Book Review: The Dumbest Generation - How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future by Mark Bauerlein
Published May 27, 2008
It is an inevitability that with every generational change, the older generation will complain about the new generation and reminisce on the past - the "good ol' days," if you will. It's not a surprise when the new fashions and trends of youth culture get misunderstood by the adults who say they know better, and as those fashions and trends become the accepted norms, those youth turn into the wise adults, criticize their children's youthful ways, and continue the vicious cycle into the next generation.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, for many reasons. When cultural norms change, art, literature, and other creative outlets become more fluid, and people respond to the spirit of the age with an intelligent and relevant civic discourse. Only the old school traditionalists - those curmudgeons who see change as the end of the world as we know it - lambast and discourage this healthy pattern, a pattern that has made our great democracy run efficiently enough throughout the 20th Century.
That's why Mark Bauerlein tries to distinguish himself from these old fogey stereotypes early in his book The Dumbest Generation, and states that his book is not an attempt to insult or undermine the youth of today, but to show "with empirical evidence" that those in Generation Y (or The Millennials, Generation Next, DotNetters, what have you) are truly stupid.
Despite being surrounded with more information than ever before, the generation that grew up on the Internet has become intellectually lazy, and that's not just one man's opinion, it's supported by statistical fact, Bauerlein says. He won't look at their attitudes, behaviors, or values, he states in his introduction, just their capacities for intelligence. And then he spends the rest of his book looking at their attitudes, behaviors, and values (in between his hefty doses of statistics and data), judging them unsound and lamenting the end of intellectualism in America.
It's not the fairest assessment, especially since his metrics of evaluation don't fit with his original premise. After all, can you really measure the intelligence of an entire generation based on samples of surveys and testing data without looking at their changing attitudes? Bauerlein's opinion seems to be that the statistics reveal a surprising move toward stupidity, and that this stupidity manifests itself in Generation Y's anti-intellectual attitudes.
Within Bauerlein's collected research, several disturbing trends among young people do emerge. The fact-based, multiple-choice approach to education has hampered our ability to "think historically," meaning young Americans have difficulties placing current events in relation to their historical contexts. Only 22 percent of those involved in one survey could identify key phrases from the Gettysburg Address. Yet in the same survey, 99 percent could identify Beavis and Butt-Head.
Kevin Eagan is a Blogcritics Books Editor and (occasional) freelance writer based in the Greater St. Louis, MO area. He also writes at There There Kid, a blog that focuses on literature, culture, and music.
- Book Review: The Dumbest Generation - How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future by Mark Bauerlein
- Published: May 27, 2008
- Type: Review
- Section: Books
- Filed Under: Culture: Society, Culture: Media, Culture: History, Books: Reference, Books: Politics and Affairs, Books: Nonfiction
- Writer: Kevin Eagan
- Kevin Eagan's BC Writer page
- Kevin Eagan's personal site
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Amen, Glen.
And all of these prescriptive vs. descriptive arguments are starting to do my head in! :)
Kevin, I had to supervise, hire (and often fire) teenage kids who worked at the Burger King where I managed in the 1990's.
Were these kids dumber? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. Intelligence is not necessarily measured by academic ability. But, getting these high schoolers to do basic math, like figuring change (which is only really calculating 100-x) was a major problem. When a high school kid has to use a calculator to figure 9*3, that is a major problem. And I saw that all the time when buying gas and presenting little coupons that shaved three cents off the price of every gallon of gas.
I would suggest that computerization and the internet has changed what is important in terms of academic achievement. Why learn how to calculate change when a pocket calculator (or the store cash register) can do it just as well? Why learn how to do a square root when all you have to do is press a button? Why learn how to use a slipstick when a "scientific calculator" will do all the skull work?
Then, of course, are all those American kids who have no clue where Madagascar is, or all those Israeli kids who have no clue who Golda Meir or David ben-Gurion was....
That's on one side of the equation.
