Buy new:
-39% $10.99$10.99
Delivery Thursday, August 1
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Blake Academic
Save with Used - Acceptable
$6.37$6.37
Delivery Wednesday, July 31
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: -OnTimeBooks-
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future(Or, Don 't Trust Anyone Under 30) Paperback – May 14, 2009
Purchase options and add-ons
The Dumbest Generation is a dire report on the intellectual life of young adults and a timely warning of its impact on American democracy and culture.
For decades, concern has been brewing about the dumbed-down popular culture available to young people and the impact it has on their futures. But at the dawn of the digital age, many thought they saw an answer: the internet, email, 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 aware, diversify their tastes, and improve their verbal skills has had the opposite effect. According to recent reports from the National Endowment for the Arts, 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: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future is a startling examination of the intellectual life of young adults and a timely warning of its impact on American culture and democracy.
Over the last few decades, how we view adolescence itself has changed, growing from a pitstop on the road to adulthood to its own space in society, wholly separate from adult life. This change in adolescent culture has gone hand in hand with an insidious infantilization of our culture at large; as adolescents continue to disengage from the adult world, they have built their own, acquiring more spending money, steering classrooms and culture towards their own needs and interests, and now using the technology once promoted as the greatest hope for their futures to indulge in diversions, from MySpace to multiplayer video games, 24/7.
Can a nation continue to enjoy political and economic predominance if its citizens refuse to grow up? Drawing upon exhaustive research, personal anecdotes, and historical and social analysis, The Dumbest Generation presents a portrait of the young American mind at this critical juncture, and lays out a compelling vision of how we might address its deficiencies. The Dumbest Generation pulls no punches as it reveals the true cost of the digital age—and our last chance to fix it.
- Print length253 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTarcherPerigee
- Publication dateMay 14, 2009
- Dimensions6 x 0.73 x 8.96 inches
- ISBN-101585427128
- ISBN-13978-1585427123
Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought
The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous AdultsHardcover$16.29 shippingOnly 14 left in stock (more on the way).
My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a StudentPaperback$15.16 shippingGet it as soon as Thursday, Aug 1Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Oxford Student Texts: Christopher Marlowe: Dr FaustusPaperback$15.27 shippingOnly 1 left in stock - order soon.
Editorial Reviews
Review
-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 Readfor 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
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
As graduation approaches, their résumés lengthen and sparkle, but their spirits flag and sicken. One Whitman junior, labeled by Robbins "The Stealth Overachiever," receives a fantastic 2380 (out of 2400) on a PSAT test, but instead of rejoicing, he worries that the company administering the practice run "made the diagnostics easier so students would think the class was working."
Audrey, "The Perfectionist," struggles for weeks to complete her toothpick bridge, which she and her partner expect will win them a spot in the Physics Olympics. She's one of the Young Democrats, too, and she does catering jobs. Her motivation stands out, and she thinks every other student competes with her personally, so whenever she receives a graded test or paper, "she [turns] it over without looking at it and then [puts] it away, resolving not to check the grade until she [gets] home."
"AP Frank" became a Whitman legend when as a junior he managed a "seven-AP course load that had him studying every afternoon, sleeping during class, and going lunchless." When he scored 1570 on the SAT, his domineering mother screamed in dismay, and her shock subsided only when he retook it and got the perfect 1600.
Julie, "The Superstar," has five AP classes and an internship three times a week at a museum, and she runs cross-country as well. Every evening after dinner she descends to the "homework cave" until bedtime and beyond. She got "only" 1410 on the SAT, though, and she wonders where it will land her next fall.
These kids have descended into a "competitive frenzy," Robbins mourns, and the high school that should open their minds and develop their characters has become a torture zone, a "hotbed for Machiavellian strategy." They bargain and bully and suck up for better grades. They pay tutors and coaches enormous sums to raise their scores a few points and help with the admissions process. Parents hover and query, and they schedule their children down to the minute. Grade inflation only makes it worse, an A- average now a stigma, not an accomplishment. They can't relax, they can't play. It's killing them, throwing sensitive and intelligent teenagers into pathologies of guilt and despair. The professional rat race of yore—men in gray flannel suits climbing the business ladder—has filtered down into the pre-college years, and Robbins's tormented subjects reveal the consequences.
