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The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30) | 
| Author: Mark Bauerlein
Publisher: Tarcher
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 3256
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 1585426393
Dewey Decimal Number: 302.231
EAN: 9781585426393
ASIN: 1585426393
Publication Date: May 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
This shocking, lively exposure of the intellectual vacuity of todays under thirty set reveals the disturbing and, ultimately, incontrovertible truth: cyberculture is turning us into a nation of know-nothings.
Can a nation continue to enjoy political and economic predominance if its citizens refuse to grow up?
For decades, concern has been brewing about the dumbed-down popular culture available to young people and the impact it has on their futures. At the dawn of the digital age, many believed they saw a hopeful answer: The Internet, e-mail, blogs, and interactive and hyper-realistic video games promised to yield a generation of sharper, more aware, and intellectually sophisticated children. The terms information superhighway and knowledge economy entered the lexicon, and we assumed that teens would use their knowledge and understanding of technology to set themselves apart as the vanguards of this new digital era.
That was the promise. But the enlightenment didnt happen. The technology that was supposed to make young adults more astute, diversify their tastes, and improve their verbal skills has had the opposite effect. According to recent reports, most young people in the United States do not read literature, visit museums, or vote. They cannot explain basic scientific methods, recount basic American history, name their local political representatives, or locate Iraq or Israel on a map. The Dumbest Generation is a startling examination of the intellectual life of young adults and a timely warning of its consequences for American culture and democracy.
Drawing upon exhaustive research, personal anecdotes, and historical and social analysis, Mark Bauerline presents an uncompromisingly realistic portrait of the young American mind at this critical juncture, and lays out a compelling vision of how we might address its deficiencies.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 John Stuart Mill's chickens come home to roost July 26, 2008
Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation joins the rank of books which invite us--compel us--to do some serious thinking about the future of democracy. If meaningful participation in the civic and political process is based on a certain degree of cultural literacy, and if the literacy of the up and coming "millennial" generation is declining, the future is foreboding.
At times Bauerlein comes across as slightly curmudgeonly, particularly in his insistence (in Chapter 5) that the mentors of the 60s generation allowed it to hijack the college curriculum and contribute to the overall decline of American literacy. But he also makes some very good points along the way.
In his first chapter, he documents the astounding and frightening across-the-board decline of achievement scores for 17-24 year-olds. Chapters 2,3,4, and 5 try to explain the decline: abysmally low levels of reading; increased immersion in digital technology, both in and out of school, that may enhance information retrieval skills but is destroying information appraisal ones, as well as siphoning off public school monies from the arts and even sciences; and poor mentoring that fails to encourage students to explore their cultural traditions, but instead uncritically hops on the technological bandwagon.
In his final chapter, Bauerlein quite interestingly argues that culture wars are good, because they keep all participants on their toes and the ensuing dialogue, heated as it sometimes can get, generates insight. But in an age in which we've lost touch with both knowledge and tradition, the lively dialogue of past culture wars becomes impossible, and single-lined dogmatism and intolerance easily replace them.
The case that Bauerlein makes for the dumbing down of the millennial generation is compelling and frightening. It becomes even more so when one stops to realize, as Rick Shenkman demonstrates in his recent Just How Stupid Are We? (2008), that a sizeable percentage of over-millennials are pretty illiterate too when it comes to the simplest civic, political, historical, and economic knowledge (forget about science and math).
John Stuart Mill clearly foresaw the danger to democracy of an electorate increasingly out of touch with the information it needs to make informed, reflective decisions. Obviously knowledge isn't a cure-all. Well-educated people can make quite foolish and even wicked decisions (which is just to say that the moral will needs to be cultivated along with the mind). But it can hardly be denied that a familiarity with basic public policy issues is a mimimal necessary condition for responsible citizenship. If Bauerlein and others are correct about falling literacy rates in this country, the Millian chickens will soon come home to roost.
The Answer Book July 23, 2008
If you are wondering why Britney Spears gets more air time than the Iraq or the other pressing problems of the world then this book is for you. This book should be required reading for every parent and every teacher in America. I think it confirms what people have been seeing already. How kids know technology but seem not to know content. The book shows how reason, logic and independent thought is disappearing from the country side.
The author, Mark Bauerlein attacks one of the biggest embedded lies in America. He does this head on, not from the side. This idea is that we are smarter than ever before because of computers. The new age of computers demands new ways of educating. This idea which has swept America is that computers by itself will save us and ensure the future. Somehow the technology that gives us Britney 24/7 and the vivid video games in the living room will also magically educate our kids. Technology will solve it all cry some.
Mark shows the idiocy of that idea in stunning detail. His points are very well documented from a variety of sources. The book is easy to read and flows well. The author first highlights the problem. The statistics are very clear, we aren't getting any smarter in spite of the growing use of technology in our lives. Then Mark shows how the educational institution has changed. Computers are being used more in education. Tests show they don't produce smarter kids. Standards are being lowered in the name of adapting to the "new age". This new age demands new procedures. Many in schools say this new age should be met all via computers.
