Book report: The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein

In his book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future* *Or, Dont Trust Anyone Under 30, Mark Bauerlein lays the case that American Millennials, people born between 1980 and 2000, pose a great threat to democracy and the future of the country in general. He blames disinterest in high culture, rejection of traditions and previously unknown levels of narcissism. These factors, he blames on the digital age in which the Millennials have grown up.

Reading this book was a challenge. It wasn't because the language was too heady or the subject matter too nebulous. It's because I was on the defensive. Bauerlein attacks me personally in this book and I can't help but have my shield up. He asserts that my generation is dumb. We have no taste for the finer things. We are all low-brow technophiles who are more interested in what our peers are tweeting about than the topic of next week's CAPS meeting. We can't read, can't write, and we have no interest in improving our skills. I approached this book wanting to disagree with Bauerlein. In the end, though, I see his point.

There were certain parts when I felt he was pointing directly at me and criticizing ("... the thrill of composing something about yourself, posting it online, having someone, somewhere read it and write something back. That's the pull of immaturity ...") my digital habits. And there were parts when I felt he was placing all the blame on adolescents, paying little heed to the fact that millennials were born into a digital society and don't know any other way.

The first two chapters, Knowledge Deficits and The New Bibliophobes, were statistics-heavy, which is always a tough situation for me to labor through. But I am glad that he included so many statistics because they help to support his argument. Stats on literacy rates, mathematical proficiency, and time spent reading/studying were shocking. Teens and undergraduates, according to the statistics, are spending more and more time on leisure, and less on scholarly pursuits. Millennials aren't reading many books, something Bauerlein calls a-literacy: "knowing how to read but choosing not to." Baurlein says "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." At the same time, I think about the mainstreamed "hipster" culture that exists. "Hipsters" are ridiculed by others as pretentious music snobs in skinny jeans and ironic t-shirts. In the world of the hipster, one's perceived intellect is just as important as the clothes they're wearing.

Another challenge in my reading was remembering that I may not be a typical example of a Millennial. My family encouraged reading. I did my homework in high school. I was active in sports and clubs in high school. I went to a liberal arts college in a very liberal upstate New York town. My friends and I have always embraced intellectual endeavors. Being smart has been cool for me. I suppose there are some people my age who don't have similar values, but I often assume everyone was raised to value knowledge.

Bauerlein is concerned that young people aren't taking advantage of opportunities to go see classical music performances and visit museums. A valid concern, true, but as he continued to write of his concern about Millennial disinterest in high culture, I couldn't help but think that he was missing the point. Kids aren't going to go to the opera on their own. They aren't going to pick up a James Joyce book if they don't see their parents and other influential elders doing the same. Throughout the reading I wondered why Bauerlein was letting the elders of the Millennials -- his generation -- get away with shirking their responsibilities as role models and influences on these young, malleable minds. And every time I would get really fed up and angry, he would swoop in and save himself: "Kids will be kids, and teens will be teens. Without any direction from the menu, they stick with what they know and like. They have no natural curiosity for the historical past and high art, and if no respected elder introduces them to Romanticism and the French Revolution, they'll rarely find such thing on their own."

When youth do find themselves immersed in art, Bauerlein find it reprehensible that they reject the notion of emulating a great master. He cites a student interviewed in a documentary about community art programs for at-risk youth. The young man says "...I see kids drawing and painting, everybody draws the exact same boring, traditional way trying to be Picasso or Rembrandt or whoever else, you know, and I'm just trying to be Carlo Lewis, you know, I don't really care, I don't want to be Rembrandt, you know, I'm a black guy from [words garbled], that's who I am." Bauerlein seems to interpret this as complete disrespect for the past and for tradition. He sees youth ignoring the great strides made by our forefathers that have brought us to the dizzying digital age we're in today, dismissing their work as irrelevant. I don't think that's really what Carlo Lewis was trying to say, though. Carlo Lewis wants to express himself in a unique way. He doesn't want his art to look like that of his peers, which looks like a poor regurgitation of another artist's work.

Bauerlein introduces the idea originally presented in a 2005 Time magazine article, a sub-generational group called "Twixters." According to Bauerlein, the following criteria define Twixters: ages 22 to 30; have college education; come from middle-class families; live in cities/large suburbs. And these are the typical lifestyle choices: taking service industry jobs after graduating college; moving back home or in with roommates after graduation; serial dating. Bauerlein writes: "It's all social, all peer-oriented. Twixters don't read, tour museums, travel, follow politics, or listen to any music but pop and rap, much less do something such as lay out a personal reading list or learn a foering language. Rather, they do what we expect an average 19 year-old to do. They meet for poker, buy stuff at the mall, and jump from job to job and bad to bed." Bauerlein sees the Twixters as immature, afraid of growing up and facing adulthood.

Essentially, Millennials are too busy updating social networking profiles and blogging the mundanity of suburban life to delve in the finer things: philosophy, robust political debate, historical texts, classical music, art history. This is probably true. I think that this book is more of a call for sweeping education reform than anything else. If educators can find compelling ways to present this higher culture and higher-level intellectual material, youth will engage themselves in it. At the same time, we can't expect pop culture to fall by the wayside. It is not the fault of the Millennials that they are living in an age of hypermedia and ego-centric diversions. You can't really prove to a disaffected 15 year-old how important it is to understand civics and history and what it will mean to him when he is of voting age. Adolescents are wrapped up in their own insecurities and social lives. It is hard for someone who has only been alive for a decade and a half to grasp the meaning of being part of an informed electorate. It is up to adults to set a good example for youth.

We have vastly greater access to knowledge and high culture than our parents and our grandparents, yet we are no smarter for it. This is "the paradox of the Dumbest Generation," according to Bauerlein. "The fonts of knowledge are everywhere, but the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, pictures, tunes, and texts back and forth, living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are up to now."

Bauerlein wraps it up quite nicely in the final chapter. He illustrates, via Washington Irving's telling of the tale of Rip Van Winkle, the need to have diverse knowledge of the past and the present in order to have a functioning democratic society in the future. He fears today's youth "will be remembered as the fortunate ones who were unworthy of the privileges they inherited. They may even be recalled as the generation that lost that great American heritage." We need an informed electorate for a democracy to work.

Was this book the alarmist rant of an aging professor fearing the loss of this country? In a way, yes. Could Bauerlein have taken a more sympathetic tone when talking about youth? Probably. I guess the accusatory tone and the seeming villification of Millennials is what took some pleasure out of reading this book for me. But the content, and the ultimate message, are important and real. I'm just not sure what the answer is.