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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) | 
 enlarge | Author: Mark Bauerlein
Publisher: Tarcher
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  36 reviews
Sales Rank: 6445
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
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Condition: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION.
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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 31 more reviews...
 Shallow and mean-spirited June 15, 2008
178 out of 243 found this review helpful
English professor Mark Bauerlein spends 250 pages telling us what America's young don't know. Here are some massive trends affecting students over the last 30 to 50 years he doesn't seem to know: the evolution from elitism toward universal education, the defunding of public education, college tuitions rising four times faster than inflation, erupting student debt, forced deferral of higher education, the influx of non-English-speaking students, the rise of the service economy... details like that.
What's even more amazing--in a book that lauds scholarship and intellectual inquiry--there is almost no original research, especially on the fundamental point the "dumbest generation" title claims to address. I expected Bauerlein to make his case by analyzing long-term surveys by the Higher Education Research Institute and Monitoring the Future and dozens of Digest of Education Statistics tables on trends, etc.--but he barely mentions them.
The reason, of course, is that the best education information exposes how superficial this book is. The biggest trend it omits (among many) is that since the 1950s, America has radically expanded its education system: high schools now include the poorest third of youth and colleges now educate more than just the richest fraction. The proportion of 16-24 year-olds who were enrolled in school or had graduated from high school rose from 60% to 91%, the percentage of high school graduates who had completed standard coursework tripled, the proportion of high school seniors taking SAT and ACT college admission tests doubled, and the percentage enrolled in college more than doubled.
Such rapid expansion bringing tens of millions of formerly uneducated youth into the education system would be expected to reduce average test scores. Remarkably, this didn't happen. Older students' reading and math scale comprehension scores are just as high, and younger students' are considerably higher, compared to 30 years ago. After bottoming out in the mid-1970s (when Bauerlein was in high school), standardized SAT and ACT scores rose slightly even as vastly greater percentages of high schoolers were taking the tests. If we compared the share of students fluent in two or more languages, the generational gains would be even more impressive.
Take a salient example: in 1975, American student scores on the ACT standard test of English, math, reading, and science averaged 20.6; in 2007, 21.2. Not much of an improvement in three decades, correct? Here's the gain: in 1975, just 17% of the nation's 18-year-olds took the test; in 2007, 30%. SAT and other standard tests show similar trends. Likewise, fewer than one-third of high school graduates of 30 years ago had completed a basic core curriculum (four English, three social science, two science, and two math credits), compared to over 80% today.
Bauerlein's limited analysis focuses only on the elitist "vertical" accumulation of knowledge (whether the average test taker is smarter today) while ignoring the more important "horizontal" gains (the spread of knowledge to broader segments of the population). If Bauerlein is really concerned about democracy, he should be cheering these egalitarian improvements.
One would expect Bauerlein to fully discuss the universalization of American education before calling today's students "dumb." Instead, he fills the book with quickie outtakes from some recent surveys absent historical context, secondhand numbers he apparently didn't analyze, silly television and mass-media quips, and quotes from teachers and others castigating the younger generation with epithets that were already hackneyed in Socrates' time. Bauerlein indulges the standard array of shallow prejudices against adolescents ("the 17-year-old mind," "the 18-year-old life," the "adolescent horde"), the usual snobbish praise of himself and middle-agers' self-anointed citizenship and intellectuality, and the same-old myth that kids today have too many rights. Meanwhile, his own narrowness is painful: nearly all the books he recommends are by classical European authors, as if 90% of the world's intellectual tradition didn't exist.
Put simply, this book is full of fluff and conceit, a lot of it blatantly unfair. Bauerlein cites some recent alarms (the same that recur every decade or two) to insinuate that today's youth represent an apocalyptic "decline" and "breakdown" compared to older America's presumably cultured, intellectual past (a past he never shows actually existed). He quotes the HERI survey to deplore today's "college delinquency" (being late, skipping classes, etc.) but fails to note the same survey reports these same behaviors going back 40 years. He complains about low voter turnout among 18-29 year-olds but somehow missed the massive increase in the 2004 election to record peaks. He cites a sketchy survey on political knowledge as evidencing young people's ignorance but fails to mention it also finds big knowledge gaps by race, sex, and education and income level.
