| THE DUMBEST GENERATION How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future Mark Bauerlein New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-58542-639-3 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-58542-639-3 | 264pp. | HC | $24.95 | |
Bauerlein's book amounts to a sermon against the sins of the current generation. But it is a solidly secular sermon, pointing not to sins against some religious creed or moral commandment, but against the very practical standard of preparation for effective performance in life.
When students entering college are not prepared, according to their professors; when they lack the ability to read on a college level, and furthermore have little interest in reading books for pleasure; when they cannot perform basic mathematics without a calculator at hand; when they don't remember basic facts of history and geography, and can't find America on a map of the world; when they neither understand science nor believe in its discoveries; when they don't even display knowledge of English grammar — then, forget concerns about the next life; they are doomed to fail in this one.
Why has this come about? A large part of the reason is that too much was expected from computers.
Like many others, Bauerlein describes the costs of lowered competence in the American workforce. But, better than most, he emphasizes the damage to the civic life of the country (p. 203):
"This is one damaging consequence of the betrayal of the mentors that is often overlooked. When people warn of America's future, they usually talk about competitiveness in science, technology and productivity, not in ideas and values. But the current domestic and geopolitical situation demands that we generate not only more engineers, biochemists, nanophysicists, and entrepreneurs, but also men and women experienced in the ways of culture, prepared for contest in the marketplace of ideas. Knowledge-workers, wordsmiths, policy wonks . . . they don't emerge from nowhere. They need a long foreground of reading and writing, a home and school environment open to their development, a pipeline ahead [of] and behind them. They need mentors to commend them when they're right and rebuke them when they're wrong. They need parents to remind them that social life isn't everything, and they need peers to respect their intelligence, not scrunch up their eyes at big words. It takes a home, and a schoolhouse, and a village, and a market to make a great public intellectual and policy maker. The formula is flexible, but with the Dumbest Generation its breakdown is under way, and with it the [breakdown of the] vitality of democracy in the United States."
The result: In 2004, one-fifth of college freshmen required remedial reading or writing (or both). Community colleges spend $1.4 billion every year to bring these skills to levels that should have been attained in high school. The lack of needed skills costs the country an additional $3.7 billion annually. Apathy costs the country as well. In 1966, three-fifths of freshmen felt participating in politics was important. By 2005, that number had shrunk to 36%.
Since their arrival, personal computers have been touted as boons to education, both in the classroom and at home. Manufacturers were quick to pick up on this lead, and advertisements promoted computers heavily. There was even an ad (I recall seeing it) which implied that parents who did not buy their son a computer were dooming him to failure in life.
And schools have spent a great deal of money equipping their classrooms with the apparatus of information technology. With what result? Survey after survey reports that while students have become proficient at using IT hardware, their essential knowledge base — the proverbial "Three Rs", along with a general understanding of science, history, geography, and the way American government works — has not improved in step with their computer literacy.
Evidence is abundant:
Another part of the reason for the deficit is the tendency to "dumb down" education. One motivation for this is political correctness: the tendency to knuckle under to protests from any offended faction in order to sell more textbooks.1 Evaluating the quality of public education delivered on a purely numerical basis also figures in, because the federal government requires it through "No Child Left Behind."2 And once the populace generally reads and comprehends at a lower level, trade books and magazines, and popular television shows, will adjust their content to match. Following are some data on that.
A basic vocabulary includes a subset of the words in existence in any language. According to Bauerlein (p. 128), researchers define the basic vocabulary of current American media as the 10,000 English words most frequently used. A rare word is one outside that 10,000-word subset. This standard permits assigning a numeric score to the "lexical richness" of media: the number of rare words per thousand words of text or speech. Another measure of lexical richness is the rank of the median word in the medium on the frequency-of-usage scale.
Bauerlein presents the following data on pp. 128-9 of his book. I've chosen to quote the original source, because it has more data and I prefer its format.
| Source | Median | Rare |
|---|---|---|
| Medium | Word | Word |
| Rank | Score | |
| Notes | ||
1. Higher median word score indicates a less common word is at the median of usage, thereby suggesting a more erudite medium. |
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2. Higher rare word scores imply a bigger vocabulary. |
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3. Source: Cunningham, Anne E. & Stanovich, Keith E.,
"WHAT READING DOES FOR THE MIND" (PDF), American Educator, Spring/Summer 1988 |
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| Printed Texts | ||
| Abstracts of scientific articles | 4,389 | 128.0 |
| Newspapers | 1,690 | 68.3 |
| Popular magazines | 1,399 | 65.7 |
| Adult books | 1,058 | 52.7 |
| Comic books | 867 | 53.5 |
| Children's books | 627 | 30.9 |
| Preschool books | 578 | 16.3 |
| Television Texts | ||
| Popular prime-time adult shows | 490 | 22.7 |
| Popular prime-time children's shows | 543 | 20.2 |
| Cartoon shows | 598 | 30.8 |
| Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street | 413 | 2.0 |
| Adult Speech | ||
| Expert witness testimony | 1008 | 28.4 |
| College graduates to friends, spouses | 496 | 17.3 |
What these data suggest is that there is a large gulf between conversation and writing, especially professional writing like scientific papers. But newspapers and magazines are also significantly more erudite than the casual conversation of college-educated adults. Indeed, that conversation is below the level of prime-time entertainment TV shows, which are below children's television shows. Should this be a concern? By itself, no. But along with the other information Bauerlein presents — the decline in reading, the ignorance of history, the fact that only 36 percent of 2005's college freshmen thought it important to keep up with politics, versus 60 percent in 1966 — it should be very troubling.
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