Saturday, January 22, 2011

The Dumbest Generation.

'The Dumbest Generation' by Mark Bauerlein
How dumb are we? Thanks to the Internet, dumb and dumber, this author writes.
By Lee Drutman
for the LA Times

In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!

Such is the kind of recklessly distracted impatience that makes Mark Bauerlein fear for his country. "As of 2008," the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in "The Dumbest Generation," "the intellectual future of the United States looks dim."

The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America's youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of "enduring ideas and conflicts." Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America's youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a "brazen disregard of books and reading."

Things were not supposed to be this way. After all, "never have the opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater," writes Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. But somehow, he contends, the much-ballyhooed advances of this brave new world have not only failed to materialize -- they've actually made us dumber.

The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. "Social life is a powerful temptation," Bauerlein explains, "and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out."

This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the "pull of immaturity." Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, "[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age." When Bauerlein tells an audience of college students, "You are six times more likely to know who the latest American Idol is than you are to know who the speaker of the U.S. House is," a voice in the crowd tells him: " 'American Idol' IS more important."

Bauerlein also frets about the nature of the Internet itself, where people "seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort." In entering a world where nobody ever has to stick with anything that bores or challenges them, "going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits."

And all this feeds on itself. Increasingly disconnected from the "adult" world of tradition, culture, history, context and the ability to sit down for more than five minutes with a book, today's digital generation is becoming insulated in its own stultifying cocoon of bad spelling, civic illiteracy and endless postings that hopelessly confuse triviality with transcendence. Two-thirds of U.S. undergraduates now score above average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, up 30% since 1982, he reports.

At fault is not just technology but also a newly indulgent attitude among parents, educators and other mentors, who, Bauerlein argues, lack the courage to risk "being labeled a curmudgeon and a reactionary."

But is he? The natural (and anticipated) response would indeed be to dismiss him as your archetypal cranky old professor who just can't understand why "kids these days" don't find Shakespeare as timeless as he always has. Such alarmism ignores the context and history he accuses the youth of lacking -- the fact that mass ignorance and apathy have always been widespread in anti-intellectual America, especially among the youth. Maybe something is different this time. But, of course. Something is different every time.

The book's ultimate doomsday scenario -- of a dull and self-absorbed new generation of citizens falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs -- seems at once overblown (witness, for example, this election season's youth reengagement in politics) and also yesterday's news (haven't we always been perilously close to this, if not already suffering from it?). But amid the sometimes annoyingly frantic warning bells that ding throughout "The Dumbest Generation," there are also some 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.


13 comments:

  1. The objection that bad tendencies have always existed arises inevitably (even the ancients lamented the bad behaviors of the youth etc.). But history is not uniform in this regard -- truly distinct phases do exist, and we live in one. If you take seriously Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows, the point here is that the computing revolution is a deep and almost unprecedented phenomenon literally re-shaping our brain grooves -- and, to a great extent, not for the better. Digital distraction is a reversal of the Gutenburg shift in the direction of focused cognition.

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  2. The old saw, "the ancient Greeks complained about how uneducated their youth were" never seemed right to me. Ancient Greek society became extinct, remember?

    People might not change much over time, but as Steward Brand observed, "Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas…and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly."

    When machines do all our thinking for us, we shouldn't be surprised to find it doesn't make us smarter. I wish I could ban calculators, and mandate that students use slide rules, since one needs to understand mathematics better in order to use a slide rule. Two problems with this are: (1) Where would I get that many slide rules? And: (2) I'd get lynched.

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  3. Perhaps this is just a nefarious plot for job security by those of us in the older generation. We created the technology. The younger will be know-nothings, but we will be know-somethings and therefore retain value and our jobs. Eventually, adjuncts will have tenure! The young will be our drones!

    Naw... but that could be another crackpot scheme for Beck to draw on his chalkboard.

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  4. I have to admit that this book changed the way I saw my students. I stopped blaming them so much and started trying to understand them. Their "skim along the surface" mentality is different than mine, but I HAVE to find a way to help them if I want to keep teaching...

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  5. I was just reading an article about how the average minutes per day reading has shot up for Americans since the introduction of the iPad.

    It seems silly to me -- I spend about 9 hours online every day, 90% of it reading, reading, reading. Even reading facebook statuses (something I do every other day) is still reading. The Simpsons of the 1990s would have simply watched tv all day.

    But beyond that, even though people are running to the hills at the sight of a slack-jawed youngster staring at a screen, studies show consistently that information learned online "one on one" with the info is retained more than information learned in lecture style.

