Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, has a thought-provoking and well-written essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the transformation of the learning experience in the age of ubiquitous networks. He seems sympathetic and in-touch with the experience of the always-on Millennials who filter through his classroom or plant themselves in his office to get "ten minutes on Freud." The existence he imputes to them screams "shallow!" but he never lets the actual judgment pass his lips. He seems to acknowledge the excitement and urgency of living in a world of nearly limitless choices but cannot quite credit their generational experience of reality with the depth and quality of a life of deliberate, linear, sequential study.

Edmunson also leaves mostly unsaid the usual littany of worries about the future for this generation, or the kind of culture they will make - though again, this trickles between the lines of his reference-heavy and occasionally florid prose. This paragraph toward the top is as close as he comes to expressing that sentiment.

This hunger for life has a number of consequences, for now and for the future. It's part of what makes this student generation appealing, highly promising — and also radically vulnerable. These students may go on to do great and good things, but they also present dangers to themselves and to the common future. They seem almost to have been created, as the poet says, "half to rise and half to fall." As a teacher of theirs (and fellow citizen), I'm more than a little concerned about which it's going to be.

I have to admit I have my own concerns about the survival of the liberal arts curriculum and, more significantly, the social and intellectual values implicit in it, but they are not generational concerns. Every generation of elders has looked on the rising crop of youth with varying measures of alarm. The Transcendentalists and Romantics of the 19th century whom Edmundson cites with such approval were seen as troublemaking punks and wooly-headed radicals in their day. Yet by the time they had passed through history, that left the culture richer than they found it. Every generation is transformed by technology, and somehow manages to preserve the enduring values worth preserving. 50 years from now, I'd bet that one of Edmundson's students will be expressing the same sentiments of beduddlement, enlightened sympathy and concern through whatever mode technology makes possible.

Edmundson's deeper concern is for the intellectual infrastructure that undergirds our civilization, and his unspoken fear is that the ernest, ambitious Millennials who are speed-skating through college, scattered in a kaleidoscope of possibilities and experiences, will come and go without internalizing the deep commitment to Enlightenment values necessary to preserve the true accomplishments of our culture from the genuine forces that threaten it. As I said, I sympathize with that concern. But I don't think much is gained by focusing objections on technology (Edmundson proudly announces at the end of his essay his intention to ban laptops from his classroom in the coming semester), than to ensure that the educational establishment adapts to new ways of learning and finds a way of accomplishing its mission without throwing itself bodily on the gears and levers that, for better or worse, drive the contemporary world.