The achievement chase displaces other life questions, and the kids can't seem to escape it. When David Brooks toured Princeton and interviewed students back in 2001, he heard of joyless days and nights with no room for newspapers or politics or dating, just "one skill-enhancing activity to the next." He calls them "Organization Kids" (after the old Organization Man figure of the fifties), students who "have to schedule appointment times for chatting." They've been programmed for success, and a preschool-to-college gauntlet of standardized tests, mounting homework, motivational messages, and extracurricular tasks has rewarded or punished them at every stage. The system tabulates learning incessantly and ranks students against one another, and the students soon divine its essence: only results matter. Education writer Alfie Kohn summarizes their logical adjustment:
Consider a school that constantly emphasizes the importance of performance! results! achievement! success! A student who has absorbed that message may find it difficult to get swept away by the process of creating a poem or trying to build a working telescope. He may be so concerned about the results that he's not at all that engaged in the activity that produces those results.
Just get the grades, they tell themselves, ace the test, study, study, study. Assignments become exercises to complete, like doing the dishes, not knowledge to acquire for the rest of their lives. The inner life fades; only the external credits count. After-school hours used to mean sports and comic books and hanging out. Now, they spell homework. As the president of the American Association of School Librarians told the Washington Post, "When kids are in school now, the stakes are so high, and they have so much homework that it's really hard to find time for pleasure reading" (see Strauss). Homework itself has become a plague, as recent titles on the subject show:
The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning (Etta Kralovec and John Buell); The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (Alfie Kohn); and The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It (Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish).
Parents, teachers, media, and the kids themselves witness the dangers, but the system presses forward. "We believe that reform in homework practices is central to a politics of family and personal liberation," Kralovec and Buell announce, but the momentum is too strong. The overachievement culture, results-obsessed parents, out-comes-based norms…; they continue to brutalize kids and land concerned observers such as Robbins on the Today show. Testing goes on, homework piles up, and competition for spaces in the Ivies was stiffer in 2007 than ever before. A 2006 survey by Pew Research, for instance, found that more than half the adults in the United States (56 percent) think that parents place too little pressure on students, and only 15 percent stated "Too much."
Why?
Because something is wrong with this picture, and most people realize it. They sense what the critics do not, a fundamental error in the vignettes of hyperstudious and overworked kids that we've just seen: they don't tell the truth, not the whole truth about youth in America. For, notwithstanding the poignant tale of suburban D.C. seniors sweating over a calculus quiz, or the image of college students scheduling their friends as if they were CEOs in the middle of a workday, or the lurid complaints about homework, the actual habits of most teenagers and young adults in most schools and colleges in this country display a wholly contrasting problem, but one no less disturbing.
Consider a measure of homework time, this one not taken from a dozen kids on their uneven way to the top, but from 81,499 students in 110 schools in 26 states—the 2006 High School Survey of Student Engagement. When asked how many hours they spent each week "Reading/studying for class," almost all of them, fully 90 percent, came in at a ridiculously low five hours or less, 55 percent at one hour or less. Meanwhile, 31 percent admitted to watching television or playing video games at least six hours per week, 25 percent of them logging six hours minimum surfing and chatting online.
Or check a 2004 report by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research entitled Changing Times of American Youth: 1981–2003, which surveyed more than 2,000 families with children age six to 17 in the home. In 2003, homework time for 15- to 17year-olds hit only 24 minutes on weekend days, 50 minutes on weekdays. And weekday TV time? More than twice that: one hour, 55 minutes.
Or check a report by the U.S. Department of Education entitled NAEP 2004 Trends in Academic Progress. Among other things, the report gathered data on study and reading time for thousands of 17year-olds in 2004. When asked how many hours they'd spent on homework the day before, the tallies were meager. Fully 26 percent said that they didn't have any homework to do, while 13 percent admitted that they didn't do any of the homework they were supposed to. A little more than one-quarter (28 percent) spent less than an hour, and another 22 percent devoted one to two hours, leaving only 11 percent to pass the two-hour mark.
