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The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30) By Mark Bauerlein ( Tarcher )
Release Date: 2008-05-15
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Product Description
This shocking, lively exposure of the intellectual vacuity of today’s under thirty set reveals the disturbing and, ultimately, incontrovertible truth: cyberculture is turning us into a nation of know-nothings.
Can a nation continue to enjoy political and economic predominance if its citizens refuse to grow up?
For decades, concern has been brewing about the dumbed-down popular culture available to young people and the impact it has on their futures. At the dawn of the digital age, many believed they saw a hopeful answer: The Internet, e-mail, blogs, and interactive and hyper-realistic video games promised to yield a generation of sharper, more aware, and intellectually sophisticated children. The terms “information superhighway” and “knowledge economy” entered the lexicon, and we assumed that teens would use their knowledge and understanding of technology to set themselves apart as the vanguards of this new digital era.
That was the promise. But the enlightenment didn’t happen. The technology that was supposed to make young adults more astute, diversify their tastes, and improve their verbal skills has had the opposite effect. According to recent reports, most young people in the United States do not read literature, visit museums, or vote. They cannot explain basic scientific methods, recount basic American history, name their local political representatives, or locate Iraq or Israel on a map. The Dumbest Generation is a startling examination of the intellectual life of young adults and a timely warning of its consequences for American culture and democracy.
Drawing upon exhaustive research, personal anecdotes, and historical and social analysis, Mark Bauerline presents an uncompromisingly realistic portrait of the young American mind at this critical juncture, and lays out a compelling vision of how we might address its deficiencies.
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 A Valuable Contribution; Need to Separate Wheat From Chaff ( jmgorman17 )
In 'The Dumbest Generation', author Mark Bauerlein articulates two big ideas:
1) Americans need to consider the opportunity cost associated with digital technology.
2) The 1960s Youth Movement (sanctioned by Rutgers University English professor Richard Poirier) began with "independent, creative, skeptical, mental energies", but later devolved into "routine irreverence and knowledge deficits".
This is a very valuable contribution to an ongoing debate over how to best educate our nation's youth. My only criticism is that the book's structure forces the reader to separate the wheat from the chaff.
For instance, Mr. Bauerlein front loads the book's first three chapters with a bevy of statistics to support his larger points. While these statistics help to refute Mr. Bauerlein's critics, they slow down a reader who is trying to grasp those larger points by themselves.
On the other hand, Mr. Bauerlein's writing really shines in Chapters Four, Five, and Six. In these chapters, Mr. Bauerlein incorporates more narrative to explain why digital technology is not the educational panacea that its proponents claim it to be. He also traces the beginnings of the anti-knowledge and anti-intellectual movement back to the 1960s. Here, the author's writing flows, making for a much more effective presentation.
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 Not just a problem with this generation ( jcondron )
I will start by admitting that I have not read this book (nor am I likely to, even though I am not by any stretch of the imagination a millenial). I am responding to the idea that this is a problem specific to that maligned generation.
I recently read a newspaper article bemoaning the fact that the writer's fifth grader had recently turned in a "research paper" almost entirely "cut and pasted" from Internet sources. The writer compared this to his own experience as a fifth grader, constructing a research paper over a period of weeks, spending hours in the library, transferring information to 3x5 cards, writing an outline, then a first draft, etc., etc., etc. I was struck by two things. First, he did not admit the obvious - that he and his classmates complained through every step of this process, and would not have done it on their own. They had not choice but to do all of that work, because their teachers, Principal, and parents (i.e., adults), insisted.
I was also struck by the fact that he, himself (a professional with a masters degree), did not insist that his little darling actually do the work, to his own apparently high standards. He did not object to his progeny stealing the words of others, but blamed the problem on the Internet! Not himself. Not the teacher. Not the school system. Not even the little plagiarist. But the Internet.
The dumbing down of America started long before the so-called "millenials" were born, and was not caused by the Internet, Ipods, mobile phones, video games, or any of the other things the author cites (contribution does not equal cause). This can be proved by a single observation. The current President was not elected - not once but twice - by millenials, but by their parents and grandparents (As I am sure the author points out, millenials rarely vote, though this may change with the current election). Case closed!
That doesn't mean we don't have a problem. The dumbing down of America is real, and ongoing, but it is much bigger than this author suggests, and clearly includes his own generation, as well.
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Great ideas, once he finally gets rolling ( sakura_systems )
I am old enough to know how to do mental arithmetic. Excluding the copious bibliography, this is a 236 page book that does not really get rolling until page 163. That's two-thirds of the way through. The first several chapters are a laborious accounting of all of the new generation's shortcomings. The chapter titles are "Knowledge Deficits", "The New Bibliophobes," "Screen Time," and "Online Learning And Not Learning." He marshals exhaustive documentation to demonstrate that today's kids do not read much and consequently do not have a very impressive vocabularies, knowledge of history, or familiarity with math and science.
