Customer Reviews

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)

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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.

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.

Mark Bauerlein begins his book by quoting an article about the frenzied, high-stakes world of American high school students. Students are pushed to succeed like never before, forced to spend their every waking minute in intense studies. Parents and teachers lean over their shoulders, brutally forcing them to ignore all leisure activity and focus solely on the goal of college. It all adds up to a nonstop barrage of academics that consumes are childrens lives, stresses them out, and even ruins their health.

The only problem with this analysis is that it's completely wrong. As anyone who's been in a classroom recently can testify, today's students have very light workloads. They refuse to do homework. They simply won't study. They care about their social lives, not about academics. This is the reality of the situation. If anecdotes won't prove the point, real research will. Bauerlein provides that research, citing multiple, large studies by universities, government agencies, and other reliable sources. The results are clear. We have raised a nation that lacks basic knowledge of math, science, history, English, foreign language, and civics. Today's young people are not only weak academically, but also unable to use their leisure time productively.

Bauerlein spends one chapter establishing that fact. The rest of the book is spent shooting down the various responses to it. Response one is that technology inevitably makes our kids smarter. Yet the facts just don't justify it. America has spent seventy billion dollars to bring technology into the classroom, yet our students continue to fall behind. Schools in other countries remain focused on the basics and easily outperform us. For all the political jabber, there's no reason to put so much faith in computerized classrooms.

Response two is that our children are shifting to a new type of learning, where the old rules simply don't apply. Kids don't need to know Newton's Laws or the Bill of Rights any more, they just need to know how to look things up online. This theory is a recipe for disaster, as Bauerlein points out. The human mind must think and decide with the information it has. The mere presence of information online doesn't guarantee that people will use that information. Moreover, technology by its very nature works against deep-seated intelligence by breeding short attention spans. This is not merely an old person ranting about all this new stuff. A research group at Apple has spent years researching how people process online information, and they confirm the results.

Response three is the most sinister. Some commentators don't really mind that our kids are getting stupider. They view education itself as oppressive, and think that new tech-centered living will be more liberating for humanity. While few would say so in as many words, many people have allowed this attitude to creep into their thinking. Bauerlein calls this "the betrayal of the mentors" and he hits it hard in the last two chapters.

Bauerlein's book is at war with a rival work of commentary, Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson. I reviewed that book last year and reached the same conclusion that Bauerlein does. Johnson's thesis is wrong because his definition of intelligence is wrong. Children need to learn more than rote problem-solving skills. They need a meaningful education that motivates them to become better people. Without that, our nation is in for a long cultural decline. The signs are already starting to show up.

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

This is an astonishingly insightful book. The fact that it has not so far garnered avalanches of commendation on this site suggests to me the dunces of our age, comfortable with the present scheme of things, may be in confederacy against it. Its thesis is that the generations since the 60's have become increasingly self-absorbed and therefore sadly unfit to maintain a democratic society. For requisite intellectual combat, the young of our time lack both a liberal education and civic knowledge, essentials for the preservation and advance of the American experiment in government. The villain here, as Bauerlien presents it, is manifestly NOT technology itself. He is no Luddite. Rather, he pillories the increasingly eager self-absorption of the young in mere private social life, and the peculiar eagerness of Boomer mentors to approve such juvenility. Technology itself, after all, does not require that the young text message DURING college classes or fake bathroom emergencies to take cell phone calls. For too many of them, the highest and only reality is peer group interaction. The rest is blah, blah, blah.

In his early chapters, Bauerlien happily provides even more hard evidence of the mediocrity of current youth culture than the most strictly defensive parent, teacher or journalist might require to become alarmed. In his summarizing words, "a parent, teacher or journalist who doesn't see the problem would have to be blind." The young these days, by and large, are ignorant of beneficent tradition. Even the pen of a Jonathan Swift would be challenged to report on them, since what he could satirize as worst case behavior in his time has become pretty standard in ours. He mocked, it will be remembered, several town wits referring to an obscure author called Homer and had them in dispute as to whether there had actually ever been any ancient writers or not, the present moment being all.

Bauerlein, I'm happy to report, does not follow his scientific analysis with a plea of impotence. He argues, instead, that adults in all spheres must speak out to reverse the order of things and encourage youth to see that adulthood rather than a Peter-Pan like endless adolescence is the desideratum. The young, by nature, do desire to be older. One has only to ask 5 1/2 year olds their age and they'll chime 6, to a person. That 25 year olds will say they're 21 is the greater problem in our time.

Freeing the young from Plato's cave has always been an uphill battle. Are there adults today, Bauerlien asks, who are willing to take the risks?