Or the 2004–05 State of Our Nation's Youth report by the Horatio Alger Association, in which 60 percent of teenage students logged five hours of homework per week or less.
The better students don't improve with time, either. In the 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, a college counterpart to the High School Survey of Student Engagement, seniors in college logged some astonishingly low commitments to "Preparing for class." Almost one out of five (18 percent) stood at one to five hours per week, and 26 percent at six to ten hours per week. College professors estimate that a successful semester requires about 25 hours of out-of-class study per week, but only 11 percent reached that mark. These young adults have graduated from high school, entered college, declared a major, and lasted seven semesters, but their in-class and out-of-class punch cards amount to fewer hours than a part-time job.
And as for the claim that leisure time is disappearing, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issues an annual American Time Use Survey that asks up to 21,000 people to record their activities during the day. The categories include work and school and child care, and also leisure hours. For 2005, 15- to 24-year-olds enjoyed a full five and a half hours of free time per day, more than two hours of which they passed in front of the TV.
The findings of these and many other large surveys refute the frantic and partial renditions of youth habits and achievement that all too often make headlines and fill talk shows. Savvier observers guard against the "we're overworking the kids" alarm, people such as Jay Mathews, education reporter at the Washington Post, who called Robbins's book a "spreading delusion," and Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution, whose 2003 report on homework said of the "homework is destroying childhood" argument, "Almost everything in this story is wrong." One correspondent's encounter with a dozen elite students who hunt success can be vivid and touching, but it doesn't jibe with mountains of data that tell contrary stories. The surveys, studies, tests, and testimonials reveal the opposite, that the vast majority of high school and college kids are far less accomplished and engaged, and the classroom pressures much less cumbersome, than popular versions put forth. These depressing accounts issue from government agencies with no ax to grind, from business leaders who just want competent workers, and from foundations that sympathize with the young. While they lack the human drama, they impart more reliable assessments, providing a better baseline for understanding the realities of the young American mentality and forcing us to stop upgrading the adolescent condition beyond its due.
This book is an attempt to consolidate the best and broadest research into a different profile of the rising American mind. It doesn't cover behaviors and values, only the intellect of under-30-year-olds. Their political leanings don't matter, nor do their career ambitions. The manners, music, clothing, speech, sexuality, faith, diversity, depression, criminality, drug use, moral codes, and celebrities of the young spark many books, articles, research papers, and marketing strategies centered on Generation Y (or Generation DotNet, or the Millennials), but not this one. It sticks to one thing, the intellectual condition of young Americans, and describes it with empirical evidence, recording something hard to document but nonetheless insidious happening inside their heads. The information is scattered and underanalyzed, but once collected and compared, it charts a consistent and perilous momentum downward.
It sounds pessimistic, and many people sympathetic to youth pressures may class the chapters to follow as yet another curmudgeonly riff. Older people have complained forever about the derelictions of youth, and the "old fogy" tag puts them on the defensive. Perhaps, though, it is a healthy process in the life story of humanity for older generations to berate the younger, for young and old to relate in a vigorous competitive dialectic, with the energy and optimism of youth vying against the wisdom and realism of elders in a fruitful check of one another's worst tendencies. That's another issue, however. The conclusions here stem from a variety of completed and ongoing research projects, public and private organizations, and university professors and media centers, and they represent different cultural values and varying attitudes toward youth. It is remarkable, then, that they so often reach the same general conclusions. They disclose many trends and consequences in youth experience, but the intellectual one emerges again and again. It's an outcome not as easily noticed as a carload of teens inching down the boulevard rattling store windows with the boom-boom of a hip-hop beat, and the effect runs deeper than brand-name clothing and speech patterns. It touches the core of a young person's mind, the mental storehouse from which he draws when engaging the world. And what the sources reveal, one by one, is that a paradoxical and distressing situation is upon us.
