The Dumbest Generation
Read The Dumbest Generation Online
Authors: Mark Bauerlein
Table of Contents
JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
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Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA •
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd,
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green,
Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group
(Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of
Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,
Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ),
67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division
of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd,
24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
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80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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Copyright © 2008 by Mark Bauerlein
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bauerlein, Mark.
The dumbest generation : how the digital age stupefies young Americans and
jeopardizes our future (or, don’t trust anyone under 30) / Mark Bauerlein.
p. cm.
Bauerlein, Mark.
The dumbest generation : how the digital age stupefies young Americans and
jeopardizes our future (or, don’t trust anyone under 30) / Mark Bauerlein.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-436-22176-4
1. Young adults—Effect of technological innovations on—United States.
2. Technology and youth—United States. 3. Young adults—United States—
Attitudes. 4. Internet—Social aspects—United States. I. Title.
HQ799.7B
302.23’1—dc22
2. Technology and youth—United States. 3. Young adults—United States—
Attitudes. 4. Internet—Social aspects—United States. I. Title.
HQ799.7B
302.23’1—dc22
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
INTRODUCTION
When writer Alexandra Robbins returned to Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, ten years after graduating, she discovered an awful trend. The kids were miserable. She remembers her high school years as a grind of study and homework, but lots more, too, including leisure times that allowed for “well-roundedness.” Not for Whitman students circa 2005. The teens in
The Overachievers,
Robbins’s chronicle of a year spent among them, have only one thing on their minds, SUCCESS, and one thing in their hearts, ANXIETY. Trapped in a mad “culture of overachieverism, ” they run a frantic race to earn an A in every class, score 750 or higher on the SATs, take piano lessons, chalk up AP courses on their transcripts, stay in shape, please their parents, volunteer for outreach programs, and, most of all, win entrance to “HYP” (Harvard-Yale -Princeton).
The Overachievers,
Robbins’s chronicle of a year spent among them, have only one thing on their minds, SUCCESS, and one thing in their hearts, ANXIETY. Trapped in a mad “culture of overachieverism, ” they run a frantic race to earn an A in every class, score 750 or higher on the SATs, take piano lessons, chalk up AP courses on their transcripts, stay in shape, please their parents, volunteer for outreach programs, and, most of all, win entrance to “HYP” (Harvard-Yale -Princeton).
As graduation approaches, their résumés lengthen and sparkle, but their spirits flag and sicken. One Whitman junior, labeled by Robbins “The Stealth Overachiever,” receives a fantastic 2380 (out of 2400) on a PSAT test, but instead of rejoicing, he worries that the company administering the practice run “made the diagnostics easier so students would think the class was working.”
Audrey, “The Perfectionist,” struggles for weeks to complete her toothpick bridge, which she and her partner expect will win them a spot in the Physics Olympics. She’s one of the Young Democrats, too, and she does catering jobs. Her motivation stands out, and she thinks every other student competes with her personally, so whenever she receives a graded test or paper, “she [turns] it over without looking at it and then [puts] it away, resolving not to check the grade until she [gets] home.”
“AP Frank” became a Whitman legend when as a junior he managed a “seven-AP course load that had him studying every afternoon, sleeping during class, and going lunchless.” When he scored 1570 on the SAT, his domineering mother screamed in dismay, and her shock subsided only when he retook it and got the perfect 1600.
Julie, “The Superstar,” has five AP classes and an internship three times a week at a museum, and she runs cross-country as well. Every evening after dinner she descends to the “homework cave” until bedtime and beyond. She got “only” 1410 on the SAT, though, and she wonders where it will land her next fall.
These kids have descended into a “competitive frenzy,” Robbins mourns, and the high school that should open their minds and develop their characters has become a torture zone, a “hotbed for Machiavellian strategy.” They bargain and bully and suck up for better grades. They pay tutors and coaches enormous sums to raise their scores a few points and help with the admissions process. Parents hover and query, and they schedule their children down to the minute. Grade inflation only makes it worse, an A- average now a stigma, not an accomplishment. They can’t relax, they can’t play. It’s killing them, throwing sensitive and intelligent teenagers into pathologies of guilt and despair. The professional rat race of yore—men in gray flannel suits climbing the business ladder—has filtered down into the pre-college years, and Robbins’s tormented subjects reveal the consequences.
The achievement chase displaces other life questions, and the kids can’t seem to escape it. When David Brooks toured Princeton and interviewed students back in 2001, he heard of joyless days and nights with no room for newspapers or politics or dating, just “one skill-enhancing activity to the next.” He calls them “Organization Kids” (after the old Organization Man figure of the fifties), students who “have to schedule appointment times for chatting.” They’ve been programmed for success, and a preschool-to-college gauntlet of standardized tests, mounting homework, motivational messages, and extracurricular tasks has rewarded or punished them at every stage. The system tabulates learning incessantly and ranks students against one another, and the students soon divine its essence: only results matter. Education writer Alfie Kohn summarizes their logical adjustment:
Consider a school that constantly emphasizes the importance of performance! results! achievement! success! A student who has absorbed that message may find it difficult to get swept away by the process of creating a poem or trying to build a working telescope. He may be so concerned about the results that he’s not at all that engaged in the activity that produces those results.
