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 | Some good facts in need of better analysis

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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 52 reviews view larger image
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Good Explanation of Problem But Wrong Cause

I'm a member of Generation X, and most of the items Dr. Bauerlein blames for the ignorance of Generation Y were not in widespread use when I was a teen. We didn't have the Internet, cell phones, iPods, or sophisticated video game systems, and my town did not even get wired for cable until my freshman year of high school. Yet we did not spend our leisure time in the type of intellectual pursuits that Dr. Bauerlein imagines have been displaced by these modern items. Instead of literature, philosophy, high culture, political activism, or discussing current events we wasted our time on mindless drivel. We hung out at the mall or roller skating rink, gossiped on landlines, watched network soap operas, listened to pop music on the radio or our Walkman, flipped through "Tiger Beat" and other teen magazines, played video games on our Nintendos or Segas, and so on. And I really don't think my parents' generation was all that much different as teens, although the technology was obviously more primitive.

So if teens have been wasting their leisure time on mindless pursuits for decades, why then is Gen Y so ignorant compared to previous generations? Dr. Bauerlein pretty much lets the schools off the hook in "The Dumbest Generation" but I believe that the "dumbing down" of the curriculum is the root cause. Today's teens were raised in the era of the "self esteem" fad, "whole language", "constructivist math" (aka fuzzy math), and all sorts of politically correct multiculturalism nonsense. Little wonder then that so many of them struggle with academic basics.

"The Dumbest Generation" is an interesting book, but the author's arguments in support of his main premise did not strike me as particularly convincing.

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Some good facts in need of better analysis

In the hands of teens, the computer is clearly not the learning tool phenomena that had adults so enthralled. Just because information is at their fingertips doesn't mean they are using it. For teens the computer is a cross between television and a telephone used mainly to select teen appeal content and chatter endlessly with friends. Surprise surprise, the computer age just made it that much easier for them to insulate themselves from the adult world. But are these skills transferable or worthwhile?

Mark Bauerlein goes to great pains to list and explain the validity of his research and data to prove that despite so many writers raving about the digital generation being smarter in more innovative, search savvy ways than before, comments from college professors, employee recruiters and national stats indicate that young people are sorely lacking in basic intellectual skills.

Bauerlein seeks out hard evidence provided by a website marketing firm tracking eye movement, of subjects wired to computers, and recording their comments as they interacted with websites. Their findings? People don't read at the screen, they skim and look for what turns them on. They want websites to look the same so they can interact with a familiar interface and they resist long blocks of text. Computers are actually helping people to dumb down and not excercise intellectual skills at all. We suspected as much which is possibly why this book has an audience.

The rest of the book is not about the digital age, but about youth culture since it became the phenomena extraordinaire of the 60's and turned this nation into the youth worshipping culture that it is. Those who should be mentoring students by raising the bar, he contends, have bought into the youth phenomena and now promote adolescent insularity, unhampered by the burden of tradition especially in liberal arts. This was actually quite a helpful perspective because it helped me realize that American Youth Culture is an aberration of history further fueled by consumerism which benefits from an impulsive materialistic adolescent mindset. Bauerlein, however, does not provide such insight.

Rather he covers all the usual arguments about why a democracy needs knowledgeable civic minded citizens and that just isn't happening anymore. None of these arguments are convincing largely because he blames the participants and doesn't mention the mind-binding sameness of a materialistic world egged on by corporate controlled capitalism. His description of young people today describes my own anti-civic, anti-intellectual, self-involved youth 25 years ago thus reviewers have panned him for so broadly criticizing any generation still in these formative years and this is perhaps the biggest flaw of his book.

This English professor author is simply arguing for the old culture of intellectual rigor as it was prescribed in his day when books were king and intellectuals had longer arguments. And I agree a book has a lot more scope to grasp the big picture. Ironically he has failed to grasp one that doesn't sound worn and tired out which is too bad because the digital age clearly needs perspective just as the Internet needs more depth.

He does mention, as a good sign, that young people are a lot better behaved than their sexually wild, drug using predecessors were. This only makes me wonder if the digital age is creating a more conservative, easily controlled populace, but Bauerlein offers no correlations here.

