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Download the dumbest generation or read the dumbest generation online books in PDF, EPUB and Mobi Format. Mark Bauerlein Languange Used. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future By Mark Bauerlein New York, NY: Tarcher/Penguin (2008). 272 pp., $10.99.
Really, don't we all know by now that finding examples of teens' and twentysomethings' ignorance is like shooting fish in a barrel? If you want to exercise your eye-rolling or hand-wringing muscles, take your pick. Two thirds of high-school seniors in 2006 couldn't explain an old photo of a sign over a theater door reading COLORED ENTRANCE. In 2001, 52 percent identified Germany, Japan or Italy, not the Soviet Union, as America's World War II ally. One quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds in a 2004 survey drew a blank on Dick Cheney, and 28 percent didn't know William Rehnquist. The world's most heavily defended border? Mexico's with the United States, according to 30 percent of the same age group.
We doubt that the 30 percent were boastful or delusional Minutemen. Like professors shocked to encounter students who respond with a blank-eyed 'huh?' To casual mentions of fireside chats or Antietam or even Pearl Harbor, and like parents appalled that their AP-amassing darling doesn't know Chaucer from Chopin, Mark Bauerlein sees in such ignorance an intellectual, economic and civic disaster in the making. In his provocative new book 'The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30),' the Emory University professor of English offers the usual indicators, grand and slight.
From evidence such as a decline in adult literacy (40 percent of high-school grads had it in 1992; only 31 percent did in 2003) and a rise in geographic cluelessness (47 percent of the grads in 1950 could name the largest lake in North America, compared with 38 percent in 2002), for instance, Bauerlein concludes that 'no cohort in human history has opened such a fissure between its material conditions and its intellectual attainments.' He is a little late to this party, of course. The old have been wringing their hands about the young's cultural wastelands and ignorance of history at least since admirers of Sophocles and Aeschylus bemoaned the popularity of Aristophanes ('The Frogs,' for Zeussakes?!) as leading to the end of (Greek) civilization as they knew it. The Civil War generation was aghast at the lurid dime novels of the late 1800s. Victorian scholars considered Dickens, that plot-loving, sentimental ('A Christmas Carol') favorite, a lightweight compared with other authors of the time. Civilization, and culture high and low, survived it all. Can it survive a generation's ignorance of history?