On the other side of the equation are the kids who can hack into any computer system in the world, build a computer as though it were an Erector Set or bunch of Legos, who can do videos and radio podcasts, and who have revolutionized news gathering by getting up in buses and making videos with cell-phones when they see what looks like news.
All this is a double edged sword. On the one side, computerization has cut into much classical academics, but on the other, it has added a dimension that paper and pencil guys like me can barely imagine.
Nevertheless, Kevin, for all of this, writing is still a craft, and it would do all young would-be writers to learn how to spell; to learn what verbs and adverbs are, and to remember that all crafts require practice, practice, and more practice.
There is no computer program that can turn a bad writer into a master wordsmith.
I'll pass on the book. I don't need to pay someone to try to tell me what I know already.
We disagree, Kevin, but that's an altogether fair and intelligent review.
Hey. Two months after your review but, assuming others like myself might stumble upon it ...
What art, sir? I live in Chicago, the new art capital of the country --as opposed to that pigpen of hillbilly poseurs, Brooklyn-- and I am continually shocked by the absolute lack of originality in much of what shamelessly passes for art in your generation, especially at the "fringes" -- everything is pathetically derivative, from music to physical art ... at the moment, e.g. the found/trash/recycled art movement and its cheesy taggin/grafitti compadre go on as if this is something new and revolutionary ... brutally ignorant of how its emptiness was booed off stage twenty years ago on "Family Ties", when then Mallory's frighteningly illiterate "found" artist boyfriend Nick was ushered in to usher that shit out. From Ladytron to the Long Blondes, from the shameless mimicry of those idiots Interpol to the recent crap by the likes of Hot Chip ("ready for the floor?" ... wanna see pathetic lifting, youtube the band Seccession circa 1985). The real sad part, however, is the overall increasing illiteracy many millenials seem to squueze into, with both pain and joy, as they do when squeezin into their skinny pants (why, why in god's name did this trend have to reappear right when we be gettin' obese at alarming rates?). I know this may be a hard concept for many of you, so I'll take it slow ... the situation with your generation regarding art but more importantly reading is profoundly disanalogous (take your time, google it, come back, we cool?) to that of previous generations. There is something painfully wrong when contests to see who can text the most in the shortest time span are publicly applauded. There is less and less language, vocabulary and concepts to flourish with the more brutally illiterate one gets. When Heidegger famously stated that language is the house of being, he could be construed to have kindled many fires beyond the metaphysical ones he was targeting. Language is the house of being but also the tool we express ourselves with. Not just cheezily or narcissistically, but when we are in pain, abused, misunderstood, feel our freedoms frustrated, wish to promote what we value, getting to know what we value, and why we do, etc. In to "Kill a Mockingbird", if one kindda reads it, you know, not as given by Wikipedia or on film, one will notice that a subtle but profound message Harper Lee wishes to impart is that the humanistic armour and motor running Atticus Finch is largely, if not exclusively the product of ... READING (BOO!), and lots of it. It is reading and the EXTENDED concentration (boo, AGAIN) required to read say, a novel, that helps one imaginatively travel and place oneself (whether socially, sexually, tearfully, or philosophically) in a diffirent place, different shoes. The less we read, the more deeply solipsistic we get. But then again, one would have to be dumb as hell to expect that members of this generation would care about themselves enough to establish habits that can help them both appreciate and confront the moral complexity of their daily lives and decision making. Thousands of years ago (ok two, but it's all the same to you guys anyway) Socrates (as recorded or portrayed ... what a fukin' fascinating question ... by Plato) stated that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what happens when even the issues and question generating and generated by this issue are not only unimportant, but unrecognized in the first place? What happens if igrorance-fed defensiveness and a grand ballroom celebration of blidiocy is yanking us further into Plato's cave? Where are you? I can't see you. Shit ... I can't even hear you. Hello?
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Pretty damn scholarly Mr. Eagan. Damn those traditionalists anyway, right?
-Glen