The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future...

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't ... | Mark Bauerlein | John Stuart Mill's chickens come home to roost

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The Dumbest Genera...

	The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't ... Mark Bauerlein Tarcher, 2008 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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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Insightful and important analysis...

Educators and parents need to hear Mark Bauerlein's message. With all the resources available via digital technology to today's youth, most of them are not benefiting from it intellectually. Why is this? According to Bauerlein, it is largely because of the way this technology is being used - unsupervised - to enable endless social networking and mindless adolescent chat. Having witnessed this behavior even among 20-somethings in my own workplace, it rings true. The younger generation is simply not reading anymore - at least not anything of lasting value. The level of ignorance of relatively recent American history, let alone formative events in our country's more distant past, is shocking - as detailed in copious statistics the author presents.

The most valuable part of this book, however, is its final chapter, in which Bauerlein uses the metaphor of Rip Van Winkle to explicate the serious consequences of historical and cultural ignorance. Beyond this, he attempts to explain how we have come to this serious juncture and what steps can be taken to turn the tide. After all, this wealth of available information via the Internet and digital media should help to make today's youth MORE aware than ever before of their rich cultural heritage, IF it is utilized properly. Too many adults have wrongly assumed that simply granting access to the technology would inevitably improve academic performance. Parents and educators need to recognize this and take action before it is too late.

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John Stuart Mill's chickens come home to roost

Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation joins the rank of books which invite us--compel us--to do some serious thinking about the future of democracy. If meaningful participation in the civic and political process is based on a certain degree of cultural literacy, and if the literacy of the up and coming "millennial" generation is declining, the future is foreboding.

At times Bauerlein comes across as slightly curmudgeonly, particularly in his insistence (in Chapter 5) that the mentors of the 60s generation allowed it to hijack the college curriculum and contribute to the overall decline of American literacy. But he also makes some very good points along the way.

In his first chapter, he documents the astounding and frightening across-the-board decline of achievement scores for 17-24 year-olds. Chapters 2,3,4, and 5 try to explain the decline: abysmally low levels of reading; increased immersion in digital technology, both in and out of school, that may enhance information retrieval skills but is destroying information appraisal ones, as well as siphoning off public school monies from the arts and even sciences; and poor mentoring that fails to encour age students to explore their cultural traditions, but instead uncritically hops on the technological bandwagon.

In his final chapter, Bauerlein quite interestingly argues that culture wars are good, because they keep all participants on their toes and the ensuing dialogue, heated as it sometimes can get, generates insight. But in an age in which we've lost touch with both knowledge and tradition, the lively dialogue of past culture wars becomes impossible, and single-lined dogmatism and intolerance easily replace them.

The case that Bauerlein makes for the dumbing down of the millennial generation is compelling and frightening. It becomes even more so when one stops to realize, as Rick Shenkman demonstrates in his recent Just How Stupid Are We? (2008), that a sizeable percentage of over-millennials are pretty illiterate too when it comes to the simplest civic, political, historical, and economic knowledge (forget about science and math).

John Stuart Mill clearly foresaw the danger to democracy of an electorate increasingly out of touch with the information it needs to make informed, reflective decisions. Obviously knowledge isn't a cure-all. Well-educated people can make quite foolish and even wicked decisions (which is just to say that the moral will needs to be cultivated along with the mind). But it can hardly be denied that a familiarity with basic public policy issues is a mimimal necessary condition for responsible citizenship. If Bauerlein and others are correct about falling literacy rates in this country, the Millian chickens will soon come home to roost.

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The Answer Book

If you are wondering why Britney Spears gets more air time than the Iraq or the other pressing problems of the world then this book is for you. This book should be required reading for every parent and every teacher in America. I think it confirms what people have been seeing already. How kids know technology but seem not to know content. The book shows how reason, logic and independent thought is disappearing from the country side.

The author, Mark Bauerlein attacks one of the biggest embedded lies in America. He does this head on, not from the side. This idea is that we are smarter than ever before because of computers. The new age of computers demands new ways of educating. This idea which has swept America is that computers by itself will save us and ensure the future. Somehow the technology that gives us Britney 24/7 and the vivid video games in the living room will also magically educate our kids. Technology will solve it all cry some.

Mark shows the idiocy of that idea in stunning detail. His points are very well documented from a variety of sources. The book is easy to read and flows well. The author first highlights the problem. The statistics are very clear, we aren't getting any smarter in spite of the growing use of technology in our lives. Then Mark shows how the educational institution has changed. Computers are being used more in education. Tests show they don't produce smarter kids. Standards are being lowered in the name of adapting to the "new age". This new age demands new procedures. Many in schools say this new age should be met all via computers.