Overall, a very thoughtful summary of what I have started calling "Generation Next," because, despite having grown up with them, the only thing most of them know how to do on their computers is press the "Next" button. The statistics, studies, and trends cited in the book are right in line with my observations as a college instructor. In looking at causes, please do not leave out the evolving emphasis at universities on money and student retention ("Dumb it down before you flunk so many next time!"), and look carefully at statistics showing exponential growth in adminstrative budgets and flat budgets for tenure-track faculty, despite ballooning enrollments.

My one personal observation that does not come out in this book is the quality of students who manage to rise above the lowly trends of their peers. The small minority of students who learn to leverage new technologies and information access with old-school work ethic and critical thinking are nothing short of astounding. History demonstrates the vast impacts of the contributions of individuals, and it is my (probably delusional) hope that these outstanding students will keep our economy and democracy going. If these handful of students succeed, then the remaining social-oriented majority ought to make great sales reps.

People fault Bauerlein for being an alarmist and a curmudgeon. He does come across that way at times, especially because of his tongue-in-cheek title (most seem to miss the sarcasm he intends). But his critics consistently misunderstand his most valuable arguments.

The key contribution of this book is some extremely eye-opening evidence/data that lofty and pervasive claims about the "educational benefits of digital technology" are more marketing rhetoric than empirically-verified reality. Bauerlein is correct--and does a superb, if dry, job of demonstrating--that parent and educator attitudes toward technology and its "usefulness" are disturbingly uncritical. Much of the evidence in this book (often cleverly cited from pro-technology folks and studies) shows that technology IMPEDES education and maturity as much or more than it promotes it.

Teachers will consider much of this evidence and Bauerlein's claims to be "obvious," but the value of the contribution is that very top-level educators and education writers have been upfront about these issues. An overwhelming majority of those folks--including, not surprisingly, those who have staked their careers on being innovative and digital-savvy educators--have instead "wowed" the general public with hype about moving learning/education into a new (digital) era. Largely, this occurred to justify the explosion of online universities, which are capitalizing on an excellent business (education is the only commodity in which the consumer consistently demands LESS for his/her money: "Take my tuition, but don't make me learn anything or take tests or write papers..." etc.). Those same online programs are now the subject of legislation in many states, who are trying to block Master's and Ph.D's earned from such programs from being employed at traditional univerisites. Why? Because anecdotal and statistical evidence consistently shows that those programs are not actually providing people with the rigor and skill that is needed to justify the degree. Only those seeking basic technical skill and knowledge from such programs are really served--to a varying degree--by an online program. They deliberately cater to our cynical cultural attitude that "all you really need is the certificate to get a job." Since the economy turned, people are now starting to find out differently, the hard way.

Wisely anticipating that readers will rebut his statistics by saying "statistics can be made to prove whatever you like," Bauerlein draws on data and reports often compiled by folks who have a vested interest in JUSTIFYING and DEFENDING the benefits of technology (folks such as those behind the "free laptop to every student" program). What he uncovers is that even they are often forced to admit that their well-intended embrace of technology turned out to have NO measurable benefit on learning or--in several cases--a measurably NEGATIVE effect on learning.

As an English/Writing professor, I've seen many of the detrimental effects on study habits, integrity, and maturity that he describes. His views are not just curmudgeonly (I myself am only 32 years old and was on the front edge of the digital explosion.) I love technology and know how to use it well, but in the decade I've been teaching college (as a grad student for 7 years, and now as a professor for 3), I have observed a significant shift in student values--especially with regard to insularity, egoism, and the decline of intellectual discourse among younger peer groups.

Bauerlein doesn't claim or think technology is evil. His essential point is that it is misused. The principal, oft-touted benefit of technology is CUSTOMIZATION. You can now tailor your entertainment and news to get only what you want and nothing that you don't. From a logical and a practical perspective, this almost certainly guarantees the increasing insularity of an individual's viewpoints. They can wrap themselves in a digital cocoon (24/7) of their own values and never have to hear or encounter a dissenting word. This is, as Bauerlein implies, very dangerous, and he includes a number of representative quotes from young persons which shows (quite startlingly) how unapologetic a new generation is becoming about silencing every viewpoint but their own. Hence, I think, the rapid spread of conspiracy theories and radical politics into the popular sphere... views that once were marginal and relatively unappealing to the masses now are becoming surprisingly "popular" while more responsibly reasoned views get silenced because they lack the hype and appeal of the loud, irresponsible voices that now dominate the Internet and politics in general.

Is there such a thing as "too much freedom"? Perhaps there is, Bauerlein suggests, when you can become free to control what viewpoints reach your ears and which don't. This is something very different than the dangers of TV or other old curmudgeonly concerns. And Bauerlein shows this well by pointing out that pullitzer-prize-winning journalists have been replaced at some major news outlets by teenagers who are more savvy at blogging and working up hits from site visitors. The result is a general "dumbening" of our culture, and there is good reason to believe that it will lead to far more damaging repercussions in society than any of the comparatively silly preceding fears (like TV "rotting your brain"). Read it with an open mind (not a technological- or generational-defensiveness), and you are sure to learn some very important things about the responsible and irresponsible uses of technology.

