Catherine Saint Louis

Each week, we’ll cull the interwebs for the most relevant articles, videos and commentary about Millennials and social change, and then present them right here in a weekly round-up. It’s not to say we won’t also provide our own fresh content and perspectives throughout the week, because we will—as will our provocative and savvy Social Citizen Ambassadors. But you can view this space as a central repository for all of the great stuff that’s filling our newsfeeds, twitter feeds, and Facebook streams.

We’ll do the curating for you, just come by and pay us a visit – and drop a comment every now and then to let us know how we’re doing and what we’re missing. And now for this week’s round-up…

A New Generation of Musicians

I’m betting that at least half of the people reading this have taken a music lesson at some point in their life. I remember packing up my piano books for lessons at Mrs. Murray’s house each week when I was a kid—critical to those memories were the familiar smells that always greeted me when I entered, the feel of the well-worn piano bench, and of course the guiding hands of Mrs. Murray as I tried to play a difficult measure or passage of music.

Those memories are so integral to the learning process that I could not separate the two. So I was surprised to read an article in The New York Times about the increasing popularity of video chat platforms as a way to teach music. The trend of teaching online seems to be working for everything from math and science, to cooking lessons—but music? Really?

Catherine Saint Louis reports that Skype, Google+, and others have “transformed the simple phone call, but the technology is venturing into a new frontier: it is upending and democratizing the world of music lessons… There is no data on the number of video music lessons, and many people certainly will prefer face-to-face lessons. But many music teachers said in interviews that they were conducting more lessons over broadband connections.”

What do you make of this novel approach to learning music (or any subject matter)? Would you ever take lessons or teach online? Do you think this will catch on? 

Where’s Waldo?

Searching books for an illustrated character outfitted in a trademark red and white shirt and blue pants is a task most young Americans can do without much difficulty. Ask those same people to point to the city of Miami or the country of Kenya on a map of the world and you may be surprised by the results.

Victoria Johnson writes for Fortnight about the lack of knowledge in geography among young people in America. She cites “a 1989 Gallup poll by the National Geographic Society’s then-president Gilbert M. Grosvenor [who] challenged young people (ages 18-24) in nine countries to label sixteen locations on a world map. Americans averaged 7/16, and only 25% could label the Persian Gulf, despite the US teetering on the brink of the Gulf War.” Similar studies by National Geographic in 2002 and 2006 resulted in essentially the same findings--of young Americans performing poorly when it comes to geographic aptitude.

A cartographer and a Millennial, Johnson sights the increasing decline in our collective knowledge of basic geography. She notes, “Geography education, of course, is so much more than just labeling places on a map. But it’s a fine indicator of an individual’s geographic awareness. After all, you need to know where things are to fully understand their relationship with one another.”

For future generations this dearth of geographic knowledge, or should I say lack of geographic awareness, seems like a relatively minor problem—what’s the big deal after all, when one can simply search online for these places. Geographic borders no longer carry the same meaning in large part due to advances in transportation and the internet. Problem solved, right? Or is it? Johnson argues no—“A basic understanding of geographic principles relies on having some knowledge of relative location. Without that, you’re nowhere. You are actually no where.”

What value do you think geography has in our education and society? While this post from Johnson focuses on young adults and their knowledge of the world, how do you think other generations would fare if asked the same questions?