Generation Y's brazen disregard for books and learning portends dismal implications for the nation's intellectual future. A review of Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation.
The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)
by Mark Bauerlein
published by Tarcher (May 15, 2008)
Hdbk., 272 pgs.
ISBN-10: 1585426393
ISBN-13: 978-1585426393
Ignorance takes center stage on NBC-TV's Tonight Show's hilarious "Jaywalking" segments. Genial host Jay Leno goes to the street to ask young people simple, basic questions. Their astounding answers reveal cultural illiteracy, a knowledge gap with staggering implications. Examples:
Q. "How many stars on the American flag?"
A. "Fifty-two?"
Q. "What's another term for the War Between the States?"
A. "Are we supposed to know this stuff? What kind of question is THAT?"
English professor Mark Bauerlein of Emory University in Atlanta explores the phenomenon of the "Gen Y's" falling into the dismal swamp of cultural illiteracy in this provocative new book. The "Gen Ys" are immersed, he finds, in an insular, self-absorbed world of i-Pods, cell phones, video games and computers, deaf to the world around them. Born along the information superhighway, they have retreated into self-imposed immaturity.
Bauerlein observes: "For all their technological adroitness, they don't read or write or add or divide very well . . ." A spate of studies he cites shows his allegations hold up about the dumbing down of America.
They are the Millennials, Americans born between roughly 1980 and 2000. The term derives from Charles Finn's What Do Our 17-Year Olds Know? (1987). As a generation, no doubt many in Prof. Bauerlein's classes at Emory, they serve as his catchy title, "the dumbest generation." The author gives credit for the title to Philip Roth's 2000 novel, The Human Stain (2000), about a troubled professor in deep dung for putting down his students' native intelligence.
Bauerlein's thesis: Twenty and thirty-somethings live in a cocoon-like cyberworld unto themselves. Averse to exploring key issues, they opt for a state of blissful, perpetual adolescence. Yet they are mentally agile, street-smart, and test well (with focused practice) particularly in their SATS, a gateway to their futures.
They are turned off by dusty old legacy stuff, such as history, geography, politics and certainly, fiction, as so much needless crap, like Latin, and oh-so dull. They draw blanks on the names of their representatives and senators, even the vice president of the United States (39%, not a clue). Leno's anecdotal "Jaywalking" segments, not totally representative, naturally, are not far off the mark. Bauerlein calls it "the knowledge problem."
With countless brilliant exceptions (think youthful "Jeopardy" champs, and the bright kid down your street) the Millennials collectively are largely immune to the grown-up world. It's a turn-off to them, full of hypocrisy and Bill Clinton-type antics. They do not lack personal honesty, although cheating on tests is somehow okay, maybe on the theory "everyone does it" and it's a tough world after all.
They can read with the best but choose not to, unless forced, as in cramming for tests. Then they discard temporarily "learned" material as so much jetsam. They must get back to their favorite websites, Facebook and MySpace, and John Madden's NFL video game. First things first.
Bauerlein calls it "a-literacy," not illiteracy. They do not read books and newspapers (circulations nosedive) or much anything "serious," at least on their own. When they visit libraries they flock bird-like to the computers, or to the A/V Room, while book stacks gather dust, devoid of inquisitive live bodies.
Roughly 50 million Millennials inhabit America. (It does not appear to be an international phenomenon.) These post-Baby Boomers reflect a "blatant disregard for books and learning," Bauerlein asserts, a point made twenty-one years ago by a like-minded professor writing in the identical genre, Allan Bloom in his landmark book, The Closing of the American Mind (1987).
Want proof of the problem (today, an "issue")? Easy. Twenty percent (20%) of Millennials end up in remedial classes when they hit college unprepared. "Proficient reading" is a problem for at least 31% of freshman. (Any wonder?) Fully half think Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) is a story about the end of the world. They are six times (6X!) more likely to know the latest Teen Idol's name, than the Speaker of the House. (Okay, so Dennis Hastert was a toughie. Nancy Pelosi would fare better.)
Chances are the Millennials will never delight in the poetry of Wordsworth, or engage an essay by Emerson or a Huxley — or, heavens forbid!, a play by William Shakespeare. Dead old white guy, you know. Hey!, who needs THAT? Why, that's worse than reading Plato's Republic.
What caused this trendy Know-Nothingness? Not being sparked by inspiring teachers? Bedazzled by a digital age, by the enticing siren song of cyberculture? (See Bauerlein's too-long subtitle.) Spoiled by abundance? Their two-job parents, with no time for their offspring's cultural education? Broken homes? Dysfunctional ones? Mental exertion too much like work? Peer pressure?
Bauerlein's take, it's youthful society:
An anti-intellectual outlook prevails in their leisure lives, squashing the lessons of school. Instead of producing knowledgeable, querulous young minds, the youth culture [sic] of American society yields an adolescent consumer immersed in juvenile matters secluded from adult realities.
As to their political life, such as it is, Bauerlein suggests young conservatives are more apt "to analyze ideas and history" than young liberals do. To "novice left-wingers," Bauerlein writes, "everything is topical." (Anyone hear echoes of young Hillary Rodham's Sixties mentor, Chicago Marxist community activist Saul Alinsky, insisting "all politics are personal"? Make that, er, "topical"? It's in Chicagoan Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, 1971, post-Machiavellian rules practiced by some area politicians ever since!)
Bauerlein describes members of the campus Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as "energetic," adept at organizing to be sure,"but [with] hardly any traces of theories, arguments, books or thinking."
