Digital Sextant

The Dumbest Generation

How the Digital Age Stupifies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future
by Mark Bauerlein

It seems apt to write a post about Bauerlein’s book the day after I reflect on Avery’s burgeoning digital talent.  I’m going to characterize the book in a couple sets of bullets — things I think the book says, things I dislike about the book, and things I like about the book.

Things the book says

• Bauerlein argues that digital technology does not deliver on the promises its promoters have made.  The millennials are told, from the moment they start mixing and Facebooking, that they see things in a different way, they are the digital generation, and that they are great.  But these new skills don’t translate into real world performance, and they’re leaving school less informed, less thoughtful, less able, and more self-confident (paradoxically) than any previous generation.
• The mentors have abdicated their (our) responsibility as guardians of tradition and have left the millennials underprepared for the future and unaware of their deficits.
• Reading is AWESOME and not enough young people do it.

Things I like about what the book says

• We are at a crisis of education.  Students aren’t being challenged in the classroom enough and the intellectual life their teachers take for granted has changed beyond recognition.
• The cultural heritage democracy depends on–particularly a contextualized knowledge of history and philosophy–is almost entirely absent from the new generation leaving high school.  We can expect to see a major problem maintaining the standards of intelligent debate when this gap exists.  The most disturbing quote in the book: “Two-thirds of high school seniors couldn’t explain a photo of a theater whose portal reads ‘COLORED ENTRANCE’.” (17)
• It’s important to instill in the young a respect for history and those who have come before them.  Youth always believe themselves to be special — history and knowledge teach us how little of what we’ve done is actually special; humility breeds real intelligence.

That I don’t like about what the book says

• Bauerlein criticizes digital boosters as focusing on a narrow niche of students, people who epitomize the highest achievers of their generation, and making broad claims based on their behaviors.  But Bauerlein does the same thing when he romanticizes the intellectual heft of students from the past.  I doubt that a huge swath of middle-achievers in the 1950s went to museums for fun instead of playing baseball or hanging out with friends; the mall– not the library– was the Facebook of the 1980s.
• Much of what he suggests about how knowledge works depends on a notion of individual depth that makes sense.  If you don’t have the context to understand the history of race-relations in the U.S., it’s hard to speak adequately about the issue.  But I think people in the digital age acquire a wider range of deep specialties which they can use to connect to other students and people.  He underplays the value of these specialties.
• He also overplays the visibility of the intellectual activities of the youth of the past.  Writing about intellectuals of the past, he says “Do Intellectual Pockets exist today similar to Alcove 1 or to Port Huron?  I don’t know of any” (228).  I suspect these groups came to power later, and that people weren’t writing books about them at the time.

In the end, I agree with many sentiments Bauerlein offers here, but I ultimately disagree with the “hell in a handbasket” reading of all our culture.  As a scholar of the digital age, I’m interesting in looking at how to leverage new ways of communicating into productive work as fast as possible.  From that perspective, Bauerlein stands like a man on the beach facing a breaker with his hand out, shouting stop as the wave bears down.