The paradox may be put this way. We have entered the Information Age, traveled the Information Superhighway, spawned a Knowledge Economy, undergone the Digital Revolution, converted manual workers into knowledge workers, and promoted a Creative Class, and we anticipate a Conceptual Age to be. However overhyped those grand social metaphors, they signify a rising premium on knowledge and communications, and everyone from Wired magazine to Al Gore to Thomas Friedman to the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation echoes the change. When he announced the American Competitiveness Initiative in February 2006, President Bush directly linked the fate of the U.S. economy "to generating knowledge and tools upon which new technologies are developed." In a Washington Post op-ed, Bill Gates asserted, "But if we are to remain competitive, we need a workforce that consists of the world's brightest minds…; First, we must demand strong schools so that young Americans enter the workforce with the math, science and problem-solving skills they need to succeed in the knowledge economy."
And yet, while teens and young adults have absorbed digital tools into their daily lives like no other age group, while they have grown up with more knowledge and information readily at hand, taken more classes, built their own Web sites, enjoyed more libraries, bookstores, and museums in their towns and cities…; in sum, while the world has provided them extraordinary chances to gain knowledge and improve their reading/writing skills, not to mention offering financial incentives to do so, young Americans today are no more learned or skillful than their predecessors, no more knowledgeable, fluent, up-to-date, or inquisitive, except in the materials of youth culture. They don't know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events. They read less on their own, both books and newspapers, and you would have to canvass a lot of college English instructors and employers before you found one who said that they compose better paragraphs. In fact, their technology skills fall well short of the common claim, too, especially when they must apply them to research and workplace tasks.
The world delivers facts and events and art and ideas as never before, but the young American mind hasn't opened. Young Americans' vices have diminished, one must acknowledge, as teens and young adults harbor fewer stereotypes and social prejudices. Also, they regard their parents more highly than they did 25 years ago. They volunteer in strong numbers, and rates of risky behaviors are dropping. Overall conduct trends are moving upward, leading a hard-edged commentator such as Kay Hymowitz to announce in "It's Morning After in America" (2004) that "pragmatic Americans have seen the damage that their decades-long fling with the sexual revolution and the transvaluation of traditional values wrought. And now, without giving up the real gains, they are earnestly knitting up their unraveled culture. It is a moment of tremendous promise." At TechCentralStation.com, James Glassman agreed enough to proclaim, "Good News! The Kids Are Alright!" Youth watchers William Strauss and Neil Howe were confident enough to subtitle their book on young Americans The Next Great Generation (2000).
And why shouldn't they? Teenagers and young adults mingle in a society of abundance, intellectual as well as material. American youth in the twenty-first century have benefited from a shower of money and goods, a bath of liberties and pleasing self-images, vibrant civic debates, political blogs, old books and masterpieces available online, traveling exhibitions, the History Channel, news feeds…; and on and on. Never have opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater. All the ingredients for making an informed and intelligent citizen are in place.
But it hasn't happened. Yes, young Americans are energetic, ambitious, enterprising, and good, but their talents and interests and money thrust them not into books and ideas and history and civics, but into a whole other realm and other consciousness. A different social life and a different mental life have formed among them. Technology has bred it, but the result doesn't tally with the fulsome descriptions of digital empowerment, global awareness, and virtual communities. Instead of opening young American minds to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them. Young people have never been so intensely mindful of and present to one another, so enabled in adolescent contact. Teen images and songs, hot gossip and games, and youth-to-youth communications no longer limited by time or space wrap them up in a generational cocoon reaching all the way into their bedrooms. The autonomy has a cost: the more they attend to themselves, the less they remember the past and envision a future. They have all the advantages of modernity and democracy, but when the gifts of life lead to social joys, not intellectual labor, the minds of the young plateau at age 18. This is happening all around us. The fonts of knowledge are everywhere, but the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, pictures, tunes, and texts back and forth, living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are up to now.
This book explains why and how, and how much, and what it means for the civic health of the United States.
Product details
- Publisher : TarcherPerigee; First Edition (May 14, 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 253 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1585427128
- ISBN-13 : 978-1585427123
- Item Weight : 10.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.73 x 8.96 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #830,534 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,038 in Philosophy & Social Aspects of Education
- #2,520 in Communication & Media Studies
- #2,827 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences
- Customer Reviews:
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."