Mark then shows how this constant barrage of the internet, technology and lower educational expectations has taken it's cost. Students do what students have done for centuries. When left to themselves they take the route of least resistance. They are studying less and focusing on stupid stuff. Instead of doing homework time is being filled with TV watching, chatting on web sites like myspace, and concerning themselves with such horrors as Britney Spear's life over other important things like history or science. This formula of constant stimulation for pleasure has eroded people's ability to reason, gather facts, and communicate.

Mark does point fingers, appropriately. He has a whole chapter that shows this problem is one of many problems society has to deal with from the 60s. The current teachers of today were the students of the 60s. The liberal attitudes then have become the liberal practices of today in the class room. The impact cuts across political lines. Arguments now come from catch phrases mentioned on talk shows or on web sites. They don't come from the great thinkers of the age or from the ideas and issues themselves.

The impact of this is degrading of the country. Our economic power is at stake. Students aren't getting the skills they need to compete in the world. They don't have an understanding of the world but they know who won American Idol. They graduate from college stuck in a perpetual childhood of sorts. He calls them Twixters. This erosion of independent thought threatens the nation. It creates people who will buy anything shinny as they do on web sites or something slick like what they see on TV or the computer screen, not what is right. This leads to election of people who might not be the best for the country.

I think everyone will love this book. It will open up your eyes in a new way.

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READ IT & WEEP...

Professor Mark Bauerlein's THE DUMBEST GENERATION is easily readable piece of tocsin scholarship.It will be welcomed or denounced precisely according to one's interest-in/love of,or indifference-to/hatred of READING.[P.12~ Q: Where does the Pope reside? A:England; Q: Where in England? A:Paris; Q:How many Stars on the Flag? A:52.. Obama thinks 57!]Jay Leno jokes might be sufficient to case-close the book there. But TDG delivers like Thunderball apocalyptic facts and statistical surveys re ignorance of Millennials [A NATION At RISK 4/1983;reprise STILL at RISK 4/2008: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research].
Inescapable conclusion: America's children are dangerously limited in common knowledge;and basic skills & civic-moral attitudes founded upon this KNOWLEDGE.

Our kiddoes are stellar adepts in i-Phones/video games/e-mail useage/text messaging & cheating on school work(lifting info w/w for term paper assignments;or stealing exams & imaging them about the "school" for the perusal of class mate homies). They are equally adept at new(un)LEARNING MODALITY~The DIGITAL(stupor). The latter Deconstructs classic visual/audeo/kinesthetic learning modes and replaces/rewires essentially linear-cognitive processes, replacing them with non-linear a-logical"emotives". This is particularly destructive to READING which demands intense LOGICAL focus and interactive judgment/evaluation of text/words against a person's Language Categories/Logos to verify a verbal information base[books;maps;instructions/directions]as valid and
dependable;"worthy" or...to the point~ dismissible as WRONG.

Linguist Frank Smith renowned work UNDERSTANDING READING ~A Psycholinquistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read repeatedly documents the key dimension of reading as KNOWLEDGE PROCESSING. His work begins...and concludes...with apparently tautological Commandment:
"Children learn to read by Reading". The Problem is...according to Professor Bauerlein and 27-year teachers like myself: Today's children don't...therefore CAN'T...read. A more disturbing conclusion is they can't THINK~lacking both linear cognitive processing faculties and the Language(knowledge)Categories necessary for analysis and judgment of (potential)information~ even Truth.

Hence~ AMERICAN IDOL;CHAT-ROOM;YOU-TUBE SURFING & NARCISSISTIC MIRROR/MIRROR/on the WALL websites dominate psyches and psychologies of today's young people(and their Yuppster parents).Soon-to-be-defunct New York Times has finally arrived to declaim on this crisis(LITERARY DEBATE: "Online,R U Really Reading?" 7/27/2008). Somehow exalted NYT will find a way to blame President Bush. The ironies of the article are too manifest to argue. (Other than in a short time former "All the News that's Fit to Print" Grey Lady may not exist to be churlish with non-
existent readers.)