As for the Right, Bauerlein observes: "College Republicans who read books such as The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot [by Russell Kirk], and track the acts of Congress, find hostility to their reasoned outlooks" from the likes of SDS members — and, Bauerlein might well have added, hostility also from the one-sided elite media. Millennials on the left, he suggests without any evidence, "show less aptitude, as yet, for research and political analysis." But college Republicans can also be set in their ways, he adds, less likely to examine issues competing with their hardened viewpoints.
This ideological standoff recalls for this reviewer what Saul Bellow wrote in the Foreword to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind in 1987: ""The habits of civilized discourse have suffered a scorching. Antagonists [on the Left and the Right] seem no longer to listen to one another . . .." No less than "the higher mental life in a democratic United States is as stake," writes the novelist about the the angst-ridden epistle-writer-to-nobody Herzog (1963).
Why is this problem – today, termed an "issue" — so damn important? Cultural illiteracy, or "a-literacy," as Bauerlein calls it, carries a stiff price tag. He complains with ample good reason: "As of 2008, the intellectual future of the United States looks dim." Call it a disconnect between present Gen "Y" and our cultural past, offering scant hope for the orderly transfer of our Western intellectual traditions.
The dumbest generation might be the weak link in intellectual tradition that bonds us as Americans, not warring Balkanized tribes, or an insular society unto only computers and video games. The late intellectual guru Allan Bloom, in my dog-eared copy of his 1987 book, sums up the cultural generational disconnect in a succinct sentence, one really for the ages:
The delicate fabric of the civilization into which successive generations are woven, has unraveled, and children are raised, not educated.
("Amen" this reviewer had jotted in a marginal note to himself twenty years ago.)
What this cultural deafness portends is scary: Unwilling to face reality? Unable to make rational decisions, as in voting in creeps? Lacking critical abilities to sniff out political demagogues, charlatans and other phonies? The Millennials' problem seems to be a chronic inability to link the present to past, let alone to the future, evoking George Santayana's forever-enduring line about condemnation for not knowing history? Did I say, it's scary as hell?
This is a readable, "serious" book, well-researched, a Godsend follow-on to Bloom's benchmark 1987 work. It lacks only a full indexing by subject for those so inclined to retrace stuff, but that's No Big Deal. While Bauerlein savagely puts down the dumbing down of America, as Allan Bloom did, he is not smart-alecky or disrespectful in his withering prose. Just the facts, shouting out. No political correctness here, folks; no malice aforethought, not a diatribe, only a deep concern for the intellectual future of our nation. Most union teachers are sure to dispute it, even the empirical facts set forth in this book. Dumbness is like that.
If you seek partisan treatise, this is not it. The author dismisses the Millennials' "politics" in a couple of pages, summed up in this review. Most of the "Y" Generation has a disdain for politics, and does not closely follow public issues. They vote viscerally, based on images and sound bites, not knowledge-based reality. Politics is dirty business to them, fostered no doubt by some cruddy politicians.
Finally, if you appreciated the expose of the dumbing down of America by the late Professor Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, you'll embrace Bauerlein's passionate plea for America's future, and want this book on your books shelf, too. Highly recommended!
The Dumbest Generation is available on Amazon.com.
An important article. The ultimate cause of the cheerful but ultimately deadly nihilism we see described in the book (and in real life all around us) is as follows:
In the past, children were generally taught, by their parents and by other of society’s authorities, that the God of the Bible exists, and the meaning of life is to honor Him by working hard to support and defend your family, your religion and your nation. Not all parents believed or openly articulated these ideas, but enough of them did that nihilism was held at bay.
But today’s parents generally don’t believe any of the above things, and so they do not impart them to their young. You cannot give what you do not have.
And why do parents no longer believe? The ultimate reason is that the philosophical system of the left, generally called liberalism, has near-total control of America, and the entire West. This means that most of society’s authorities teach liberalism, and most people believe it, aside from the occasional “unprincipled exceptions” to liberalism that are required in order to live a halfway-tolerable life.
Liberalism of course, denies that God, religion or nation has any claim on people, and it assets that freedom and non-discrimination are the greatest goods. The predictable result is that people become selfish, in the most petty sense of the word, and they accordingly become unable to preserve the goods which they have received from their ancestors, chief among them being American society itself.
Therefore, to preserve our nation, we must fight against the foundational beliefs of liberalism, and we must instruct our young properly to honor God, parents, tradition and society. Otherwise the corruption of our youth will only accelerate, with disastrous results. For some concrete suggestions about how to fight liberalism, see the blog “View From the Right” at http://www.amnation.com/vfr/, and browse the archives.
"The indispensable condition of any conservative or traditionalist movement, as well as of our personal spiritual survival, is that we say NO to the prevailing values of the liberal order and that we keep saying NO.” – Lawrence Auster
[...] found this article via the Conservative Blog for Peace. It seems that pundits are calling people my age the [...]
I live in what is perhaps the greatest concentration of colleges – and hence young college students – in the US, if not the world, Boston Massachusetts (I live deep in the "student ghetto," if you will). On a daily basis, I get watch these young people interact. I overhear their conversations. I see the commercial venues opened specifically for their benefit.
The three most important values most of them seem to possess is eat, sleep, and gratify themselves. That, simply, is it. They are arrogant to a fault, have a keen ability to flip around any criticism of their actions onto the accuser, are violent and destructive "for fun," and possess the most superficial knowledge of the world around them.
While I am something of a cynic, I am not inflating any of this.