The Dumbest Generation (6 page)
Read The Dumbest Generation Online
Authors: Mark Bauerlein
The knowledge problem remains, however, in spite of the forbearance of middle-aged folk, and the material blessings of adolescent life haven’t helped at all. The trappings of prosperity are plainly in view, and they eclipse the intellectual shortfalls all too well, but when poor learning and feeble skills surface, they are resolute. If a young clerk has a hard time counting change, her cool photos on the Web won’t save her from the disrespect of fellow workers. A freshman might best his dorm buddies in a dozen video games, but when a teacher asks him to name the three branches of government and he goes mute, the aura of his expertise dims. If a student interviews for an internship at a local museum and shows up wearing the hippest garments but can’t name a single eighteenth-century artist, the curators will pass. The clothes, merchandise, and e-aptitudes officiate in the social world of teens and young adults, whose currency is pop styles and techno-skills. Outside that heated habitat, however, in the workplace, grad school, and politics, what glorifies youth among their peers is, at best, a distraction and, at worst, a disqualification.
The situation marks an important contrast: material possessions vs. intellectual possessions, adolescent skills vs. adult skills. Young Americans excel in the first and fail in the second. They seem so adept with technology, multitasking to the amazement of their parents. They care so much about the trappings of cool, and are so conversant with pop culture. But they blink uncomprehendingly at the mention of the Reformation, the Second Amendment, Fellow Travelers, and Fellini. For all their technological adroitness, they don’t read or write or add or divide very well. A 2005 Harvard poll of college students announces, “The 27 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 are poised to make their presence known in community and civic life,” and a 2004 U.S. Department of Education report says that 47 percent of high school seniors believe it is “very important” to be an active and informed citizen. And yet in the 1998 NAEP civics exam, only 26 percent of high school seniors scored “proficient” or “advanced,” and eight years later, the next NAEP civics test of twelfth-graders produced a gain of only 1 percentage point. Fully 45 percent could not understand basic information on a sample ballot.
The contrasts are stark, and they suggest a troubling conclusion: the abundant material progress in an adolescent’s life hasn’t merely bypassed or disengaged him or her from intellectual progress, but has, perhaps, hindered it. Greater spending power for teens and 20-year-olds has steered them away from books, museums, and science shows, not toward them. The Internet doesn’t impart adult information; it crowds it out. Video games, cell phones, and blogs don’t foster rightful citizenship. They hamper it. Maybe it is true, as the Ad Council declares in a report on youth volunteering, that “young adults today are fiercely individualistic, and are media-savvy to a degree never seen before.” And maybe it is true that teenagers relate better to their parents—
Time
magazine found in 2005 that more than half of them termed the relationship “excellent.” Those positives, though, only underscore the intellectual negatives, and pose a worrisome contrary connection between areas of youth progress and liberal arts learning. The enhancements and prosperities claimed to turn young Americans into astute global citizens and liberated consumers sometimes actually conspire against intellectual growth.
Time
magazine found in 2005 that more than half of them termed the relationship “excellent.” Those positives, though, only underscore the intellectual negatives, and pose a worrisome contrary connection between areas of youth progress and liberal arts learning. The enhancements and prosperities claimed to turn young Americans into astute global citizens and liberated consumers sometimes actually conspire against intellectual growth.
Hence the middle-class teenager may attend a decent high school and keep a B+ average, pack an iPod and a handheld, volunteer through his church, save for a car, and aim for college, and still not know what the Soviet Union was or how to compute a percentage. None of the customary obstacles to knowledge interfere—poverty, bad schools, late-night jobs—but they might as well, given the knowledge outcomes. All the occasions and equipment for learning are in place, but he uses them for other purposes. Adolescents have always wasted their time and chances, of course, but the Dumbest Generation has raised the habit into a brash and insistent practice. No cohort in human history has opened such a fissure between its material conditions and its intellectual attainments. None has experienced so many technological enhancements and yielded so little mental progress.
It remains to us to uncover how they do it. We must identify and describe the particular routines of the members of the Dumbest Generation that freeze their likings in adolescence despite more occasions for high culture, that harden their minds to historical and civic facts despite more coursework, that shut out current events and political matters despite all the information streams. To do that, however, we mustn’t follow the standard approach of delving into schools and curricula, as noted education leader Chester E. Finn explained why back in 1992.
To put this in perspective, a child reaching her 18th birthday has been alive for about 158,000 hours. If she has attended school without miss—no absences for 6 hours a day, 180 days a year, for 12 years—she will have spent almost 13,000 hours in school. If we add kindergarten, the number increases to 14,000 hours. But that is only 9 percent of her time on Earth. Consider what this means in terms of the leverage of formal education, if much of what goes on during the other 91 percent is at cross purposes to the values and lessons of school.
