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Incredibly Flawed

Customer Rating:

As a member of "the Dumbest Generation," I was intrigued by the title and was curious what was being said about people my own age. To be frank, I'm surprised that the editors at Penguin allowed this to be published. The book is full of allegations that lack any real substance, and which are unfortunately most often wrong. The use of statistics from multiple-choice surveys about education is highly questionable. It appears that the author did not bother personally interviewing any members of the generation he's speaking about for the book, or if he did, those interviews did not make their way into the text. Rarely have I found a piece of writing so ignorant, so incorrect, and so offensive. I feel strongly enough about it that in the future, I may write more about the flaws in this book on The Huffington Post. In the meantime, skip this book and buy another.

Some good facts in need of better analysis

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In the hands of teens, the computer is clearly not the learning tool phenomena that had adults so enthralled. Just because information is at their fingertips doesn't mean they are using it. For teens the computer is a cross between television and a telephone used mainly to select teen appeal content and chatter endlessly with friends. Surprise surprise, the computer age just made it that much easier for them to insulate themselves from the adult world. But are these skills transferable or worthwhile? Mark Bauerlein goes to great pains to list and explain the validity of his research and data to prove that despite so many writers raving about the digital generation being smarter in more innovative, search savvy ways than before, comments from college professors, employee recruiters and national stats indicate that young people are sorely lacking in basic intellectual skills. Bauerlein seeks out hard evidence provided by a website marketing firm tracking eye movement, of subjects wired to computers, and recording their comments as they interacted with websites. Their findings? People don't read at the screen, they skim and look for what turns them on. They want websites to look the same so they can interact with a familiar interface and they resist long blocks of text. Computers are actually helping people to dumb down and not excercise intellectual skills at all. We suspected as much which is possibly why this book has an audience. The rest of the book is not about the digital age, but about youth culture since it became the phenomena extraordinaire of the 60's and turned this nation into the youth worshipping culture that it is. Those who should be mentoring students by raising the bar, he contends, have bought into the youth phenomena and now promote adolescent insularity, unhampered by the burden of tradition especially in liberal arts. This was actually quite a helpful perspective because it helped me realize that American Youth Culture is an aberration of history further fueled by consumerism which benefits from an impulsive materialistic adolescent mindset. Bauerlein, however, does not provide such insight. Rather he covers all the usual arguments about why a democracy needs knowledgeable civic minded citizens and that just isn't happening anymore. None of these arguments are convincing largely because he blames the participants and doesn't mention the mind-binding sameness of a materialistic world egged on by corporate controlled capitalism. His description of young people today describes my own anti-civic, anti-intellectual, self-involved youth 25 years ago thus reviewers have panned him for so broadly criticizing any generation still in these formative years and this is perhaps the biggest flaw of his book. This English professor author is simply arguing for the old culture of intellectual rigor as it was prescribed in his day when books were king and intellectuals had longer arguments. And I agree a book has a lot more scope to grasp the big picture. Ironically he has failed to grasp one that doesn't sound worn and tired out which is too bad because the digital age clearly needs perspective just as the Internet needs more depth. He does mention, as a good sign, that young people are a lot better behaved than their sexually wild, drug using predecessors were. This only makes me wonder if the digital age is creating a more conservative, easily controlled populace, but Bauerlein offers no correlations here. Except for one mention of teens missing out on a soldering iron, he does not mention the core of this whole argument which is that teens are not getting outdoors or experiencing hands-on skills that would allow them greater self-sufficiency. They don't negotiate or manage for themselves their own free time because now it's all so much protective play dating thus they lack initiative in the workplace and managing skills for facilitating team work. Outdoor activity and skills of self-sufficiency were eroding in their parents' time in favor of grooming worker bees for the digi-mines which might well be the logical progression of the book reading intellectual activity he espouses. Amanda Kovattana is author of Diamonds In My Pocket: Tales of a Childhood In Asia

Children reflect on their parents	Customer Rating:
And if the children can't make it, the elder generation has to be responsible. This sort of smug bashing is not helping anyone.

Degenerate Luddite

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First off, I have not read the book. I will not read the book. I will discourage everyone to not read the book. All it is a collection of fearmongering "good ole' days" propaganda from a Luddite who can't keep up with the shifting culture of information consumption and new ways to learn both new and old lessons. Like the majority of people who find change scary, he demonizes that which he willingly makes no effort to understand, and uses platitudinous anecdotes with no real bearing on reality and manipulated statistics to make far-reaching claims about how dumb my generation (yes, my) generation is, and makes the logical face plant jump about trustworthiness. I find even the title and the implication that my digital "lifestyle" as it were has done anything other than enhance me as an informed, educated, individual. There are plenty of better written, more balanced arguments exploring both the pros and the cons of the current state of information culture. Do yourself a favor and do your own research, and find your own conclusions that aren't based on fear and anxiety.

A fairly dumb book

Customer Rating:

I have been reading this book, and am so far impressed by two apparent facts. First, the title is a lie. All the author proves is that the kids are as dumb as us. How exciting. And then, second, will this book do any good? I doubt it. As Ortega y Gasset noted, almost a century ago: "The commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will." But of course -- everybody is equal!!! (And if they aren't, they can always find somebody else to blame......)