Title THE DUMBEST GENERATION may,indeed,offend potential readers. But, IMO,the line between offending and PROVOKING still-capable readers into self-awareness and debate has not been crossed. The DIGITAL WORLD is essentially about entertainment(at best)and mind-destroying DISTRACTION at worst. Bauerlein's book is about Reality~some very dangerous truth. T.S.Eliot prophetically asserted "the average man can bear only a little truth;..while spending much of his life being distracted from distraction by DISTRACTION." In PM reality it may be too late to do anything about this. Our schools are locked in nonsense(cf~Frank Smith INSULT to INTELLIGENCE) Testing Agendas that abet and contribute to the fecklessness and inability to read that is crippling most students.Yet as long as there is healthy FEAR of what is occurring(cf:chapter 5~"The Betrayal of the Mentors"; or Victor Davis Hanson's seminal WHO KILLED HOMER?),there is hope. To recall the voice that summoned St.Augustine to action: TAKE and READ...while you still can(451 Ray Bradbury warning stars)!

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A Too-Narrow Polemic that Screeches and Overreaches

Everything from Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" interviews to a host of national surveys and tests demonstrates that today's 15 - 29 year-olds have an atrocious lack of at-hand knowledge about math, science, history, geography, civics, and nearly anything else that traditionally qualified as education or middle-to-highbrow culture. In author Mark Bauerlein's estimation, these results qualify the current group of teenagers and young adults for the title "the dumbest generation." By choosing such an obviously disparaging appellation and adopting it as his book's inciting, marketing-driven title (along with the subtitle, "How the Digital Age Stupifies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future"), Mr. Bauerlein makes clear without opening the front cover where he stands.

The entire thesis of THE DUMBEST GENERATION can be summarized in a syllogism:

1. Reading is the main source of knowledge and intelligence.
2. Televisions and computers (e.g., the Internet) have significantly reduced young people's time and interest in reading more than ever before.
3. Therefore, young people have less knowledge and intelligence than previous generations and are hence "the dumbest generation."

Bauerlein's thesis is further buttressed by the argument that young people's lost knowledge is not being replaced, not even by useful technology skills despite the many hours spent online at the computer keyboard. He sees instead a generation increasingly absorbed in a socializing, narcissistic, content-empty, pop culture-oriented, style- and peer-driven world of their own devising, one in which external news events, traditional culture, and contrary opinions are casually filtered out of awareness and existence. In the end, he faults the gatekeepers of academia for acceding to and even glorifying the notion that the coming Internet generation would be evolution's "next humans," equipped with new knowledge and skills best suited for the new millennium.

While elements of Mr. Bauerlein's argument resonate, the whole seems much less than the sum of his parts. His singular focus on the Internet and "screen technology" renders his work more of a polemic against teens' Internet-aided self-absorption and their peculiar, Facebook/YouTube culture. The author fails to credit any of a multitude of other contributing causes for student's apparent decrease in factual knowledge: the increased number of single-parent and two wage-earner homes, decreased hours of operation for public libraries, media lionizing and corporate marketing of youth culture as the only one that matters, rise of "school as parent," promotion of universally high self-esteem where all student work is of equal merit if it reflects one's true feelings, dumbing down school curriculums, abandonment of a demanding literary canon in favor of a lighter multicultural fare, classroom teachers' disregard of books as source materials in favor of Google searches and Wikipedia, and the national-to-local focus on standardized exam scores in English and math.

In addition, Bauerlein barely acknowledges what has doubtless been the greatest mass fraud perpetrated on the American family (by government, media, the computer industry, and educators) in the last century - the notion that every home and classroom must be wired, that any child who is not computer literate (whatever that means) by the end of high school is doomed to professional failure and a life of adult manual labor. Surely, each of these (and other) factors adds to the overall weakening of the intellectual atmosphere in schools while providing legitimacy to young people's keyboard time.

Brauerlein's book is something of a drudge to read, overly repetitive and too often larded to bursting with embedded statistics that would have been far more digestible in tabular form. The book's final chapter is certainly his most fatuous, a plaintive "why can't they be like we were"serenade. In that chapter, Brauerlein recalls in rosy hues the City College of New York in the 1930's, populated with the argumentative likes of Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer, Julius Rosenberg, and Seymour Lipset. He questions whether any such grouping of nascent intellectuals can exist in today's universities, as if this group was perfectly representative of American university life of that era.

Worse, however, THE DUMBEST GENERATION suffers the faults of any book that so openly denigrates an entire age group while attributing their presumed failings to a single cause. The author's case that today's young people are any "dumber" than their parents is not even wholly convincing, relying as it does primarily on factual recall ability. Furthermore, it begs the inevitable question as to how much dumber still will be the children of this dumbest generation, and so on until we presumably reach the hilarious state parodied in the movie IDIOCRACY. There is no doubting that America's educational system is badly in need of a serious wake-up call. Regrettably, THE DUMBEST GENERATION is far from being that call.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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