The Dumbest Generation
by Mark 

Bauerlein, Tarcher/Penguin, 2008

The Dumbest Generation by Mark 

Bauerlein, Tarcher/Penguin, 2008

I’m not one to argue that technology is turning American society into a race of super-capable knowledge workers who have transcended the need to ever touch material objects, nor do I believe that such a technological transition has produced a generation of young people who exist on an intellectual plane foreign to older folks, a plane on which creativity – a previously unknown creativity that will change the world – is unleashed by an unhesitating embrace of technology.

I don’t even believe that iPhone-wielding kids are necessarily any more techno-savvy than us crumbling Gen Xers who still use e-mail. Every time I read a breathless newsmagazine story about the special powers of today’s young people, I have to chuckle. Still, there’s something about Mark Bauerlein’s argument of the opposite – that technology is making young Americans stupid – that makes me want to resist his conclusions, even as I agree with his basic premise. 

The Dumbest Generation is part of a venerable genre of sociological analysis: the “these kids today” manifesto. In reaction to the journalists who trumpet the techno-superpowers of this latest generation of kids and authors such as Alexandra Robbins, whose book The Overachievers argued that students today are so relentlessly focused on intellectual success that they have given up their childhoods, Bauerlein asserts a completely contrary theory. He argues that kids today are actually lazier than they used to be and their anti-intellectual attitudes are making them less likely to succeed than any pervious generation of American young people. Technology, Bauerlein contends, is not making kids smarter; it is, in fact, encouraging them to remain dumb and thus endangering the future of not only individual kids but the nation as a whole. 

Bauerlein insists that anecdotal projects such as Robbins’ create a false picture of what contemporary young people are really like, and so he resists using anecdotes in favor of compiling and analyzing data in order to reach more reliable conclusions. The result is a book heavy on statistics and light on stories, an approach that makes his argument much more credible scientifically, but which makes his book much less readable and entertaining than a book like The Overachievers. Bauerlein would probably have no problem with that, as he identifies the need to be constantly entertained as one of the problems we’ve created for ourselves. 

So Bauerlein turns to a giant pile of studies, surveys, and other statistical data to back up his claims. He finds lots of troubling stuff in the data. First, he discovers that, despite the claims of technophiles, kids aren’t actually getting smarter as the technology they use evolves; studies of academic achievements show that kids are, at best, no more intellectually capable than their parents (or even their older siblings), and they might actually be getting denser. If that’s true, what’s the problem? Why isn’t technology cranking out geniuses? 

Bauerlein mines the data for answers. To start with, kids don’t read – not books, not magazines, not websites, nothing. Failure to read turns to people into dunces, Bauerlein suggests (full disclosure: Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University). When they’re not reading (that is, all the time) kids are sitting in front of screens: TVs, computers, cell phones, MP3 players, whatever. If it has an LCD or plasma display, kids are looking at it. 

And they’re not using this technology to learn; they’re watching “American Idol,” sending illiterate text messages, watching contentless videos, and scrolling through Facebook pages. 

    There are other problems, too. Because kids have been told since they were toddlers that they’re part of a special generation, they have lost all respect for the wisdom of their elders. Kids understand technology and therefore hold all the answers; they have nothing to learn from teachers and mentors. And despite the fact that our political system panders endlessly to these kids, they are almost entirely ignorant of the political process and the affairs of the world. They are self-absorbed and smug, convinced of their invincibility and omnipotence. 

But whose fault is that? That’s the question you have to ask Bauerlein, as he insists on blaming the kids. Who has told kids that they’re so special? Who has allowed youth culture to supplant adult culture as the dominating cultural force in America? Who has told kids that it’s fine – preferable, in fact – to stay young, to hold yourself in a state of adolescence? Who’s telling them that growing up is bad, that it makes you incompetent and uncreative? I’ll give you a hint: it isn’t other kids. 

I won’t dispute Bauerlein’s contention that American kids are, on balance, anti-intellectual, barely literate, willfully ignorant and unjustifiably arrogant. But if you look around you, you’ll notice a whole lot of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers who fit that description as well, and many of them were born before the Internet was invented. These are the problems of our culture as a whole, and much of Bauerlein’s data fails to make a convincing case that they are getting worse. Young Americans are shamefully dull, but they appear to be only marginally more so than their parents and grandparents were. 

Ironically, the meat of Bauerlein’s argument lies in the same “everbody’s special” mentality that he seems to dislike so much. With the unprecedented access to knowledge that technology provides, he argues, today’s kids shouldn’t be as dumb as their parents; they should be much smarter, but they’re not. Maybe the conclusion we should be drawing here is not that technology is making kids dumb, but that tools are not going to work miracles. Even if everyone has a paintbrush, everyone is not going to paint a masterpiece.

America has never been an intellectual culture, and there is little reason to think that access to Wikipedia is going to turn us into one.

evan.whatzup@gmail.com

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