Even Finn’s generous calculation—he assumes no absences at all—plus five or six hours a week of homework (which exceeds the high school seniors’ average) allow the schools a meager portion of the kids’ time. The unique failings of the Dumbest Generation don’t originate in the classroom, then, which amounts to only one-eleventh of their daily lives. They stem from the home, social, and leisure lives of young Americans, and if changes in their out-of-school habits entail a progressive disengagement from intellectual matters, then we should expect their minds to exhibit some consequences in spite of what goes on in school. If leisure diversions complement academic performance, then the enhancement of them will show up in education scores and surveys. If the numbers remain low and flat while leisure improves, as is the case today, then teen and young adult customs and mores must have an anti-intellectual effect.
Here lies the etiology of the Dumbest Generation—not in school or at work, but in their games, their socializing, and their spending. It begins with a strange and spreading phobia.
CHAPTER TWO
THE NEW BIBLIOPHOBES
Back in 2004, I went on the air with an NPR affiliate in the Midwest to talk about leisure reading habits in the United States. I was with the National Endowment for the Arts at the time, and we had just issued a report showing that adults then read literature at significantly lower rates than adults had in previous decades, and that the biggest drop was in the 18- to 24-year-old age group. The report was titled
Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America,
and after its release in July 2004 it sparked a national discussion of the decline of reading, with more than 600 newspaper stories and commentaries appearing by the end of the summer. The radio interview was one of many of my appearances during those weeks, and aside from simply recounting the findings, I was startled again and again at the reactions of the audience. In this case, after 15 minutes spent reviewing the study, the host opened the phone lines and a bright young voice came through. I tried to capture the exchange word for word just after the show concluded.
Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America,
and after its release in July 2004 it sparked a national discussion of the decline of reading, with more than 600 newspaper stories and commentaries appearing by the end of the summer. The radio interview was one of many of my appearances during those weeks, and aside from simply recounting the findings, I was startled again and again at the reactions of the audience. In this case, after 15 minutes spent reviewing the study, the host opened the phone lines and a bright young voice came through. I tried to capture the exchange word for word just after the show concluded.
CALLER: I’m a high school student, and yeah, I don’t read and my friends don’t read.
HOST: Why not?
CALLER: Because of all the boring stuff the teachers assign. HOST: Such as?
CALLER: Uh . . . that book about the guy. [Pause] You know, that guy who was great.
HOST: Huh?
CALLER: The great guy.
HOST: You mean
The Great Gatsby
?
The Great Gatsby
?
CALLER: Yeah. Who wants to read about him?
The call ended there, and I regret not asking another question in reply: “What do you like to read?” She objected to
Gatsby,
a novel about Jazz Age figures who interested her not a whit, but she didn’t offer anything in its place. A social drama of the rich and notorious in 1920s New York bored her, but she never mentioned anything else in print that amused her. No Austen and no Faulkner, certainly, but no Harry Potter, Mitch Albom, or Sophie Kinsella either. She didn’t like to read, period, and she wanted to tell us just that, throwing our assumption that every young person should read books right back in our faces.
Gatsby,
a novel about Jazz Age figures who interested her not a whit, but she didn’t offer anything in its place. A social drama of the rich and notorious in 1920s New York bored her, but she never mentioned anything else in print that amused her. No Austen and no Faulkner, certainly, but no Harry Potter, Mitch Albom, or Sophie Kinsella either. She didn’t like to read, period, and she wanted to tell us just that, throwing our assumption that every young person should read books right back in our faces.
I didn’t laugh at the “that guy who was great” remark, though it made for lively radio. I was too busy pondering a young woman’s eagerness to broadcast the disdain for reading across southern Ohio. She suffered no shame for her anti-literary taste, and no cognizance of its poverty. The refusal to read seemed to her a legitimate response to a wearisome syllabus, and if the turnoff extended to her leisure time, well, that, too, was the adults’ fault.
It’s a new attitude, this brazen disregard of books and reading. Earlier generations resented homework assignments, of course, and only a small segment of each dove into the intellectual currents of the time, but no generation trumpeted
a-literacy
(knowing how to read, but choosing not to) as a valid behavior of their peers. The 1960s youth movements had enough intellectuals of their own to avoid it, and their gurus (Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, the Beats . . .) wrote many books. Generation X delivered grunge music and slacker attitude, and its primary voice, Douglas Coup-land, highlighted X-ers’ exile from 1980s commercial lifestyles, but they didn’t make their disaffection into so much of a boast. Today’s rising generation thinks more highly of its lesser traits. It wears anti-intellectualism on its sleeve, pronouncing book-reading an old-fashioned custom, and it snaps at people who rebuke them for it.
a-literacy
(knowing how to read, but choosing not to) as a valid behavior of their peers. The 1960s youth movements had enough intellectuals of their own to avoid it, and their gurus (Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, the Beats . . .) wrote many books. Generation X delivered grunge music and slacker attitude, and its primary voice, Douglas Coup-land, highlighted X-ers’ exile from 1980s commercial lifestyles, but they didn’t make their disaffection into so much of a boast. Today’s rising generation thinks more highly of its lesser traits. It wears anti-intellectualism on its sleeve, pronouncing book-reading an old-fashioned custom, and it snaps at people who rebuke them for it.