Mark then shows how this constant barrage of the internet, technology and lower educational expectations has taken it's cost. Students do what students have done for centuries. When left to themselves they take the route of least resistance. They are studying less and focusing on stupid stuff. Instead of doing homework time is being filled with TV watching, chatting on web sites like myspace, and concerning themselves with such horrors as Britney Spear's life over other important things like history or science. This formula of constant stimulation for pleasure has eroded people's ability to reason, gather facts, and communicate.
Mark does point fingers, appropriately. He has a whole chapter that shows this problem is one of many problems society has to deal with from the 60s. The current teachers of today were the students of the 60s. The liberal attitudes then have become the liberal practices of today in the class room. The impact cuts across political lines. Arguments now come from catch phrases mentioned on talk shows or on web sites. They don't come from the great thinkers of the age or from the ideas and issues themselves.
The impact of this is degrading of the country. Our economic power is at stake. Students aren't getting the skills they need to compete in the world. They don't have an understanding of the world but they know who won American Idol. They graduate from college stuck in a perpetual childhood of sorts. He calls them Twixters. This erosion of independent thought threatens the nation. It creates people who will buy anything shinny as they do on web sites or something slick like what they see on TV or the computer screen, not what is right. This leads to election of people who might not be the best for the country.
I think everyone will love this book. It will open up your eyes in a new way.
Insightful and important analysis... July 17, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Educators and parents need to hear Mark Bauerlein's message. With all the resources available via digital technology to today's youth, most of them are not benefiting from it intellectually. Why is this? According to Bauerlein, it is largely because of the way this technology is being used - unsupervised - to enable endless social networking and mindless adolescent chat. Having witnessed this behavior even among 20-somethings in my own workplace, it rings true. The younger generation is simply not reading anymore - at least not anything of lasting value. The level of ignorance of relatively recent American history, let alone formative events in our country's more distant past, is shocking - as detailed in copious statistics the author presents.
The most valuable part of this book, however, is its final chapter, in which Bauerlein uses the metaphor of Rip Van Winkle to explicate the serious consequences of historical and cultural ignorance. Beyond this, he attempts to explain how we have come to this serious juncture and what steps can be taken to turn the tide. After all, this wealth of available information via the Internet and digital media should help to make today's youth MORE aware than ever before of their rich cultural heritage, IF it is utilized properly. Too many adults have wrongly assumed that simply granting access to the technology would inevitably improve academic performance. Parents and educators need to recognize this and take action before it is too late.
 Get a real job, Academic Slob July 7, 2008
5 out of 53 found this review helpful
I used to read a lot of books. I always had a book in my coat pocket. My collection is the envy of my friends - a lot of signed books including Marv Albert's signature in Franny and Zooey. You know what all that reading got me? A bed that was never over crowded. And a constant feeling that I was doomed. Most books are really depressing. They are written by people who have major psychological issues. They are drunks and junkies. They are mean and bitter. Many of them eventually kill themselves. Once I cut back on my reading - restricting it to the bathroom, I became happier with myself. Once I quit embracing the warmth of intellectual alienation, I was able to love others and let myself be loved. I didn't feel doomed to live a quiet and solitary life with my eyes glued to a page. And I got laid.
Who cares about the speaker of the house? Or the winner of American Idol? If given a choice between knowing either, you might as well give me the electro shock therapy. Do we need to keep engaging the moronic work of a lifelong academic who sucks off the teats of the dumb kids he detests? The college dork needs to get a real job like pushing a hotdog cart around Atlanta.
A Valuable Contribution; Need to Separate Wheat From Chaff July 5, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
In 'The Dumbest Generation', author Mark Bauerlein articulates two big ideas:
1) Americans need to consider the opportunity cost associated with digital technology.
2) The 1960s Youth Movement (sanctioned by Rutgers University English professor Richard Poirier) began with "independent, creative, skeptical, mental energies", but later devolved into "routine irreverence and knowledge deficits".
This is a very valuable contribution to an ongoing debate over how to best educate our nation's youth. My only criticism is that the book's structure forces the reader to separate the wheat from the chaff.
For instance, Mr. Bauerlein front loads the book's first three chapters with a bevy of statistics to support his larger points. While these statistics help to refute Mr. Bauerlein's critics, they slow down a reader who is trying to grasp those larger points by themselves.
On the other hand, Mr. Bauerlein's writing really shines in Chapters Four, Five, and Six. In these chapters, Mr. Bauerlein incorporates more narrative to explain why digital technology is not the educational panacea that its proponents claim it to be. He also traces the beginnings of the anti-knowledge and anti-intellectual movement back to the 1960s. Here, the author's writing flows, making for a much more effective presentation.
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