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the content insightful and important, but they describe the writing style as poorly written, snobby, and elitist.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book's content insightful, important, and provocative. They also say the book is well-documented, reasoned look at America's dumbest and a valuable contribution to an ongoing debate over how to best educate. Readers also mention that the message is important, interesting, poignant, and to the point.
"...The key contribution of this book is some extremely eye-opening evidence/data that lofty and pervasive claims about the "educational benefits of..." Read more
"...decade-and-a-half out, Bauerlein, however, has the stats and strong counter-arguments to the more optimistic interpretations...." Read more
"...I stopped reading after four chapters because the statistics were mind numbing, and I couldn’t tell if the behavioral studies cited by the author..." Read more
"...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..." Read more
Customers find the writing style of the book phenomenally poorly written, cumbersome, and preachy. They also say the arguments are bad, with little citations. Customers also describe the tone throughout the work as snobby and elitist. They say the book has the shabbiest sort of entitlement mentality.
"...busy trying to search for pretty words, but many parts of his argumentation are empty and contradictory...." Read more
"...of this in today's youth, which has developed the shabbiest sort of entitlement mentality, ignorant of its own ignorance, if not actually proud of it..." Read more
"...The book is easy to read and flows well. The author first highlights the problem...." Read more
"...all I firmly agree that the latest generation of students are dumber than a door nail and from what I gathered from other reviews most people agree..." Read more
Reviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
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 NOT 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.
His critique is accurate, but I do think what is driving the problems is far more than just the cultural turn. Bauerlein mentions Christopher Lasch but doesn't contextualize the current educational decline in it's political economic context and thus he doesn't really have a way to reverse the problems. He is right that the abnegation of responsibility of educations and the problems of technology, but we can't easily reverse the technological problems and the political-economic problems of babyboomers, where Bauerlein thinks the problem began, was rooted in cultural changes related to economic changes. Lasch understood this, particularly in his pre-1984 works, whereas Bauerlein acknowledges it may be a problem but doesn't really propose an answer to it. I look forward to his recent sequel to the book to see how his analysis has matured.
The Dumbest Generation, Screen Time, pages 103-104, paperback edition
I began reading Dr. Mark Bauerlein's book due to its mention in Dr. Diane Ravitch's Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and School Choice Undermines Education. In combination, both books were cathartic.
As a means to an end, I took and passed a certification exam for teaching math and physics at the high school level. There were no high-tech firms hiring at the time in my field. Both schools I worked at seemed interested in my background, and thought my years in the semiconductor industry as an engineer and a web master for my youngest son's basketball booster club would provide a bridge that kids could cross; I'd give "real world" experiences to problems in Algebra, Pre-Calculus and Science. I could, and I did.
I found myself witness to the "entertainment-industrial-complex," the notion that for education to have value, it must be a performance. At a few Saturday teacher trainings, I heard just that: "as a teacher, you must have `stage presence.'" Or the other one I'm fond of: "it's important that the kids get to know things about you...that they like you."
Like became a relative term. Since I was in the industry, mastery was my goal and objective every day that I stood to teach. Confiscating cell phones, disrupting an argument that started the night before on Facebook; explaining a concept I'd lectured on in class DURING an exam was not.
Two of my college engineering professors from a generation ago:
"Good morning! Sixty-three percent of you will FLUNK this course!"
"My name is __________. EVERYTHING you've heard about me is true. I will take drop slips at this time!"
In a classroom of 200+ kids, neither of these gentlemen were the least interested in being "friends" with me. The second prof went from 250 students to 7: I as physics major and the other six chemistry majors. He flunked the chemistry majors. The former essentially announced proudly a failure rate that would get you fired in secondary education (1st high school: 10% or less, 2nd: 15% or less). No, in the previous generation, they challenged me and my classmates: "you want this? Come and GET it!" Any student had a right to major in science and engineering; it was a privilege to actually acquire a degree. That is what these gentlemen communicated. Mind you, I did have professors that were more approachable and had a sense of humor. They were no less strict in their dictum: MASTERY. Your goal was to become her/his colleague, a living, breathing representation of what they could transfer into another; possibly a graduate student if you showed you had "the chops," and knew your way around the Dewey Decimal System at the school library. That took sacrifice, dedication and concentration.