Except for one mention of teens missing out on a soldering iron, he does not mention the core of this whole argument which is that teens are not getting outdoors or experiencing hands-on skills that would allow them greater self-sufficiency. They don't negotiate or manage for themselves their own free time because now it's all so much protective play dating thus they lack initiative in the workplace and managing skills for facilitating team work. Outdoor activity and skills of self-sufficiency were eroding in their parents' time in favor of grooming worker bees for the digi-mines which might well be the logical progression of the book reading intellectual activity he espouses.

Amanda Kovattana is author of Diamonds In My Pocket: Tales of a Childhood In Asia

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I am part of the so-called "dumbest generation" and I liked the book

As said above, I am part of the generation that Bauerlein calls "the dumbest." I was born in 1984 and had the good luck to be raised by parents who always encour aged intellectual curiosity. I also went to some pretty decent public primary and secondary schools. But many people haven't shared my good fortune.

Some of the reviews here exemplify the kind of mentality that Bauerlein discusses in his book: kids who are apparently convinced that any knowledge that they already have, regardless of how superficial or paltry it might be, is perfectly sufficient; people who are not only ignorant, but are aware of their own ignorance and consider it no obstacle to voicing whatever uninformed opinion bubbles up in their heads, like the guy who said he hadn't read the book and had no intention of doing so.

That they have this attitude is not entirely their fault, since many of them attended schools where climbing out of the ignorance that all of us are born into was considered optional, lack of effort was no bar to moving up through the grades, and academic rigor was thought of as a cruel imposition on their innocent lives of play or perhaps (horrors) "elitist." Their peer environment was little help, as it punished those with a taste for academic work by calling them "nerds" or simply ignoring them.

The "peer environment" theme is probably the strongest point in the book -- that kids are spending more time with each other, reinforcing the idea that the only thing that matters is the immediate, the present, and fun times spent among one's own age group; adults and their works are boring and irrelevant except insofar as they provide cash and new ways of connecting with friends. Of course, this is the same "extended childhood + prolonged adolescence" cluster of ideas that psychologists and sociologists have been toying with for decades, but I think it is worth considering.

Does Bauerlein *conclusively* establish the idea that this generation is "the dumbest?" I don't think so. He presents some statistics, yes, but the data I have read outside of the book looks equivocal to me. What he does establish, I think, is the existence of a steep decline in the reading of books for pleasure, and a decline in the *desire* (if not ability) to think about complex arguments and current events. These trends merit concern. As for the big question -- "What is to be done?" -- given Bauerlein's belief that the "dumbness" is primarily a result of extracurricular lifestyle, not of education practices, it seems logical that he would be pessimistic, and predictably the book ends with foreboding.

Dr. Males, the writer of the best negative review here, says that the book comes across as self-congratulatory, and parts of it certainly do. Members of the brainy class have always been complaining that the coming generations fail to measure up to their standards of intellectual excellence, and that conditions are looking ever-darker for the causes of academia, informed government, civil society...so I naturally look at these kinds of jeremiads with some skepticism, conscious that the complaints are old ones even if the specific circumstances vary. In the early nineteenth century, Thoreau complained that nobody read serious literature or classics anymore. Maybe we just have to accept that the audience for complex literary works has always been and *will always be* small, and that few people in *any era* will take on philosophical meditation or serious political involvement as a habit.

Depending on your view of the merits of different media types, you may think that substituting web-browsing for book-reading is a bad trend, a neutral one, or even a good one. I see it mostly as a bad one, and I say this as a guy who for years spent hours and hours of each day on discussion boards, social networking sites, and YouTube, only to once again make book-reading my main pastime when I concluded that most of my time online had done me more harm than good.

That was just my own experience, of course, and maybe others see things differently. Anyway, life's too short to throw away most of it sitting in front of a screen. I think I'll go read a book. :-)

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Good Idea, but...

The premise for the book is fascinating but the methodology was one long tie in of statistics, quotes and sources. I felt like I was reading someone's masters thesis which some may desire, but I was hoping for an insightful AND readable book.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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