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Review
"If you're the parent of someone under 20 and read only one non-fiction book this fall, make it this one. Bauerlein's simple but jarring thesis is that technology and the digital culture it has created are not broadening the horizon of the younger generation; they are narrowing it to a self-absorbed social universe that blocks out virtually everything else."
-Don Campbell, USA Today
"An urgent and pragmatic book on the very dark topic of the virtual end of reading among the young."
-Harold Bloom
"Never have American students had it so easy, and never have they achieved less. . . . Mr. Bauerlein delivers this bad news in a surprisingly brisk and engaging fashion, blowing holes in a lot of conventional educational wisdom."
-Charles McGrath, The New York Times
"It wouldn't be going too far to call this book the Why Johnny Can't Read for the digital age."
-Booklist
"Throughout The Dumbest Generation, there are . . . keen insights into how the new digital world really is changing the way young people engage with information and the obstacles they face in integrating any of it meaningfully. These are insights that educators, parents, and other adults ignore at their peril."
-Lee Drutman, Los Angeles Times
-Don Campbell, USA Today
"An urgent and pragmatic book on the very dark topic of the virtual end of reading among the young."
-Harold Bloom
"Never have American students had it so easy, and never have they achieved less. . . . Mr. Bauerlein delivers this bad news in a surprisingly brisk and engaging fashion, blowing holes in a lot of conventional educational wisdom."
-Charles McGrath, The New York Times
"It wouldn't be going too far to call this book the Why Johnny Can't Read for the digital age."
-Booklist
"Throughout The Dumbest Generation, there are . . . keen insights into how the new digital world really is changing the way young people engage with information and the obstacles they face in integrating any of it meaningfully. These are insights that educators, parents, and other adults ignore at their peril."
-Lee Drutman, Los Angeles Times
Book Description
This shocking, surprisingly entertaining romp into the intellectual nether regions of today's underthirty set reveals the disturbing and, ultimately, incontrovertible truth: cyberculture is turning us into a society of know-nothings.
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Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comprehensive evidence that supports my experiences teaching adolescents,
By
This review is from: The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future(Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30) (Paperback)
I am very impressed with this book. As a high school Physics and Mathematics teacher, I have noticed an alarming decline in fundamental skills and intellectual curiosity in my students over the last ten years. The rhetoric expounding that technology and the Web promotes "problem-solving" and "higher-order thinking" in students has only become more strident in the last decade -- unfortunately, these outcomes have proven to be an illusion, as clearly demonstrated by the results of many esteemed surveys and skill tests referenced in Bauerlein's book. My experiences in the classroom have proven to me that "problem-solving" and "higher-order thinking" cannot occur without a mastery of the fundamentals of the discipline, and now, after reading this book, I understand why my students are lacking these prerequisite skills.While the Web is indeed an amazing resource for those of us with an interest in history, civics, the arts and the sciences, the Web does not create that intellectual curiosity in adolescents. In fact, the data referenced in this book proves that teenagers use technology almost exclusively as a social networking tool, and the time spent in peer interaction is taken from pursuits that would actually benefit the intellectual growth of our youth. Even Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, is skeptical of the learning potential of blogging and games: "It sounds like it's a lot of encapsulated entertainment... This ... sounds like a gigantic waste of time. If I was competing with the United States, I would love to have the students I'm competing with spending their time on this kind of crap." Perhaps this explains why more than 50% of the engineering doctorates granted by American universities go to foreign students. How ironic that, at a time when technological innovations lead the global economy, illiteracy and innumeracy are overtaking our youth as a direct result of using this technology. By the way, to the reviewer who admittedly did not bother to read this book, yet proclaimed that it was a waste of money: sadly, you proved the author's point quite well. I highly recommend this book to all educators and parents, and everyone who has an interest in nurturing the potential of our next generation.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
To: The Dumbest Generation - Wake up!!!,
By
This review is from: The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future(Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30) (Paperback)
