Mindset List

Each fall, as college freshmen crawl onto college campuses with their microwaves, micro-fridges, HD TVs, iPads, and parents’ credit cards, Beloit College releases the “Mindset List,” a reminder of just how out of touch their teachers are and how unaware the incoming students are. Some representative examples from this year’s list (students born in 1993):

What Berlin wall?

They have grown up with bottled water.

Pete Rose has never played baseball.

Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.

Being “lame” has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not disabled.

Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN.

They grew up in Wayne’s World.

Fox has always been a major network.

Burma has always been Myanmar.

I’ve always found this list amusing, even slightly interesting, though it’s always greeted by the news media as some sort of revelation, a bonk on the cultural head walking through the door of the new school year. But of course it’s the kind of thing that could have been compiled for every year for the past several thousand years. Consider what the list might look like from the year I entered college (students born in 1949):

Who was Hitler?

They have grown up with running water (and indoor toilets).

Babe Ruth has never played baseball.

Women have always gone to college (and voted).

Being “a retard” has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not mentally disabled.

Walter Cronkite has always been reading news on TV (and always will).

They grew up in The Twilight Zone.

ABC, NBC, and CBS have always been (the only) TV networks.

Israel has always existed.

There are inevitably several responses to this list. The most ignorant is to denigrate or mock the incoming students for somehow being naïve or lacking in historical and cultural knowledge when all they’ve done is grown up in a different time with a different history and culture. As noted above, we all have had our “mindset list.” This year’s students are no different than last year’s or ten years ago or fifty years ago.

Another response – and probably the most prevalent, particularly by the network and cable newsreaders (and their writers) – is a sort of oh-my-god-can-you-believe-how-old-we’re-getting? This is a wholly self-centered response – what does this say about me? Well, if you’re really this old, don’t you know by now that time moves on, things change, progress happens? Why are you surprised by history?

Of course, the most valid response is that for which the list was originally intended, “as a witty way of saying to faculty colleagues ‘watch your references.’” We teachers grew up in a much different history and culture than our students, and there is often a disconnect between our experiences and allusions and references and theirs. And we have to be aware of that. We’re moving out of a world they’ve never known, and they’re moving into a world we’ll never know. We have just this brief overlay or worlds where we might make some contact and understanding. If we work on the continuity, not the distance.