Just get the grades, they tell themselves, ace the test, study, study, study. Assignments become exercises to complete, like doing the dishes, not knowledge to acquire for the rest of their lives. The inner life fades; only the external credits count. After-school hours used to mean sports and comic books and hanging out. Now, they spell homework. As the president of the American Association of School Librarians told the
Washington Post,
“When kids are in school now, the stakes are so high, and they have so much homework that it’s really hard to find time for pleasure reading” (see Strauss). Homework itself has become a plague, as recent titles on the subject show:
The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning
(Etta Kralovec and John Buell);
The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing
(Alfie Kohn); and
The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It
(Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish).
Washington Post,
“When kids are in school now, the stakes are so high, and they have so much homework that it’s really hard to find time for pleasure reading” (see Strauss). Homework itself has become a plague, as recent titles on the subject show:
The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning
(Etta Kralovec and John Buell);
The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing
(Alfie Kohn); and
The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It
(Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish).
Parents, teachers, media, and the kids themselves witness the dangers, but the system presses forward. “We believe that reform in homework practices is central to a politics of family and personal liberation,” Kralovec and Buell announce, but the momentum is too strong. The overachievement culture, results-obsessed parents, outcomes -based norms . . . they continue to brutalize kids and land concerned observers such as Robbins on the
Today
show. Testing goes on, homework piles up, and competition for spaces in the Ivies was stiffer in 2007 than ever before. A 2006 survey by Pew Research, for instance, found that more than half the adults in the United States (56 percent) think that parents place too little pressure on students, and only 15 percent stated “Too much.”
Today
show. Testing goes on, homework piles up, and competition for spaces in the Ivies was stiffer in 2007 than ever before. A 2006 survey by Pew Research, for instance, found that more than half the adults in the United States (56 percent) think that parents place too little pressure on students, and only 15 percent stated “Too much.”
Why?
Because something is wrong with this picture, and most people realize it. They sense what the critics do not, a fundamental error in the vignettes of hyperstudious and overworked kids that we’ve just seen: they don’t tell the truth, not the whole truth about youth in America. For, notwithstanding the poignant tale of suburban D.C. seniors sweating over a calculus quiz, or the image of college students scheduling their friends as if they were CEOs in the middle of a workday, or the lurid complaints about homework, the actual habits of most teenagers and young adults in most schools and colleges in this country display a wholly contrasting problem, but one no less disturbing.
Consider a measure of homework time, this one not taken from a dozen kids on their uneven way to the top, but from 81,499 students in 110 schools in 26 states—the 2006
High School Survey of Student Engagement.
When asked how many hours they spent each week “Reading/studying for class,” almost all of them, fully 90 percent, came in at a ridiculously low five hours or less, 55 percent at one hour or less. Meanwhile, 31 percent admitted to watching television or playing video games at least six hours per week, 25 percent of them logging six hours minimum surfing and chatting online.
High School Survey of Student Engagement.
When asked how many hours they spent each week “Reading/studying for class,” almost all of them, fully 90 percent, came in at a ridiculously low five hours or less, 55 percent at one hour or less. Meanwhile, 31 percent admitted to watching television or playing video games at least six hours per week, 25 percent of them logging six hours minimum surfing and chatting online.
Or check a 2004 report by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research entitled
Changing Times of American Youth: 1981-2003,
which surveyed more than 2,000 families with children age six to 17 in the home. In 2003, homework time for 15- to 17-year -olds hit only 24 minutes on weekend days, 50 minutes on weekdays. And weekday TV time? More than twice that: one hour, 55 minutes.
Changing Times of American Youth: 1981-2003,
which surveyed more than 2,000 families with children age six to 17 in the home. In 2003, homework time for 15- to 17-year -olds hit only 24 minutes on weekend days, 50 minutes on weekdays. And weekday TV time? More than twice that: one hour, 55 minutes.
Or check a report by the U.S. Department of Education entitled
NAEP 2004 Trends in Academic Progress.
Among other things, the report gathered data on study and reading time for thousands of 17-year -olds in 2004. When asked how many hours they’d spent on homework the day before, the tallies were meager. Fully 26 percent said that they didn’t have any homework to do, while 13 percent admitted that they didn’t do any of the homework they were supposed to. A little more than one-quarter (28 percent) spent less than an hour, and another 22 percent devoted one to two hours, leaving only 11 percent to pass the two-hour mark.
NAEP 2004 Trends in Academic Progress.
Among other things, the report gathered data on study and reading time for thousands of 17-year -olds in 2004. When asked how many hours they’d spent on homework the day before, the tallies were meager. Fully 26 percent said that they didn’t have any homework to do, while 13 percent admitted that they didn’t do any of the homework they were supposed to. A little more than one-quarter (28 percent) spent less than an hour, and another 22 percent devoted one to two hours, leaving only 11 percent to pass the two-hour mark.
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