That was before "the Google," and phone apps.
Dr. Bauerlein has accomplished a literary anthropological study of what is wrong with America, education and the future of our nation.
"... people enjoy so many mechanisms of pleasure that they `adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.'"
CNN published an article on the web titled Does life online give you `popcorn brain'? See: [...]
Quoting the article: "...constant stimulation can activate dopamine cells in the nucleus accumbens, a main pleasure center of the brain.
"Over time, and with enough Internet usage, the structure of our brains can actually physically change, according to a new study. Researchers in China did MRIs on the brains of 18 college students who spent about 10 hours a day online."
This is apparently becoming a health concern, especially in developing minds and the full-embrace of technology in the classroom. As one teacher put it to me "we're kind of like television, she said." The kids either tune us in or tune us out."
Her statement reminded me of the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business," by Neil Postman (deceased). His commentary centered on the advent of 24-hour news in the 1980s: CNN was the first such network that has since spawned others. Children that used to stay up to watch the "snow" on TV as stations signed off now have 24-hour entertainment, hundreds of cable channels to surf and an Internet to post information to Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.
I saw kids with phones that have apps I could only envy. Everyone could seem to afford an I-phone, yet no one seemed to have the cash-on-hand for a TI-83/84 calculator. Taking a cell phone from a child was almost oxymoron when his mother was texting him at the time you confiscated it. A $15 fine is the only sanction a teacher can levy: providers have fought technologies that would block cell phone signals because of the bottom-line: the kids are making them a truckload of cash for every tweet, text and social network update while you discuss: series and parallel circuits (that they promptly flunk on the next exam). The same child will follow you to the office and pay the fine; everyday if necessary. You eventually succumb to the shear pressure of policing, classroom management and drill-drill-drill the vaunted standardized exam for the school's rating (and your job).
"We're kind of like television": we can be tuned in or tuned out at will. It's never the child's fault if he/she fails. The teacher obviously didn't connect, control their class or wasn't "entertaining enough." I'd personally gotten emails asking me to "bond" with the parent's child. (Even typing that was creepy!) The replied suggestion to another parent to take the cell phone from her child herself got this response: "I just read what you said. It wouldn't have occurred to me to do that."
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States Ranks 15th in Reading Literacy, 19th in Mathematical Literacy and 14th in Scientific Literacy, see: Who's No. 1? Finland, Japan and Korea, Says OECD: [...]
So quietly, subtlety we've become a nation of entertainment addicts, I-phones with apps, games, texting and academic distractions. The development of young minds used to be simple before levels of video games were invented. Now we compete with them and with what the latest "reality show" is (I believe the kids I previously taught were viewing "What Chili Wants" from TLC fame:[...]).
And if I was not entertaining, be it Algebra 1, Pre-Calculus or Math Lab, I was TLC would have crooned: a "scrub."
I am out of secondary teaching, thankfully back in the semiconductor industry, something I understand and I think appreciates me, my skillsets and the dilemma our country is in.
Alas, our students are not prepared for college, civic responsibilities, critical thinking, problem-solving skills or life. That justifies outsourcing, hurts our nation financially and puts us on a troubling course.
I suggested a documentary be done on Dr. Ravitch's book. I think that much of The Dumbest Generation as well, but my suggestion for Dr. Bauerlein's excellent read is a game show:
"Who's Smarter than a Baby Boomer?"
Limitations: no Internet, no phone apps, no phones, no life lines.
Weapons: memorized times tables, slide rules, Encyclopedia Britannica and/or Dewey Decimal System, pencils and/or chalk.
Contest would take place in a notable library, moderated by college professors and AP teachers for respective categories. It could make a valid point.
En Garde!
Reginald L. Goodwin
[...]
Top reviews from other countries
In this book, Buerlein, who teaches English in a university and is a commentator on “culture and American life”, argues that the digital age is taking the students away from the realm of liberal arts. As a result they are not growing up to be an informed and involved citizen which is the very foundation of a democratic society.
