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

Mark Bauerlein (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 14, 2009

This shocking, surprisingly entertaining romp into the intellectual nether regions of today's underthirty set reveals the disturbing and, ultimately, incontrovertible truth: cyberculture is turning us into a society of know-nothings.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

It’s an irony so commonplace it’s become almost trite: despite the information superhighway, despite a world of knowledge at their fingertips, the younger generation today is less informed, less literate, and more self-absorbed than any that has preceded it. But why? According to the author, an English professor at Emory University, there are plenty of reasons. The immediacy and intimacy of social-networking sites have focused young people’s Internet use on themselves and their friends. The material they’re studying in school (such as the Civil War or The Great Gatsby) seems boring because it isn’t happening right this second and isn’t about them. They’re using the Internet not as a learning tool but as a communications tool: instant messaging, e-mail, chat, blogs. And the language of Internet communication, with its peculiar spelling, grammar, and punctuation, actually encourages illiteracy by making it socially acceptable. It wouldn’t be going too far to call this book the Why Johnny Can’t Read for the digital age. Some will disagree vehemently; others will nod sagely, muttering that they knew it all along. --David Pitt --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"If you're the parent of someone under 20 and read only one non-fiction book this fall, make it this one. Bauerlein's simple but jarring thesis is that technology and the digital culture it has created are not broadening the horizon of the younger generation; they are narrowing it to a self-absorbed social universe that blocks out virtually everything else."
-Don Campbell, USA Today

"An urgent and pragmatic book on the very dark topic of the virtual end of reading among the young."
-Harold Bloom

"Never have American students had it so easy, and never have they achieved less. . . . Mr. Bauerlein delivers this bad news in a surprisingly brisk and engaging fashion, blowing holes in a lot of conventional educational wisdom."
-Charles McGrath, The New York Times

"It wouldn't be going too far to call this book the Why Johnny Can't Read for the digital age."
-Booklist

"Throughout The Dumbest Generation, there are . . . keen insights into how the new digital world really is changing the way young people engage with information and the obstacles they face in integrating any of it meaningfully. These are insights that educators, parents, and other adults ignore at their peril."
-Lee Drutman, Los Angeles Times

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 253 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher; First Edition edition (May 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585427128
• ISBN-13: 978-1585427123
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.8 x 8.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (136 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,567 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #17 in Books > Education & Reference > Schools & Teaching > Education Theory > Philosophy & Social Aspects
  • #25 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Communication & Media Studies
  • #48 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Pop Culture > General

More About the Author

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and has worked as a director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he oversaw studies about culture and American life, including the much discussed Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Weekly Standard, Reason magazine, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among many other publications and scholarly periodicals. A frequent lecturer, he has been called one of the Independent Women's Forum's "favorite intellectuals," and has been praised by columnist George Will as "dazzling."

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

389 of 421 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great ideas, once he finally gets rolling June 19, 2008

By Graham H. Seibert TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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. Read more ›

108 of 115 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars As a card-carrying member of the dumbest generation, I endorse this book. January 17, 2009

By not4prophet

Format:Hardcover

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. Read more ›

343 of 388 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Explanation of Problem But Wrong Cause September 20, 2008

By CrimsonGirl VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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.