- Bauerlein, Mark.
The Dumbest Generation.
New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2008.
ISBN 978-1-58542-639-3.
-
The generation born roughly between 1980 and 2000, sometimes dubbed
“Generation Y” or the “Millennial Generation”,
now entering the workforce, the public arena, and exerting an
ever-increasing influence in electoral politics, is the first
generation in human history to mature in an era of ubiquitous
computing, mobile communications, boundless choice in entertainment
delivered by cable and satellite, virtual environments in video games,
and the global connectivity and instant access to the human patrimony
of knowledge afforded by the Internet. In the United States, it is
the largest generational cohort ever, outnumbering the Baby Boomers
who are now beginning to scroll off the screen. Generation Y is the
richest (in terms of disposable income), most ethnically diverse, best
educated (measured by years of schooling), and the most comfortable
with new technologies and the innovative forms of social interactions
they facilitate. Books like
Millennials Rising sing
the praises of this emerging, plugged-in, globally wired
generation, and
Millennial Makeover
(May 2008)
eagerly anticipates the influence they will have
on politics and the culture.
To those of us who interact with members of this generation
regularly through E-mail, Web logs, comments on Web sites,
and personal Web pages, there seems to be a dissonant chord
in this symphony of technophilic optimism. To be blunt,
the kids are clueless. They may be able to multi-task,
juggling mobile phones, SMS text messages, instant Internet
messages (E-mail is so Mom and Dad!), social
networking sites, Twitter, search engines, peer-to-peer
downloads, surfing six hundred cable channels with nothing
on while listening to an iPod and playing a video game,
but when you scratch beneath the monomolecular layer of
frantic media consumption and social interaction with
their peers, there's, as we say on the Web,
no content—they appear
to be almost entirely ignorant of history, culture, the
fine arts, civics, politics, science, economics, mathematics,
and all of the other difficult yet rewarding aspects of
life which distinguish a productive and intellectually
engaged adult from a superannuated child. But then one
worries that one's just muttering the perennial complaints
of curmudgeonly old fogies and that, after all, the kids
are all right. There are, indeed, those who argue that
Everything Bad Is
Good for You: that video games and pop culture
are refining the cognitive, decision-making, and moral
skills of youth immersed in them to never before attained
levels.
But why are they so clueless, then? Well, maybe
they aren't really, and Burgess Shale relics like me have
simply forgotten how little we knew about the real world
at that age. Errr…actually, no—this book, written
by a professor of English at Emory University and former
director of research and analysis for the National Endowment
for the Arts, who experiences first-hand the cognitive capacities
and intellectual endowment of those Millennials who arrive in his
classroom every year, draws upon a wealth of recent research
(the bibliography is 18 pages long) by government
agencies, foundations, and market research organisations,
all without any apparent agenda to promote, which documents
the abysmal levels of knowledge and the ability to apply it
among present-day teenagers and young adults in the U.S.
If there is good news, it is that the new media technologies
have not caused a precipitous collapse in objective measures
of outcomes overall (although there are disturbing statistics
in some regards, including book reading and attendance at
performing arts events). But, on the other hand, the
unprecedented explosion in technology and the maturing
generation's affinity for it and facility in using it have
produced absolutely no objective improvement in their
intellectual performance on a wide spectrum of metrics.
Further, absorption in these new technologies has further
squeezed out time which youth of earlier generations spent
in activities which furthered intellectual development
such as reading for enjoyment, visiting museums and historical
sites, attending and participating in the performing
arts, and tinkering in the garage or basement. This was compounded
by the dumbing down and evisceration of traditional content
in the secondary school curriculum.
The sixties generation's leaders didn't anticipate
how their claim of exceptionalism would affect the next generation,
and the next, but the sequence was entirely logical. Informed
rejection of the past became uninformed rejection of the past, and
then complete and unworried ignorance of it. (p. 228)
And it is the latter which is particularly disturbing: as
documented extensively, Generation Y knows they're
clueless and they're cool with it! In fact, their
expectations for success in their careers are entirely
discordant with the qualifications they're packing as they
venture out to slide down the razor blade of life
(pp. 193–198). Or not: on
pp. 169–173 we meet the “Twixters”,
urban and suburban middle class college graduates between 22 and 30
years old who are still living with their parents and engaging in
an essentially adolescent lifestyle: bouncing between service
jobs with no career advancement path and settling into no
long-term relationship. These sad specimens who refuse to
grow up even have their own term of derision:
“KIPPERS”
Kids In Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings.
In evaluating the objective data and arguments presented here, it's
important to keep in mind that correlation does not imply causation.
One cannot run controlled experiments on broad-based social trends:
only try to infer from the evidence available what might be the cause
of the objective outcomes one measures. Many of the characteristics
of Generation Y described here might be explained in large part simply
by the immersion and isolation of young people in the pernicious peer
culture described by Robert Epstein in
The Case Against Adolescence
(July 2007), with digital technologies
simply reinforcing a dynamic in effect well before their
emergence, and visible to some extent in the Boomer and
Generation X cohorts who matured earlier, without being
plugged in 24/7. For another insightful view of Generation Y (by another
professor at Emory!), see
I'm the Teacher, You're the Student
(January 2005).
If
Millennial Makeover
is correct, the culture and politics of the United States
is soon to be redefined by the generation now coming of
age. This book presents a disturbing picture of
what that may entail: a generation with little or no
knowledge of history or of the culture of the society
they've inherited, and unconcerned with their ignorance,
making decisions not in the context of tradition and
their intellectual heritage, but of peer popular culture.
Living in Europe, it is clear that things have not
reached such a dire circumstance here, and in Asia the
intergenerational intellectual continuity appears to
remain strong. But then, the U.S. was the first adopter
of the wired society, and hence may simply be the first to
arrive at the scene of the accident. Observing what happens
there in the near future may give the rest of the world a
chance to change course before their own dumbest generations
mature. Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, the author notes that
“Knowledge is never more than one generation away from
oblivion.” (p. 186) In an age where a large fraction of all
human knowledge is freely accessible to anybody in a
fraction of a second, what a tragedy it would be if
the
“digital natives”
ended up, like the pejoratively denigrated “natives” of the
colonial era, surrounded by a wealth of culture but ignorant of
and uninterested in it.
The final chapter is a delightful and stirring defence of culture wars
and culture warriors, which argues that only those grounded in
knowledge of their culture and equipped with the intellectual tools to
challenge accepted norms and conventional wisdom can (for better or
worse) change society. Those who lack the knowledge and reasoning
skills to be engaged culture warriors are putty in the hands of
marketeers and manipulative politicians, which is perhaps why so many
of them are salivating over the impending Millennial majority.
June 2008 