Buerlein also criticizes the mentors – parents, teachers and others guardians of society – for abdicating their responsibility and lapping up the youth culture: “Fewer books are checked out of public libraries and more videos. More kids go to the mall and fewer to the museum. Lunchroom conversations never drift into ideology, but Web photos pass nonstop from handheld to handheld. If parents and teachers and reporters don’t see it now, they’re blind.”
What is true of America of last decade is true of India of this.
The advent of smartphone and social media, Facebook and WhatsApp is changing the societal landscape of the country beyond recognition.
Are all social media bad? No.
But indiscriminate use of social media – much of it of recreational variety – is beginning to have a deleterious effect on a country that is caught between its 21st century ambitions and 19th century traditional mores.
Laden with statistics Dumbest Generation makes for a dismaying reading.
But Buerlien’s call is unlikely to the heeded.
While the Web is indeed an amazing resource for those of us with an interest in history, civics, the arts and the sciences, the Web does not create that intellectual curiosity in adolescents. In fact, the data referenced in this book proves that teenagers use technology almost exclusively as a social networking tool, and the time spent in peer interaction is taken from pursuits that would actually benefit the intellectual growth of our youth. Even Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, is skeptical of the learning potential of blogging and games: "It sounds like it's a lot of encapsulated entertainment... This ... sounds like a gigantic waste of time. If I was competing with the United States, I would love to have the students I'm competing with spending their time on this kind of crap." Perhaps this explains why more than 50% of the engineering doctorates granted by American universities go to foreign students.
How ironic that, at a time when technological innovations lead the global economy, illiteracy and innumeracy are overtaking our youth as a direct result of using this technology.
By the way, to the reviewer who admittedly did not bother to read this book, yet proclaimed that it was a waste of money: sadly, you proved the author's point quite well.
I highly recommend this book to all educators and parents, and everyone who has an interest in nurturing the potential of our next generation.
Although the author concentrates describing U.S. teenagers, the analysis can too much easily be applied to their European counterparts, in highlighting their lack of interest in anything even loosely linked with what has defined “Culture“ over human history, in their spending their time (a time that will never come back) stupefied at some kind of screen reading or posting idiocies), and in their subsequent inability to understand, let alone to cope with, the most basic topic of politics, law, science or history. And this also shedding some light over the claimed “other“ skills developed by our youngsters instead, in fields raised to higher ranks by the current apologists of the new era and the new medias, as, for instance, IT: as a matter of fact, only a tiny portion of people spending their lives scrolling down FB pages or gawking at funny youtube pranks develops some proficiency in computer science (if any).
This is really bad news for not just the future, but the actual present of our post-modern societies, in spite of all the boasted technological development and welfare. We can actually witness the results of this retreat of large portion of society from the public sphere into online isolation, and noting that this portion is composed by those generations usually driving human societies toward change and innovation, will just make the picture more depressing.
As the pars destruens is clear and convincing, so the pars construens of this book falls short of expectations. This is not that I disagree with the author when he claims that the only way to break this vicious deadlock of visual content and alienation would be to foster reading, participation and a reappraisal of the Past. It’s that I don’t believe the appeal to the “American tradition” will help to face the causes of the deadlock in any sensible way. I even find questionable if anything dating from 1776 can even be defined as “tradition”: such a thing originates not in a barely two centuries time span, neither in a materialist-rooted culture, as the enlightenment-formed one of the Declaration of Independence was. Moreover, the author did not even address another much disturbing topic, although one can easily sense it by reading his narrative of teenagers deserting museums and libraries while crowding Apple or other media-stores: the structural interdependence among the development of a marketing-based, consume-centered economy, and a stolid, blank and easily manipulated public eager to waste his own money, and life, on it. Until our finance-driven economy will put its stakes on this kind of market, appeals to art, culture and smart readings will be short-lived.
Said this, the book is anyway a stimulating read that get all the points of the recent years’ cultural degeneration. If there is any remedy to this, that’s another matter.





