.

Believing that intellectual activities are rewarding and satisfying.

Believing that self-improvement requires changing oneself.

Believing that self-discipline is necessary for self-improvement. 

If large numbers of teachers and parents are still doing their best to promote these values, who or what is causing so many young people to adopt opposing values? 

The answer is mass culture—that is, the entertainment and communications media, popular music, radio, and TV, and the advertising industry. [Note: In 1998 schools and colleges were less involved in the opposition to traditional values but since then have played a major role in it, no doubt because educators were themselves increasingly influenced by mass culture.) The opposition included the following:

In opposition to active living, mass culture promotes a spectator mentality and a desire to be entertained.

In opposition to objective truth, mass culture extols subjective, design it yourself reality.

In opposition to through effort, mass culture promotes achievement through self-proclamation.

In opposition to informed opinion, mass culture makes all opinions equally meritorious.

in opposition to demanding moral standards mass culture argues for whatever feels good.

In opposition to intellectual activities, mass culture argues for sensory stimulation.

In opposition to improving oneself, mass culture promotes accepting one’s self as is.

In opposition to thinking for oneself, mass culture encourages accepting popular ideas with our examination.

In opposition to self-control and self-discipline, encourages immoderation and discourages restraint.

Consider the impact of a single medium. By age 18 a person who has watched thee hours of TV a day (from age 5) will have been exposed to over 14,000 hours of mass culture’s ideas and values, enhanced by laugh and applause tracks, background music and other devices of emphasis; commercials too, at the rate of 44 per hour. The average viewer is bombarded with 48,000 commercials annually, each a cleverly designed appeal wrapped in the values of mass culture. [Keep in mind all these figures are from 1998. Today’s figures are much higher.]

Among the myriad themes of popular culture, three are particularly powerful and inimical to learning: self-indulgence, impulsiveness, and instant gratification. Self-indulgence says,”I am entitled to do or say anything I wish because I am more important than other people”; Impulsiveness, “I should follow my urges because spontaneity is more desire than reflectiveness and restraint is repressive”; and instant gratification, “Pleasure delayed is pleasure denied.”

The principal reason for today’s academic deficiency is that mass culture has undermined young peoples’ desire to learn as well as their respect for parents and teachers. This unfortunately situation is not likely to change until the purveyors of that culture acknowledge their responsibility to help rather than hinder the process of education. Only then will the unhealthy attitudes they have created in young people be effectively addressed.

[Note: The 1998 book went on to explain the unhealthy attitudes that needed to be corrected. The next part of this essay will explain those attitudes which have become more serious in the quarter century that has followed.]

Copyright © 2025 by Vincent Ryan Ruggiero. All rights reserved.