Bauerlein doesn't even title his book right. His gripe is not that today's youth really are the "dumbest generation," but that "young Americans today are no more learned or skillful than their predecessors." That's an entirely different point, and it's contradicted by measures showing higher proportions of today's younger generation do know more.
But what is really disturbing about this book and its fans' uncritical praise is the self-adulation and complete lack of humility. Face it, we older Americans (I'm 57) aren't exactly setting cosmic records as intellectual beacons, enlightened leaders, and philosopher kings. This is yet another in the avalanche of egotistical books by Boomer and older Xer authors lavishly praising ourselves and our generation as morally and intellectually superior to the "dumb," "unworthy" young that utterly fail to represent the critical scholarship these authors say they prize.
--Mike Males, Ph.D., http://www.YouthFacts.org
 I weep for the future May 17, 2008
97 out of 133 found this review helpful
Sixty-three percent of test takers couldn't find Iraq on a map??? Fifty-two percent of high school seniors picked Germany, Japan, or Italy as allies of the United States in World War II? Are you SERIOUS?
A well-documented, reasoned look at America's Dumbest Generation. The author pulls no punches. He isn't out to insult or deride -- rather, his points serve to highlight and emphasize the severity of the problem.
Highly recommend.
In later chapters, the author delves into how "The Dumbest Generation" came to be. One point stands out -- the contemptuous view of history and tradition. The author documents a case of a young aspiring artist who not only does not know who Michaelangelo or Rembrandt are -- BUT DOES NOT CARE.
I can only take this book in doses before having to put it down. The author talks about how today's society is more focused on information retrieval versus knowledge formation. He demonstrates how today's society can multi-task and do a lot without actually learning a lot. Test results are sprinkled throughout to support the author's points.
An insightful, eye-opening book.
The Current Prisoners In Plato's Cave June 7, 2008
67 out of 87 found this review helpful
This is an astonishingly insightful book. The fact that it has not so far garnered avalanches of commendation on this site suggests to me the dunces of our age, comfortable with the present scheme of things, may be in confederacy against it. Its thesis is that the generations since the 60's have become increasingly self-absorbed and therefore sadly unfit to maintain a democratic society. For requisite intellectual combat, the young of our time lack both a liberal education and civic knowledge, essentials for the preservation and advance of the American experiment in government. The villain here, as Bauerlien presents it, is manifestly NOT technology itself. He is no Luddite. Rather, he pillories the increasingly eager self-absorption of the young in mere private social life, and the peculiar eagerness of Boomer mentors to approve such juvenility. Technology itself, after all, does not require that the young text message DURING college classes or fake bathroom emergencies to take cell phone calls. For too many of them, the highest and only reality is peer group interaction. The rest is blah, blah, blah.
In his early chapters, Bauerlien happily provides even more hard evidence of the mediocrity of current youth culture than the most strictly defensive parent, teacher or journalist might require to become alarmed. In his summarizing words, "a parent, teacher or journalist who doesn't see the problem would have to be blind." The young these days, by and large, are ignorant of beneficent tradition. Even the pen of a Jonathan Swift would be challenged to report on them, since what he could satirize as worst case behavior in his time has become pretty standard in ours. He mocked, it will be remembered, several town wits referring to an obscure author called Homer and had them in dispute as to whether there had actually ever been any ancient writers or not, the present moment being all.
Bauerlein, I'm happy to report, does not follow his scientific analysis with a plea of impotence. He argues, instead, that adults in all spheres must speak out to reverse the order of things and encourage youth to see that adulthood rather than a Peter-Pan like endless adolescence is the desideratum. The young, by nature, do desire to be older. One has only to ask 5 1/2 year olds their age and they'll chime 6, to a person. That 25 year olds will say they're 21 is the greater problem in our time.
