Dumber and dumberer

The Dumbest Generation

By Mark Bauerlein

253 pages, available at National Book Stores

It’s easy for people like Jay Leno and Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, to pick on young Americans. That’s because they keep asking them questions. You know, stuff like, “Who was Condoleezza Rice?” or “What are the three branches of government?” Young Americans — especially the ones regularly street-quizzed by Leno in his “Jaywalking” segment — don’t like having questions thrown at them. They especially don’t like, you know, having to come up with answers. Let’s just say they don’t test well.

The correct answer to the above questions in the digital age, by the way, is: “Give me two minutes, and I’ll look it up online.” Thanks to the Internet, young people take it for granted that cyberspace —not your brain — is the place for storage and information retrieval. Let’s face it: people just assume that information is a few clicks away, easy to access, out there in some theoretical “space.” So who needs to clutter up their minds with all this history and civics and science?

You might think this is a kind of evolution, but what happens when someone pulls the plug?

Bauerlein is particularly upset about this dumbing down. An English professor at Emory University, he no doubt encounters a fresh crop of dolts every September who would rather read up on Paris Hilton than John Milton (and you know, who can blame them?). The situation is particularly bad in the US, where American kids are losing their edge to every developed nation in terms of knowledge testing. They’ve also stopped reading books at an alarming rate. The culprit in all of this? Technology, says Bauerlein, who lists “killjoy” and “professional scold” in his résumé.

Of course, I sympathize with his case. It’s just that he’s preaching to the converted, because nobody from “the dumbest generation” he writes of (the phrase actually comes from Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain) will ever, ever, ever pick up this book. They just don’t do books anymore.

Thanks to technology, the “millennials” (yet another gushing term cooked up by media to describe the Gen-Next kids who take to computers and gadgets the way the Children of the Damned kids took to spooky-eyed looks) lack the intellectual curiosity that previous generations honed through countless hours spent hitting the library stacks. I know plenty of 20-somethings who have absolutely no clue how to do research — even if the facts are a few mouse clicks away. The effort of sifting through facts, weighing arguments, judging what’s real and what’s bogus online — it’s all too much, man. That’s what Wikipedia’s for. But sadly, even Wikipedia is too much effort for some young netizens.

There’s also an impulse, among the young, to turn their backs on the past. I find this odd, because growing up, I wanted to know all about old movies, old (‘60s) music, and all about history. But I know young Filipinos today who, out of some warped inner policy, won’t even deign to watch black and white movies or anything “set in the past.” It’s just not “hip” enough. Imagine what they miss out on.

What we found important “back then” just doesn’t click with today’s generation. The frames of reference no longer apply. I recall being in France a few months back. The top CNN story, for two days running, was about Somali pirates releasing a ship’s captain (the number two story was about Ashton Kutcher besting CNN in a tweeting contest). I ran into one of my (younger) sisters-in-law one morning at the hotel’s breakfast buffet. She told me, “They arrested the pirates.” She seemed quite angry about this news. I naturally thought she meant the Somali pirates. “You mean the Somali guys?” “No, the Pirate Bay guys.” That’s a top video downloading site run by some dudes in Sweden. She was worried about the implications for her future TV viewing. So much for current events.

What really broils Bauerlein’s grill in The Dumbest Generation (subtitle: Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) is that these kids are being praised to high heavens by the media. They’re “content creators,” “click innovators” who have highly developed and sophisticated “viewer literacies” (presumably from watching YouTube) that rival the old-fogey book literacy that Bauerlein pushes. Their ability to juggle 20 web pages at once is impressive, but Bauerlein sees a problem: “When a fifth grader is assigned a topic, they proceed like this: go to Google, type keywords, download three relevant sites, cut and paste passages into a new document, add transitions of their own, print it up, turn it in. The model is information retrieval, not knowledge formation, and the material passes from Web to homework paper without lodging in the student’s mind.”

While older generations marvel at the way young ‘uns grasp technology and gadgets that leave them scratching their (white-haired) heads, it’s important to note that every generation takes to technology faster than their forebears. It’s cumulative knowledge, a progression. So of course kids are “broken in” on the latest gadgets first — not Betamaxes, pagers and rotary phones. No wonder they pick it up faster.

But Bauerlein sneers at this: their “literacy” is shallow, he says. Despite having all of the “information age” at their fingertips, they still don’t know what the Gettysburg Address is, or Impressionism, or bebop. They have no wide historical or cultural knowledge, just a series of associations they’ve picked up from their favorite pop-cultural inputs, which are television and the movies. Worse, Bauerlein fears they have insulated themselves with “cool” technology that ensures that the outside world — and the past — are seen as irrelevant.

I hate to bring up an inconvenient truth, but Bauerlein’s generation — or at least the Baby Boomers — started kids down this road to oblivion. The Sixties, as much as I love ‘em, created the largest youth demographic in history. The media adored them, sold things to them, coddled them, and yes, marveled at their precociousness. There were naysayers and scolds of course, but as Jim Morrison noted, “they got the guns, but we got the numbers.” The kids prevailed. They inherited the earth. And they promptly became the Me Generation. They fostered a sense of entitlement and irresponsibility that continues to haunt the First World. (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were two very different world leaders who embodied this sense of irresponsibility.) And so the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. And if you don’t know what that expression means, millennials, look it up.