In the last 10 years I have been a high school teacher and a grad student at the university. I would have granted these points rather readily. Moreover, most people who would dispute these points are not going to sit down and read a book that delights in exercising a postgraduate level vocabulary. My most poignant critique of this book would be that, excellent as it may be, the writing alone make it inaccessible to "The Dumbest Generation." If not them, who is Bauerlein trying to convince?
After he has successfully brushed off the dummies Bauerlein's last couple of chapters, which attempt to explain the phenomenon, make a series of very good points. We adults who are supposed to be in charge of our children's formation and education have abdicated our responsibilities. We have found it easier to cave in to them. To mistake a facile familiarity with the use of electronic gadgetry to socialize with deep understanding. To ascribe literary merit to their puerile Facebook blogs. To let them retreat for hours to their bedrooms surrounded by cell phones, telephones, computers, and every form of video and audio entertainment. To back away from engaging them in meaningful adult conversation about serious topics. They are growing up without adult guidance, only the now obligatory strokes to their self-esteem. The result is a disaster.
We allow our children to reject their cultural heritage in toto, not because they have examined it and found it wanting, but because it would be simply too much work to become familiar with it. Bauerlein cites young artists who have only contempt for the discipline that made Rembrandt and Picasso the great artists that they were. They proclaim that everything can be successfully invented ad novum, not on the basis of any evidence but on the conviction that it is not worth the effort to learn from what has been done previously. They are simply lazy and self-absorbed.
I am familiar with Bauerlein's geographical references in the Washington, DC area. He starts by talking about Walt Whitman high school, the subject of "The Overachievers," a chronicle of obsessive high school students. My daughter recently graduated from that school, and I would say that her peers put little premium on genuine learning. Some did study very hard to ace the standardized tests, but the passion for socializing certainly outweighed the passion for learning.
I could say the same for the elite private schools in which I taught. There is a minority, but it is a distinct minority, who relish discussing ideas. Even there, most kids seem to be caught up with the anti-intellectualism of our popular culture. There is a general disdain for hard work. Some of this disdain has its origins in the self-esteem movement. The schools want to avoid anything that will tend to highlight differences in innate ability among students. Even talented students are readily complicit in this game, because it means more time for their friends and other pursuits.
It was not much better at the University of Maryland, to which I return to pursue an advanced degree. Some of the older students in the College of Education seemed genuinely interested in the coursework. For most it was simply something to get out of the way so they can get on with their lives. The statistics Department was substantially better, but it is telling that out of a Department of 60 some graduate students, I was close to the only WASP male. The department was overwhelmingly Asian, and overseas Asians at that. Good students, but not a good reflection on American secondary education.
Bauerlein does not propose much in the way of remedies. I do not think that there are any. I live now in Kiev, where university level academics appear to have somewhat more rigor than in the United States, but the same pernicious effects are at work. The Internet cafés are so full of video game nuts that you can barely find the terminal to check your e-mail. No kid goes five minutes without initiating or receiving a call or an SMS on their cell phone.
Computer technologies in themselves are not bad. Word, Dragon Naturally Speaking, Excel and the Internet are Godsends for people who work with information. The question is getting kids to use them intelligently.
My own modest proposal would be to teach children how to use technology to do their schoolwork. It is a given that they all have computers. It is a tragedy that they do not know how to do anything useful with Excel, research a paper using the Internet to do much more than plagiarize, put together a PowerPoint presentation that is longer on substance that blinking whirligigs, or even use Microsoft Word to format the paper properly. I believe schools could teach this. I further believe that schools could use blocks to prevent rampant wasting of time cruising the Internet for material totally unrelated to school. I think that they could prevent the computer CD-ROM readers from being used to blare music during study halls. In a nutshell, I think that if we adults gave a damn about the future of the country, we might bestir ourselves to retake the control over our children and their education that we ceded in the 1960s. I'm not holding my breath.
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 The Dumbest Generation
If ever there is an explanation for the incredible rise of Barak Obama, it is the message of The Dumbest Generation. This is an excellent treatise on why the 18-29 generation is getting dumbed down in spite of technology.
When American Idol draws 30 million viewers and the Presidential debates only 3 million, the Republic is in peril. This book clarifies the issues.