Freeing the young from Plato's cave has always been an uphill battle. Are there adults today, Bauerlien asks, who are willing to take the risks?
In defense of the millenials against this pessimistic, narrow-minded book June 13, 2008
43 out of 90 found this review helpful
A few years ago, a Congress composed mostly of people 50+ followed a 50+ president into an unjustified war based on false and unreviewed data on WMD. By the time my generation retires, the baby boomers will have completely drained Social Security, leaving us to fend for ourselves in our old age. You tell me who the dumbest generation is.
My generation, although we may have low voter turnout, voted by a full 10% for John Kerry, and along with voters 60+ was the only group that favored Gore over Bush. If Obama is elected, it will be due to the overwhelming support of the youth vote. We boosted Clinton to his first victory (thanks in part, yes, to his sax playing and underwear declarations on MTV).
As for MTV, don't even try to put that on us. I was six months in the womb when the Buggles first declared that video killed the radio star, and no one in my generation is head of Viacom. That they decide that "youth programming" must be idiotic is a reflection of their cynicism, not our moral or intellectual decrepitude. This is nothing new, see the drive-in Frankie and Annette beach bunny comedies of the 50's as evidence that the young will always me the target market for cheap "entertainments."
The failure of young Americans to embrace culture and literature is in due large part to the increasingly regimented and results-obsessed focus of American education (thank you very much, No-Child-Left-Behind). Arts and musics programs have been swept aside in importance (where they haven't vanished entirely). I predict this will only get worse as the boomers, the most selfish and indulged generation, retire and decide that other's people's children are not worth their tax dollars and vote accordingly.
As for the actual book, aside from being grossly pick-and-choosy about what material he uses to condemn us (Jay Leno's comedy bits? Really?) He also skews his findings to make them sound worse (1/4 of young Americans not knowing who Dick Cheney instead that 3/4 do). A balanced look at the the cause-and-effect of youth apathy might have been interesting, instead, this is nothing but a 200+ page diatribe, insulting at worst, tiresome at best.
A dumb title May 27, 2008
42 out of 64 found this review helpful
Mr. Bauerlein cites numerous studies to demonstrate that the vast majority of the younger generation, aka "Millenials" (born between 1980 and 1999), are not developing solid reading, writing and math skills in their formative years. They also acquire limited knowledge about or interest in public policy issues. By way of explanation, it is established that young people spend far more time using digital devices (television, computers, cell phones, video games, etc.) than reading books (with the exception of the Harry Potter series).
Earlier generations spent more time reading, per the sources cited, but they did not achieve significantly higher educational standards. It therefore seems unfair to label the Millenials as "the Dumbest Generation." In any case, the advance of technology is irreversible, and books, newspapers, etc. are probably headed for eventual extinction. One would hardly be justified in concluding that our society is therefore doomed.
The author goes on to make a much sounder point. Notwithstanding the glowing predictions of many educators and politicians and a ton of investment, computer technology has not had a major, positive impact on educational results. This is not because the computer does not have stunning potential as a learning tool; it does, as Bauerlein acknowledges, but is being used mostly for social networking vs. mind stretching exploration or research.
Who is to blame? The Millenials may be faulted for not capitalizing on their opportunities, but the real culprits are the educators and other custodians of received learning in our culture who have abdicated responsibility for setting standards in favor of "student-centered instruction." The premise is that students should be allowed to determine what they want to learn, rather than told what they are expected to learn, as a means to "inspire the lesser-caliber students to work harder and stay in school." Just the opposite result is obtained in practice.
Assessment: This is a far ranging book that makes some important points about our educational system, but the hype about the corrosive effects of computer technology is distracting. Also, it would be nice to see some discussion of how a return to teacher-centered instruction could be achieved.
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