The Wrong Mindset

It's time for my regular rant about the Mindset List.

In case you're unfamiliar: Beloit College, a liberal-arts school in Southern Wisconsin (that's in Ripon's conference), puts out this thing every year called the Mindset List. A few humanities or social sciences professors sit around and list a whole bunch of cultural references that, while familiar to adults, are not familiar to 18-year old freshman. To read the mindset list, click here.

A few years ago, I wrote a long rant explaining how stupid this list is. (You can find it here... It was back in the days when this blog was far more expletive-filled.) Basically, it came down to two big problems with the list:

1. It assumes 18-year old students can't relate to cultural references to anything that happened before 1990 or so.
   
   
2. It places far too much importance on relatively meaningless trivia. For example, this year's list explains that to this year's incoming freshmen:

   12. Smoking has never been permitted on U.S. airlines.
   15. They have never had to distinguish between the St. Louis Cardinals baseball and football teams.
   25. Phantom of the Opera has always been on Broadway.
   29. Computerized player pianos have always been tinkling in the lobby.
   42. Ken Burns has always been producing very long documentaries on PBS.

   Do these things have anything to do with the mindset of 18-year-olds? With the exception of those 18-year-olds who are huge Arizona Cardinals fans, I think not.

Anyway, this year's rant is a short one because I got beat to it by Chris Heard (who is himself a college professor), who trashes this year's list in a snarky blog post. The highlight:

Okay, I don’t want to through each of the 75 items like this. Most of the rest could be grouped into such categories as “false,” “overstated,” or “irrelevant.” What the list really boils down to is this: the members of the class of 2010 take for granted some things that earlier generations lived through. Wow. What a revelation.

Amen. As I wrote two years ago, if college professors really cared about the mindset of their new students (and not just the fact that they grew up riding in minivans and listening to canned lobby music), then maybe they'd sit down with these (presumably bright) 18-year-olds and ask them, "Tell me about the world you live in."