As I write, this week’s issue of the
Chronicle of Higher Education
(January 2007) just hit my mailbox, and it contains a revealing section on technology and Millennials. One article entitled “How the New Generation of Well-Wired Multitaskers Is Changing Campus Culture” records a symposium in Nevada at which local college students related their interests and habits. The opening paragraphs note that Millennials “think it’s cool to be smart,” but discloses also that “They rarely read newspapers—or, for that matter, books.” In answer to the question “How often do you go to a library, and what do you do there?” one panelist replied:
Chronicle of Higher Education
(January 2007) just hit my mailbox, and it contains a revealing section on technology and Millennials. One article entitled “How the New Generation of Well-Wired Multitaskers Is Changing Campus Culture” records a symposium in Nevada at which local college students related their interests and habits. The opening paragraphs note that Millennials “think it’s cool to be smart,” but discloses also that “They rarely read newspapers—or, for that matter, books.” In answer to the question “How often do you go to a library, and what do you do there?” one panelist replied:
My dad is still into the whole book thing. He has not realized that the Internet kind of took the place of that. So we go to the library almost every Sunday. I actually have a library card, but I have not rented a book for a long time, but I go to our school’s library a lot because they have most of the course books.
How serenely this undergrad announces the transfer from “the whole book thing” to the Internet, as if the desertion of civilization’s principal storehouse merits little more than a shrug. And note the scale of awareness. The father just doesn’t “realize” how things have changed, that his world is over. The inversion is settled. It’s the bookish elders who know so little, and the young ones countenance them as they would a doddering grandpa on the brink of senility.
The student speaks for herself, but behind her verdict lies the insight of a new generation. The consignment of books to the past wouldn’t be so blithely assumed if it weren’t backed by a poised peer consciousness. We may smile at the compliment the hubris pays to adolescence, but the rejection of books by young adults is a common feature, and it isn’t always so condescendingly benign. In fall 2004, I joined a panel of faculty members at the University of Maryland to discuss, once again, reading trends for young adults and their implications for American culture. Facing about 250 students, I told them the truth, reciting the findings of several knowledge surveys as the inevitable outcome of not reading. Their interests lead them in polar directions, their knowledge running to zero in areas of civics, history, etc., while rising to a panoramic grasp of the lives of celebrities, the lyrics of pop music, and
MySpace
profiling. They wrinkle their brows if offered a book about Congress, but can’t wait for the next version of
Halo.
“Let’s get specific,” I goaded. “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.” At that point, a voice in the crowd jeered, “
American Idol
is more important!”
MySpace
profiling. They wrinkle their brows if offered a book about Congress, but can’t wait for the next version of
Halo.
“Let’s get specific,” I goaded. “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.” At that point, a voice in the crowd jeered, “
American Idol
is more important!”
She was right. In her world, stars count more than the most powerful world leaders. Knowing the names and ranks of politicians gets her nowhere in her social set, and reading a book about the Roman Empire earns nothing but teasing. More than just dull and nerdish, reading is counterproductive. Time spent reading books takes away from time keeping up with youth vogues, which change every month. To prosper in the hard-and-fast cliques in the schoolyard, the fraternities, and the food court, teens and 20-year-olds must track the latest films, fads, gadgets,
YouTube
videos, and television shows. They judge one another relentlessly on how they wear clothes, recite rap lyrics, and flirt. Having career goals may not draw their mockery, but a high school guy found by his buddies reading
The Age of Innocence
on a summer afternoon never regains his verve, and a girl with
Bowling Alone
in hand is downright inscrutable. The middle school hallways can be as competitive and pitiless as a Wall Street trading floor or an episode of
Survivor.
To know a little more about popular music and malls, to sport the right fashions and host a teen blog, is a matter of survival.
YouTube
videos, and television shows. They judge one another relentlessly on how they wear clothes, recite rap lyrics, and flirt. Having career goals may not draw their mockery, but a high school guy found by his buddies reading
The Age of Innocence
on a summer afternoon never regains his verve, and a girl with
Bowling Alone
in hand is downright inscrutable. The middle school hallways can be as competitive and pitiless as a Wall Street trading floor or an episode of
Survivor.
To know a little more about popular music and malls, to sport the right fashions and host a teen blog, is a matter of survival.
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