Mark Bauerlein
The Dumbest Generation.
Tarcher, 272 pages, $24.95
Paeans to the new batch of Millennial workers appear, it seems, in every other edition of the Sunday paper, detailing the sharp aptitudes, habits, likes, and dislikes of “Generation Y.” But these articles mean little to Mark Bauerlein. Author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) and a professor of English at Emory University, Bauerlein believes that behind the supposed worldliness and tech-savvy of today’s twenty-somethings and teens is mostly air. Millennials, he thinks, possess little substantive knowledge and, therefore, even less wisdom.
That young people are uninformed about a great many things is old hat. The ancient Greeks engaged in generational spats between devotees of Sophocles and younger, rowdier, surely irresponsible fans of Aristophanes. More recently, Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Diane Ravitch published in 1987 What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?—a critical review of the scores achieved by 8,000 seventeen-year-olds on tests of history and literature—and answered their eponymous question thusly: Not much. In their last chapter, “A Generation at Risk,” Finn and Ravitch wrote, “We do not contend that the ‘younger generation’ is going to the dogs. We merely conclude that it is ignorant of important things that it should know, and that it and generations to follow are at risk of being gravely handicapped by that ignorance upon entry into adulthood, citizenship, and parenthood.”
Twenty-one years later, Bauerlein