First of all, I will state that I HAVE read this book and don't believe that people who haven't read or completed this book should be posting here or elsewhere.Mark Bauerlein's "The Dumbest Generation" or "Don't trust anyone under 30" is well-researched and well presented book about how the digital revolution has, contrary to widely-held beliefs, made the Digital Generation less ambitious, bright and intelligent. The author is perhaps on to something when he says that The Digital Generation; referred to with various alternative names such as the digital natives, the Rising Generation, Generation X and Twixters are largely self-absorbed, illiterate and uncultured. Much of the book centers on how the new generation has rejected reading whole-heartedly for other activities such as social networking, video games and creating personalized works of art. While the author recognizes that video games may improve hand-eye coordination, they do nothing to further one's reading skills or to learn mathematical formulas, nor learn the works of the Great Masters. He recognizes that there is a slew of literature on the internet, but how most people scan websites in an "F" fashion and don't really read the content and if there is content worth reading, it is written at a sixth or eighth grade level. His exhaustive research is clearly visible as he presents literally hundreds of other works on both sides of the argument. The Dumbest Generation is also betrayed by their mentors, who are teachers, guidance counselors and educators who teach them to be all they can be without the challenges, intellectual rigor and effort that comes with self discovery. Still though, there are some criticisms. Like all authors pitching a certain message, the arguments can occasionally be a bit drawn-out and redundant. The author also seems quite pessimistic, and offers virtually no personal opinions on how to change things. For some arguments, other factors, such as the increase in the price of real estate and difficulty of saving for a down payment, might be factors for Twixters leaving the house later (p.170), rather than a change in generational world views. In spite of its shortfalls, Bauerlein's book is well worth the read and offers some ideas as to why the young people of today seem to be lacking a certain Je ne sais quoi in terms of their sense de vivre. If you don't understand the terms in the last sentence, then you are, as the author would state, part of the "Dumbest Generation".
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Rant On An Important Topic,
By grapemanca (Vancouver, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future(Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30) (Paperback)
The Dumbest Generation's central thesis is that the relatively new "Web 2.0" social technologies are creating an illiterate youth culture obsessed by triviality, pop culture and adolescent social life. It is an enjoyable pro-reading, anti-technology jeremiad in the tradition of Neil Postman (to whom Bauerlein pays homage), but it's not without its limitations.Drawing on research from a number of government sources and reputable cultural institutions, Bauerlein's arguments can be both persuasive and problematic. For example, one of the best empirical studies he relies upon is a large-scale reading survey from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts that measured leisure reading rates in 1982, 1992 and 2002. The rate (based on reading a single book outside of school or work) shows a precipitous drop of 17% in 18-24 year-olds (from 59.8% to 42.8%) between 1982 and 2002. This is certainly troubling, but Bauerlain glosses over the fact that leisure reading for 25-34 year-olds also declined (from 62.1% to 47.7%), as it did for 35-44 year-olds (from 59.7% to 46.6%). Moreover, this decline in leisure reading occurred BEFORE the wholesale adoption of the social computing technologies that Bauerlein believes is at the core of today's "dumbest generation". If anything, the best evidence he provides suggests that the big change in the 1970's - the spread of cable TV - has been the worst offender. [Speaking of out-of-date, one of the newest and biggest social networking fads, Facebook, is barely mentioned, whereas another service that has already receded, MySpace, features prominently in Bauerlein's analysis.] Therefore, it appears to me that he is identifying a larger problem, one to which modern technology may contribute, but which is nevertheless deeper and longer-standing than Bauerlein contends. And since much of his empirical data is out-of-date in terms of relatively recent social technologies, he needs to rely on anecdotes and reasoning rather than statistics. On this level, I think Bauerlein actually succeeds. His discussions of reading versus screen time, adult vs. youth culture, and cultural literacy vs. pop literacy certainly ring true (though, again, I think larger forces are at work). As a long-time educator, I have to admit that his discussion of a growing anti-intellectualism certainly mirrors my own experience. I also think Bauerlein is absolutely correct that educators (esp. education researchers) share some of the blame as they jump on the technology bandwagon. Educators rarely seem to ask if adolescent enthusiasm necessarily leads to pedagogically desirable results. Perhaps in time Bauerlein's contentions can be supported by more up-to-date, empirical evidence. In the meantime, his arguments are provocative and timely - as long as one casts a wary eye.
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