The Dumbest Generation

LETTER FROM AMERICA
Don't trust anyone under 30?

Richard Bernstein January 14, 2009

 
NEW YORK: Facebook, of course, is the social networking Web site that claims to have more than 150 million active users. Recently I became one of those 150 million, so now I can see the "status updates" that my friends post in the space provided at the top of each profile that asks, "What are you doing right now?"

Interestingly, nobody writes, "I'm checking my Facebook page." They put down things like taking down the Christmas tree, or wishing it was already May, or isn't it "awesome" that Mickey Rourke thanked his dog in his Golden Globe acceptance speech.

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Dumbed down:The troubling science of how technology is rewiring kids’ brains
by Lianne George
 

For almost three decades, the Arrowsmith School, a small Toronto private school housed in a converted mansion on the edge of Forest Hill, has been treating kids with learning disabilities. When its founder, Barbara Arrowsmith Young, developed the school’s patented program in the late ’70s, it was with a first-hand knowledge of the frustration and stigma of living with cognitive deficits. Growing up, Young struggled with dyslexia. She had difficulties with problem-solving and visual and auditory memory. Finding connections between things and ideas was a challenge, and telling time was impossible—she couldn’t grasp the relationship between the big hand and the little hand. Traditional learning programs taught her tricks to compensate for her deficits, but they never improved her ability to think. “I walked around in a fog,” she says. But as a young psychology graduate, Young came across the brain maps created by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who studied soldiers who had suffered head wounds. Using these maps, she identified 19 unique learning dysfunctions and the brain regions that control them. Her theory was that a person can transform weak areas of the brain through repetitive and targeted cognitive exercises, and she was right. Today, this notion of brain plasticity—which she intuited three decades ago—is established wisdom in neuroscience.

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Prelude To Excellence
by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

 
In her recent book, The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby paints a bleak picture of the creeping anti-intellectualism that dominates our culture.

"The scales of American history have shifted heavily against the intellectual life so essential to functional democracy," she warns.

Mark Bauerlein of Emory University echoes the theme in his new data-filled book, The Dumbest Generation, which paints a picture of self-absorption--young people fascinated with themselves, and each other, but "the least curious and intellectual generation in national history." Standing the Vietnam-era slogan on its head, Bauerlein warns us: "Don't trust anyone under 30."

Like many others, I share their concerns: a vacuous popular culture, a lost interest in reading for pleasure and, of course, the Internet, which makes information and disinformation easy to access but harder than ever to distinguish.


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Will Generation Y be dumb or great?
Cheryl Wetzstein
Sunday, October 26, 2008

Are our youth going to be the "dumbest generation" or the next "great generation"? This unanswerable question recently was posed -- where else -- at a Washington think tank.

Bemoaning the "decline of intellectual habits" in Generation Y was Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein, who makes his case in his new book, "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)."

Members of Generation Y -- those born from 1982 to 2000 -- have mediocre scores in U.S. and international academic surveys, he told the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) event.

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'Digitally addicted kids threaten to return civilisation to the Dark Ages'
The internet is creating a generation of ignoramuses with tiny attention spans, who will surely become the dumbest generation in history.
By Andrew Keen
Monday, 20 October 2008

 
One of the most troubling of all American cases over the last couple of years is that of Megan Meier, an overweight, psychologically troubled St Louis, Missouri, teenager who committed suicide in 2006 after she was cyberbullied by an online boyfriend called "Josh Evans".

Later, however, it transpired that Josh was actually Lori Drew, the middleaged mother of an ex-friend of Meier's, who – quite literally – drove the teenager to hang herself in the closet of her bedroom.

I'm not alone in observing the consequences of online technology for reading habits, literacy, and education. Over the past 18 months, a series of excellent books and articles have been published by experienced academics and journalists who share my concern about the dire intellectual and cognitive consequences of the digital revolution. The news, I am afraid, is bleak.

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Plugging in, tuning out
The digital culture has changed the way kids learn, but at the expense of literacy and cultural awareness.

By Don Campbell
Sept. 10, 2008

I ask students on the first day of my journalism classes to fill out a questionnaire. Most questions inquire about their interest in journalism and any experience they have that is journalism-related. One question is: "What do you read, at least fairly regularly?"

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Pencils, Schmencils, I need a laptop
by TRALEE PEARCE
September 2, 2008
 

A few evenings before the first day of school, a Toronto branch of the electronics chain Future Shop is buzzing.

The stretch of laptops on display is obscured by a sea of bodies, many of them students scoping out dozens of shiny new models.

As his sister Eesha, 20, strokes a MacBook Air she might like for her first year at university in Toronto, Tariq Hussain, 13, says he's thinking of ways to persuade his father to buy him one, too, after they return home to Pakistan.

"All my friends have one," he says, admitting that homework would be a lower priority than video games.

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Charles Enman, The Ottawa Citizen
August 16, 2008

Mark Bauerlein says that the digital age is causing 'something insidious' to happen in the heads of the young.

What They Do: Download, upload, IM post chat, network, watch tv,

play video games

What They Don't Do: Read (even online), Follow politics, keep a strict work ethic, Vote

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London Times
July 20, 2008
Stoooopid .... why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks
The digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate
Bryan Appleyard

On Wednesday I received 72 e-mails, not counting junk, and only two text messages. It was a quiet day but, then again, I’m not including the telephone calls. I’m also not including the deafening and pointless announcements on a train journey to Wakefield – use a screen, jerks – the piercingly loud telephone conversations of unsocialised adults and the screaming of untamed brats. And, come to think of it, why not include the junk e-mails? They also interrupt. There were 38. Oh and I’d better throw in the 400-odd news alerts that I receive from all the websites I monitor via my iPhone.

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So how dumb are we?
Duh! Younger Americans stumped in knowledge tests in our visually driven global info age
By Lisa Anderson | Chicago Tribune correspondent
July 5, 2008

NEW YORK—Who hasn't snickered at "Jaywalking," a "Tonight Show" segment in which host Jay Leno flummoxes unsuspecting young people on the street with such tricky questions as: In what country is Paris located?

Or cringed to see Miss America 2007 humiliated by a brainy bunch of 10-year-olds—who just happened to know the sun is the heavenly body with the greatest mass in our solar system—on "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" Or witnessed the consternation of a cashier presented with a $20 bill and two quarters for a $12.50 tab?

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Politics & Society
May 23 -OMG! Expert Says Today's Kids Are Stupid

The Bryant Park Project. Don't trust anyone over 30? A new book says don't trust anyone under 30. Mark Bauerlein, a Professor of English at Emory University, discusses his book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.

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May 20 - Between the Covers
with John J. Miller
 

Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, describes his subject for John J. Miller: “They were on Google doing research from the time they were in fourth or fifth grade.” And why are they dumb? “They have all these [technological] privileges, and they use them on adolescent trivia.”

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THE KIDS ARE IDIOTS
HIS NEW MOTTO: DON’T TRUST ANYONE UNDER 30
By MARK BAUERLEIN
 
May 11, 2008 -- Given the opportunities for knowledge and culture in America today, one would think we were on the verge of a golden age of intelligence.

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