World Famous Comics: The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)
The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)
By: Mark Bauerlein Publisher: Tarcher Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Tarcher Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 272 Publication Date: May 15, 2008
Product Description: This shocking, lively exposure of the intellectual vacuity of today’s 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 didn’t 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.
The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age... This book is a compilation of statistical information; it is a good, but slower read due to this. The information, however, is quite an eye-opener. We should take the ideology of this book to heart. This book would be a great reference for college students, education majors, and for parents.
I am part of the so-called "dumbest generation" and I liked the book As said above, I am part of the generation that Bauerlein calls "the dumbest." I was born in 1984 and had the good luck to be raised by parents who always encouraged intellectual curiosity. I also went to some pretty decent public primary and secondary schools. But many people haven't shared my good fortune.
Some of the reviews here exemplify the kind of mentality that Bauerlein discusses in his book: kids who are apparently convinced that any knowledge that they already have, regardless of how superficial or paltry it might be, is perfectly sufficient; people who are not only ignorant, but are aware of their own ignorance and consider it no obstacle to voicing whatever uninformed opinion bubbles up in their heads, like the guy who said he hadn't read the book and had no intention of doing so.
That they have this attitude is not entirely their fault, since many of them attended schools where climbing out of the ignorance that all of us are born into was considered optional, lack of effort was no bar to moving up through the grades, and academic rigor was thought of as a cruel imposition on their innocent lives of play or perhaps (horrors) "elitist." Their peer environment was little help, as it punished those with a taste for academic work by calling them "nerds" or simply ignoring them.
The "peer environment" theme is probably the strongest point in the book -- that kids are spending more time with each other, reinforcing the idea that the only thing that matters is the immediate, the present, and fun times spent among one's own age group; adults and their works are boring and irrelevant except insofar as they provide cash and new ways of connecting with friends. Of course, this is the same "extended childhood + prolonged adolescence" cluster of ideas that psychologists and sociologists have been toying with for decades, but I think it is worth considering.
Does Bauerlein *conclusively* establish the idea that this generation is "the dumbest?" I don't think so. He presents some statistics, yes, but the data I have read outside of the book looks equivocal to me. What he does establish, I think, is the existence of a steep decline in the reading of books for pleasure, and a decline in the *desire* (if not ability) to think about complex arguments and current events. These trends merit concern. As for the big question -- "What is to be done?" -- given Bauerlein's belief that the "dumbness" is primarily a result of extracurricular lifestyle, not of education practices, it seems logical that he would be pessimistic, and predictably the book ends with foreboding.
Dr. Males, the writer of the best negative review here, says that the book comes across as self-congratulatory, and parts of it certainly do. Members of the brainy class have always been complaining that the coming generations fail to measure up to their standards of intellectual excellence, and that conditions are looking ever-darker for the causes of academia, informed government, civil society...so I naturally look at these kinds of jeremiads with some skepticism, conscious that the complaints are old ones even if the specific circumstances vary. In the early nineteenth century, Thoreau complained that nobody read serious literature or classics anymore. Maybe we just have to accept that the audience for complex literary works has always been and *will always be* small, and that few people in *any era* will take on philosophical meditation or serious political involvement as a habit.
Depending on your view of the merits of different media types, you may think that substituting web-browsing for book-reading is a bad trend, a neutral one, or even a good one. I see it mostly as a bad one, and I say this as a guy who for years spent hours and hours of each day on discussion boards, social networking sites, and YouTube, only to once again make book-reading my main pastime when I concluded that most of my time online had done me more harm than good.
That was just my own experience, of course, and maybe others see things differently. Anyway, life's too short to throw away most of it sitting in front of a screen. I think I'll go read a book. :-)
Good Idea, but... The premise for the book is fascinating but the methodology was one long tie in of statistics, quotes and sources. I felt like I was reading someone's masters thesis which some may desire, but I was hoping for an insightful AND readable book.
Good Explanation of Problem But Wrong Cause I'm a member of Generation X, and most of the items Dr. Bauerlein blames for the ignorance of Generation Y were not in widespread use when I was a teen. We didn't have the Internet, cell phones, iPods, or sophisticated video game systems, and my town did not even get wired for cable until my freshman year of high school. Yet we did not spend our leisure time in the type of intellectual pursuits that Dr. Bauerlein imagines have been displaced by these modern items. Instead of literature, philosophy, high culture, political activism, or discussing current events we wasted our time on mindless drivel. We hung out at the mall or roller skating rink, gossiped on landlines, watched network soap operas, listened to pop music on the radio or our Walkman, flipped through "Tiger Beat" and other teen magazines, played video games on our Nintendos or Segas, and so on. And I really don't think my parents' generation was all that much different as teens, although the technology was obviously more primitive.
So if teens have been wasting their leisure time on mindless pursuits for decades, why then is Gen Y so ignorant compared to previous generations? Dr. Bauerlein pretty much lets the schools off the hook in "The Dumbest Generation" but I believe that the "dumbing down" of the curriculum is the root cause. Today's teens were raised in the era of the "self esteem" fad, "whole language", "constructivist math" (aka fuzzy math), and all sorts of politically correct multiculturalism nonsense. Little wonder then that so many of them struggle with academic basics.
"The Dumbest Generation" is an interesting book, but the author's arguments in support of his main premise did not strike me as particularly convincing.
Incredibly Flawed As a member of "the Dumbest Generation," I was intrigued by the title and was curious what was being said about people my own age. To be frank, I'm surprised that the editors at Penguin allowed this to be published. The book is full of allegations that lack any real substance, and which are unfortunately most often wrong. The use of statistics from multiple-choice surveys about education is highly questionable. It appears that the author did not bother personally interviewing any members of the generation he's speaking about for the book, or if he did, those interviews did not make their way into the text.
Rarely have I found a piece of writing so ignorant, so incorrect, and so offensive. I feel strongly enough about it that in the future, I may write more about the flaws in this book on The Huffington Post. In the meantime, skip this book and buy another.
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