    I'm still a fan of face to face learning, but I think this person is just another older generation harping on how the newest generation will end all of society. Just like how Jesus is going to return. Any day now! I promise! Sell your house now!

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  6. If "Even reading facebook statuses (something I do every other day) is still reading," then is texting "writing"? Ugh.

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  7. No, that's more like graffiti in a pay toilet.

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  8. @Froderick: I have a slide rule I'm willing to donate to your endeavor; the slide rule was a tool of my grandfather's trade, and he made sure every one of his grandchildren had one; unfortunately, cheap calculators appeared right about then, and I never learned to use it (though I did learn to do basic and some fairly advanced mathematics -- e.g. derivations -- without a calculator, slide rule, or abacus). I can't help you avert the potential lynching though, I'm afraid, so I suppose it would be irresponsible of me to give you the slide rule, and so hurry you along a perilous path.

    I have to say that time spent on an internet-connected computer has reshaped my own brain grooves enough to make me sympathetic to the problem. The difference, I think,is that I can still remember my pre-internet brain and behavior patterns well enough to try to recapture them when I feel my thinking getting especially scattered. But it's tough; the way the www works is clearly very, very appealing to most human brains.

    I try to design exercises in which my students get credit for slowing down and paying attention to a text for a (comparatively) long time; like many of my colleagues, I'm finding annotation exercises useful. If one can maintain the illusion that the annotated texts will be carefully examined before credit is given, while actually skimming them pretty quickly, it's an effective and not too time-consuming approach. Another option would be to assign the annotation as homework and then use some of the techniques for calling on students during discussion discussed in posts here during the last few weeks. If they've read an annotated carefully, they *should* be prepared to answer questions, and point to particular passages to illustrate their answers.

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  9. Forget the students, I'm worried what all these years of reading online has done to my ability to concentrate on a long piece of text!

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  10. Can somebody please just summarize the last two thirds of the article and the comments for me? thx.

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  11. @Froderick: Changes in political and economic systems are also news, because the distribution of wealth and power profoundly affect human life. That, and science.

    Who's friends with whom, or was back in the day, is arguably only significant when it affects the distribution of wealth and power. So, only the relations of powerful people really make a difference to the rest of us. But we're all hard-wired to understand that, I think, without necessarily being able to figure out who the "powerful people" really are. So, Us, People, Hello, and perezhilton.

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  12. @Middle-Aged and Morose: That's the point of Nick Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" from the Atlantic in 2008 (and I suspect is what led to The Shallows http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/). We have no idea how our brains are being altered--that's what makes all of this so important to discuss.

    I teach composition and use "Considering the Future" as the main thread. Lately I've been showing my classes the PBS Frontline program Digital Nation (Feb 3 2010). We watch, then discuss. Bauerlein, Sherry Turkle, Clifford Nass, and many others weigh in on what's happening (and what we don't know about how our digital time is changing the way we think). My students can see it--they recognize themselves quite readily. I have begun using excerpts of TDG in my courses, and I'm thinking I might just go ahead and use the whole book next year. Bauerlein's argument is worth discussing--esp. for the people he's talking about.

    The question for those of us who still have another 30 years of teaching ahead of us is how are the ways we teach going to have to adapt? They already are. Accelerated courses, hybrid courses, online courses--all developed in an attempt to stay ahead of the curve. Are they serving the new populations? Yes. Are they serving them as well as the old butts-in-seats way? Hard to say. In my opinion, acceleration is the fastest way to have to dumb down a course. There simply isn't enough time to cover the same amount of material (to require the same amount of writing and reflection) in 8 weeks that you can in 15, and administrations are kidding themselves if they think otherwise. (I'm talking about regular-semester accelerated courses that students may take along with their regular, non-accelerated courses. The assumption with summer school courses is that the student has the time to read, reflect, and write because that student is taking at most one other course).

    We are going to be teaching a nation of skimmers. Hell, we already are. I'm not sure how much worse the Digital Age is going to be--most people aren't interested in more than a surface understanding anyway. Learning is hard, dude. Have you noticed the way this country has been leaning lately? Demagoguery and willful stupidity go hand in hand.

    I'd also recommend Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles Pierce--the book originated as an essay for Esquire on. Or Mike Judge's under-appreciated film Idiocracy. I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants. My Better Half thought it was the most depressing film ever made.

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  13. tl/dr (Too long/didn't read, jsuk [just so you know])

    Can I get the Cliff Notes version? Holla back! Old skool in da howse!





    And yes, I know it's Cliff's Notes. How many of you who used them (and you and I both know you did) knew it?

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