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 Shallow and mean-spirited ( mmales )
English professor Mark Bauerlein spends 250 pages telling us what America's young don't know. Here are some massive trends affecting students over the last 30 to 50 years he doesn't seem to know: the evolution from elitism toward universal education, the defunding of public education, college tuitions rising four times faster than inflation, erupting student debt, forced deferral of higher education, the influx of non-English-speaking students, the rise of the service economy... details like that.
What's even more amazing--in a book that lauds scholarship and intellectual inquiry--there is almost no original research, especially on the fundamental point the "dumbest generation" title claims to address. I expected Bauerlein to make his case by analyzing long-term surveys by the Higher Education Research Institute and Monitoring the Future and dozens of Digest of Education Statistics tables on trends, etc.--but he barely mentions them.
The reason, of course, is that the best education information exposes how superficial this book is. The biggest trend it omits (among many) is that since the 1950s, America has radically expanded its education system: high schools now include the poorest third of youth and colleges now educate more than just the richest fraction. The proportion of 16-24 year-olds who were enrolled in school or had graduated from high school rose from 60% to 91%, the percentage of high school graduates who had completed standard coursework tripled, the proportion of high school seniors taking SAT and ACT college admission tests doubled, and the percentage enrolled in college more than doubled.
Such rapid expansion bringing tens of millions of formerly uneducated youth into the education system would be expected to reduce average test scores. Remarkably, this didn't happen. Older students' reading and math scale comprehension scores are just as high, and younger students' are considerably higher, compared to 30 years ago. After bottoming out in the mid-1970s (when Bauerlein was in high school), standardized SAT and ACT scores rose slightly even as vastly greater percentages of high schoolers were taking the tests. If we compared the share of students fluent in two or more languages, the generational gains would be even more impressive.
Take a salient example: in 1975, American student scores on the ACT standard test of English, math, reading, and science averaged 20.6; in 2007, 21.2. Not much of an improvement in three decades, correct? Here's the gain: in 1975, just 17% of the nation's 18-year-olds took the test; in 2007, 30%. SAT and other standard tests show similar trends. Likewise, fewer than one-third of high school graduates of 30 years ago had completed a basic core curriculum (four English, three social science, two science, and two math credits), compared to over 80% today.
Bauerlein's limited analysis focuses only on the elitist "vertical" accumulation of knowledge (whether the average test taker is smarter today) while ignoring the more important "horizontal" gains (the spread of knowledge to broader segments of the population). If Bauerlein is really concerned about democracy, he should be cheering these egalitarian improvements.
One would expect Bauerlein to fully discuss the universalization of American education before calling today's students "dumb." Instead, he fills the book with quickie outtakes from some recent surveys absent historical context, secondhand numbers he apparently didn't analyze, silly television and mass-media quips, and quotes from teachers and others castigating the younger generation with epithets that were already hackneyed in Socrates' time. Bauerlein indulges the standard array of shallow prejudices against adolescents ("the 17-year-old mind," "the 18-year-old life," the "adolescent horde"), the usual snobbish praise of himself and middle-agers' self-anointed citizenship and intellectuality, and the same-old myth that kids today have too many rights. Meanwhile, his own narrowness is painful: nearly all the books he recommends are by classical European authors, as if 90% of the world's intellectual tradition didn't exist.
Put simply, this book is full of fluff and conceit, a lot of it blatantly unfair. Bauerlein cites some recent alarms (the same that recur every decade or two) to insinuate that today's youth represent an apocalyptic "decline" and "breakdown" compared to older America's presumably cultured, intellectual past (a past he never shows actually existed). He quotes the HERI survey to deplore today's "college delinquency" (being late, skipping classes, etc.) but fails to note the same survey reports these same behaviors going back 40 years. He complains about low voter turnout among 18-29 year-olds but somehow missed the massive increase in the 2004 election to record peaks. He cites a sketchy survey on political knowledge as evidencing young people's ignorance but fails to mention it also finds big knowledge gaps by race, sex, and education and income level.
Bauerlein doesn't even title his book right. His gripe is not that today's youth really are the "dumbest generation," but that "young Americans today are no more learned or skillful than their predecessors." That's an entirely different point, and it's contradicted by measures showing higher proportions of today's younger generation do know more.
But what is really disturbing about this book and its fans' uncritical praise is the self-adulation and complete lack of humility. Face it, we older Americans (I'm 57) aren't exactly setting cosmic records as intellectual beacons, enlightened leaders, and philosopher kings. This is yet another in the avalanche of egotistical books by Boomer and older Xer authors lavishly praising ourselves and our generation as morally and intellectually superior to the "dumb," "unworthy" young that utterly fail to represent the critical scholarship these authors say they prize.
--Mike Males, Ph.D., http://www.YouthFacts.org
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