The real importance of this book is that so many of these views have not been admitted into popular awareness. As we expect our first baby, I can't tell you how many parents have told us how important it is to get our baby using a Fisher Price laptop as soon as possible so she can "get comfortable" with technology and "thrive" later. Ugh. I can tell you with total certainty that the only folks who consistently use technology responsibly are those who do NOT grow up with it initially. That is how they learn to appreciate, not abuse, its efficient benefits. Bauerlein confirms this by sharing the statistic that the ONLY age group who consistently uses the Internet to learn (rather than to avoid the "discomfort" of encountering information they don't already understand or know) are folks aged 55+!

By the way, Bauerlein's point is NOT that prior generations were any more intellectually inclined that youths today, or even that they were any smarter. His point is that they had FEWER OPPORTUNITIES TO AVOID LEARNING (less opportunity to "plug in" to whatever they liked, at any given moment of the day) than previous generations. He implies (rightly, I think) that all human beings are naturally lazy and prefer entertainment to education, but for previous generations, the cartoons eventually ended and were followed by news, or Tiger Beat magazine would run out of pages and you might have to find something else to read. Now, you can plug in 24/7 and--if you wish--watch nothing but YouTube clips of folks kicking themselves in the testicles or lighting their farts on fire. Think about that for a moment... it is very, very dangerous to live in a world where immature folks can feed ONLY that desire if they choose. What is EVER to push them to something more substantive or mature? Maybe boredom isn't such an unhealthy thing for a person after all... Maybe it is NOT the best idea to give kids a DVD to watch on family trips just to shut them up... Maybe they should have to read, or exercise their imaginations, or learn to be silent for a 6-hour car ride even when it bores them. I'm musing here, but trying to show you how truly important it is to consider the "benefits" of technology in a much more critical manner than society and educators have heretofore done.

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

Excellent research - gives a grim-but-true picture about the decline of academic intelligence in Generation Y. :-(

Lots of valuable statistics which can be lengthy and difficult reading at times, but I still give this a five star review because I don't know how the author could have prevented it. Without all the information, you wouldn't understand the problem, and the author would be heavily criticized (probably by the same reviewers who gave him low marks already) for not backing up his statements with research.

I am one of the under-30 crowd, but I'm objective and informed enough about my own generation to agree with the author. I am also an educator who can't believe the lack of expectations parents & other adults have for some of the kids I teach. If a child doesn't know basic multiplication facts at age 13, his parents should have enough common sense to trade his video games in for a deck of flashcards until he does (but instead they say, "well we just can't get him to practice."). When a sixth grader plagiarizes a research paper from Wikipedia yet is able to spend hours a night on MySpace instead of doing the work herself, there is a problem. And furthermore, when her mother isn't even fazed by her behavior, tries to make it seem like no big deal, and even jokes about the infraction later....its tragic. These are just two of numerous situations like this that I have encountered in the last year, and it indicates to me that this generation is hands-down the dumbest, because the adults of previous generations have low expectations or are too caught up in their own lives to care.

And the scariest thing is that this type of behavior is now the rule, rather than the exception. To all the reviewers who are blaming schools, funding, etc., try working in the field before you criticize it. The author is dead-on in his evaluations that kids spend more time with their gadgets than they do improving their minds. The schools have no control over how kids spend their time. The funding has nothing to do with getting kids to actually do their homework and pay attention in class. This book is a wake-up call, to every adult, that we need to do something, anything, to change the current trend and get kids to embrace the privilege that is education. Its for their own benefit!

THE DIGITAL AGE IS NOT THE CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM...THE CAUSE IS THAT KIDS ARE OBSESSED WITH IT AND NOTHING ELSE!

Sixty-three percent of test takers couldn't find Iraq on a map??? Fifty-two percent of high school seniors picked Germany, Japan, or Italy as allies of the United States in World War II? Are you SERIOUS?

A well-documented, reasoned look at America's Dumbest Generation. The author pulls no punches. He isn't out to insult or deride -- rather, his points serve to highlight and emphasize the severity of the problem.

Highly recommend.

In later chapters, the author delves into how "The Dumbest Generation" came to be. One point stands out -- the contemptuous view of history and tradition. The author documents a case of a young aspiring artist who not only does not know who Michaelangelo or Rembrandt are -- BUT DOES NOT CARE.

I can only take this book in doses before having to put it down. The author talks about how today's society is more focused on information retrieval versus knowledge formation. He demonstrates how today's society can multi-task and do a lot without actually learning a lot. Test results are sprinkled throughout to support the author's points.

An insightful, eye-opening book.