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:  52 reviews
Sales Rank: 13570
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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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 47 more reviews...
 Scary Dumb Generation! January 3, 2009
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is so very frightening. This slim book talks about the digital generation born between 1980 to mid 1990s. A generation that reads less and less every day and is off the mark by miles. And this know-nothing generation voted a know-nothing president into office this past November. It makes me very worried. Unless something is done with the public education, there's no way the future generations become any better either. Most teenagers and young adults I have talked to in the US or Canada are clueless morons. That frightens me beyond any thing else. This book is detailed with info, stats and surveys and it is gonna be very hard to deny the findings of this book. Indeed, the current structure of the mass media, public schools and education is helping this crisis become bigger and ever more scarier. This book is a must read for those who would like to understand how this know-nothing generation works, thinks and operates. Get it and read it!
 Too true December 30, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
The details of this book have been hashed over abundantly in previous reviews. I simply wanted to add that as an instructor in what is generally regarded as a good university with a high entering g.p.a. and that turns away more than 80% of its applicants, I found most of Bauerlein's criticisms to be accurate. There are always exceptions, but the attention span, ability to assimilate data and argue from it, and ability to express themselves of the last ten years' worth of students is markedly worse on the whole than those from twenty years ago. His title is hyperbole, but those that seem to condemn the book on that basis alone are simply revealing their ignorance.
Their Parents' Children December 28, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
There is a great deal of hand-wringing these days about the fact that, as the Editorial review states, "Most young people 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." Well, as someone who grew up in the fifties and sixties (that ostensible Age of Enlightenment), I can most definitely tell you that the vast majority of us at age 16, or 18, or even 20, could not perform these tricks of erudition either. I think we tend these days to want to do a revisionist take on our own youthful days. At 18, few of us back then cared to be grinds any more than kids do today. Furthermore, in our intellectually rose-colored view of our own adolescence, we've forgotten what it was like to really be young, forgotten the endless hours spent listening to rock music, watching James Bond movies, fretting about whether we'd have that Satuday night date we so dearly wanted. We didn't spend a whole lot of time wondering where Vietnam or Cambodia was, much less Iraq or Israel, unless, of course, your draft number was up. And our elders worried constantly that we watched too much television, hot-rodded too much, and danced too immoderately to wild primal rhythms.
The people who write books like this are from the privileged class, the college graduates of the sixties and seventies and eighties, and they often live in insular, gated communities of the mind, never rubbing elbows with the great undegreed masses. They fail to consider that the large preponderance of students in their own day, or even today, never went or will go to college. Worse, these latter-day oracles are often conceited in the extreme, looking down their noses at those who aren't college grads, who aren't intellectuals by nature or by choice, telling those poor unfortunates that their futures are hopeless without a sheepskin in hand, or at least some serious book learning. I am a college graduate. I enjoy my share of literature and history, but many of my close acquaintances have never darkened the doors of a college, and though I've a good job that I enjoy, they make more money than I, have closer extended family relationships, and live in a world devoid of the pettiness that comes of the educated class's overbearing pride and intellectual one-upmanship.
No, the vast majority of young people can't pinpoint Israel on a map, name their local representatives, or adequately explain the scientific method. But they never could. Unfortunately, the snobbishness of the old, wealthy elite has today given way to another form of snobbishness: that of the educated elite. Having a good education doesn't make you better than others; all too often, though, it makes you think you are.
 Don't trust this review because I'm under 30. December 22, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
The title is truly one of the most overly broad statements amounting subjective measures as indicative of some sort of bizarre idea of cause and effect. That oversight could be forgiven if the content provided a sound basis for this conclusion of "the dumbest generation". It doesn't. Polls and surveys are used to "measure" knowledge.
Knowledge is further implied by the author to be defined as the accurate representation of facts without context. Therefore, the author concludes my generation to be the dumbest (yet) on the basis of incorrect responses to questions such as: "Who invented the lightbulb?". Of course it matters that we have knowledge about such things, but does it mean that we are dumb and untrustworthy? That seems a mighty stretch to make Professor, and science usually does not amount highly subjective, gap-filled suggestions as wholly evident for making such a broad conclusion.
Furthermore, I can go to Wikipedia to look up anything I may need to know about the lightbulb. Ah, but Wikipedia is also a cause of our dumbness. I shall look to a book for the answer then because books are inherently accurate simply by the fact that they have been written and printed. Where does that leave us with your book?
Again, I am under 30 so it would be best to not trust anything that I say, do, propose, imply, or otherwise communicate. I am dumb and you shouldn't trust me!
Silver Lining December 5, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Overall, a very thoughtful summary of what I have started calling "Generation Next," because, despite having grown up with them, the only thing most of them know how to do on their computers is press the "Next" button. The statistics, studies, and trends cited in the book are right in line with my observations as a college instructor. In looking at causes, please do not leave out the evolving emphasis at universities on money and student retention ("Dumb it down before you flunk so many next time!"), and look carefully at statistics showing exponential growth in adminstrative budgets and flat budgets for tenure-track faculty, despite ballooning enrollments.
My one personal observation that does not come out in this book is the quality of students who manage to rise above the lowly trends of their peers. The small minority of students who learn to leverage new technologies and information access with old-school work ethic and critical thinking are nothing short of astounding. History demonstrates the vast impacts of the contributions of individuals, and it is my (probably delusional) hope that these outstanding students will keep our economy and democracy going. If these handful of students succeed, then the remaining social-oriented majority ought to make great sales reps.
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