Today I saw a headline in Boston.com that listed 8 reasons why those under 30 belong to the dumbest generation. I read on, and apparently it’s a gallery based on a new book by Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein titled The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. Here is a blow by blow of his points with my comments.
1. They make excellent “Jaywalking” targets - Here Bauerlein makes an argument that young people do not know anything beyond friends, work, and Facebook. Well, I know many people older than 30 that do not know anything beyond money, cars, and sports. Basically, I don’t think it’s unique to our generation to focus on things that are narrowly important to ourselves. Jaywalking is a TV show segment that picks out the most hilariously dumb people on the streets, and I have seen Jay find dumb people of all sizes and ages.
2. They don’t read books — and don’t want to, either – I don’t think this generalization could be blanketed onto an entire generation. Some people love to read and some don’t. I am one of those people who used to read almost a book a week, but these days I just don’t have the time to dig through the thousands of books that are written everyday. I do read a lot of news, and I don’t believe that young people don’t want to read books. If we didn’t read books then how do giant bookstores like Amazon sell so many books that are interesting and targeted to our generation?
3. They can’t spell – In this point Bauerlein states that young people’s vocabulary and spelling have been defiled by IMs and text messages. Well, I do a considerable amount of instant messaging every day, and I do use shortcuts sometimes because they are easier to type. Bauerlein seems to miss the point that texting and IMing are forms of communication equivalent to speaking. When you talk to your friends it is completely acceptable to use slang and colloquialisms that are not applicable to formal writing. I think most people I know are aware of this fact and are completely capable of spelling correctly in formal papers and reports even though they IM things like “LOL” and “luv u”.
4. They get ridiculed for original thought, good writing - This is one of the dumbest points I have read. Basically the author states that when a young person actually formally composes something original on MySpace they are ridiculed for their spark of intelligence. Well, guess what, MySpace is not a place for literary greatness, and buddies are ALWAYS making fun of each other on sites like that. My husband writes an extremely intelligent blog about games, and I have never seen him ridiculed on his blog. There is a place for everything, and Bauerlein shouldn’t be scouring MySpace for intelligent discourse.
5. Grand Theft Auto IV, etc.- Ah, here is another required bashing of games and other digital entertainment for the dumbing down of my generation. My husband could probably write a ten page rant about this since he is a video game developer and he gets a bit riled up whenever the media blames video games for the downfall of modern society. Whenever I hear people bashing video games, I wonder if they have ever played a great video game. Yes, there are a lot of dumb games, but there are a lot of dumb books and movies, too. Any piece of entertainment reflects the skill and art of its creators, and I’m sure not all of the trashy pieces of entertainment we see are created by 20 somethings. Anyway, I am pretty sure that the author of this book doesn’t have 1/100th the ingenuity and creativity that goes behind creating a great game.
6. They don’t store the information – Here the author’s point is that young people have access to a lot of information at their fingertips so they don’t make an effort to retain the knowledge they obtain. Instead, they look it up and move on. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this. For example, I am a software engineer by trade, and I don’t make an effort to memorize every defined function in a computer language because things are changing all the time. So when I need to write something I am unfamiliar with I search for functions I need and read documentation. I know pretty much all of my colleagues young and old work the same way. Some of the older people may have stored more in their heads just because they have programmed in a language for a longer period of time, but that doesn’t make them smarter. We don’t store information because there is just so much information we need to know these days. Life isn’t as simple as knowing your multiplication table and this behavior of research instead of memorization is not stupidity. I would argue that it’s actually better than memorization because we constantly obtain updated information.
7. Because their teachers don’t tell them so - Well, this point actually says to me that the teachers are dumb. I have had teachers I needed to correct. The last time this happened was in college in Physics class. There were three problems on a midterm and two of them had wrong answers on the answer key. I had to email the professor and tell him he was wrong. I just want to say that just because there are teachers that do not do their jobs well it doesn’t mean that my generation isn’t learning and thinking.
8. Because they’re young – I made a comment on Can I Get Rich on a Salary saying that it is probably unfair to judge the money habits of generation Y right now because when we are in our 20s we are in a grand stage of transition. Life is confusing and abruptly changing for any generation of people at this age range. Anyway, this is an extremely retarded reason to call an entire generation stupid. It is almost as absurd as calling my friends’ children’s generation dumb just because they are all babies that can’t do anything but poop and eat. I really wonder if Bauerlein admitted how stupid he was when he was young in his book to support this point.
Anyway, I personally know more brilliant 20 somethings than smart older people just because most of my friends are about the same age as me. I researched this Mark Bauerlein a bit and it seems that his students think he is a very condescending guy. I am not surprised, and I am pretty sure he wrote this book to stir up controversy, and also make a bit of money so he is a little less angry about dumb twenty-somethings like me being paid more than a highly educated English professor like him.
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17 comments ↓
It’s easy to say that another generation is dumber than your own based on acedotal evidence. For example it’s easy to turn #8 around and say that the Boomers are dumber about money than Gen Y because there are Boomers out there that didn’t save for their retirement and expected Social Security to take care of them in their old age. Ask a Gen Yer about social security and they’ll most likely say that after reading several Internet sources they are pretty sure that they better start saving for their retirements because there won’t be any Social Security money left to support them when they retire.
I also think it is pretty dumb that 20-somethings are forced into paying for Social Security when there is no benefit for us to do so. I just received my Social Security statement recently and I’m kind of annoyed that I am paying so much money towards older people that didn’t bother to plan for their retirements.
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
— attributed to Socrates by Plato
http://www.bartleby.com/73/195.html
Each generation complains about the next. Now that I’m old, I get to complain about those damned ebullient teenagers too.
Regarding point 6, you might want to take a look at “Rainbow’s End” by Vernor Vinge. It explores what happens when the elderly try to adapt to a world where almost all information is available at the twitch of a finger or the blink of an eye.
http://vrinimi.org/rainbowsend.html
Haha Alex you’re not even that old. Cool book. I’m reading it.
In the book “Everything bad is good for you” the author argues that today’s popular culture, including the comples tv shows and video games, is making people smarter. For more, see my post at http://connectwithyourteens.blogspot.com/2008/03/is-popular-culture-good-for-you.html
I do think today’s youth can tend to be a bit lazy sometimes but I think they are actually the smartest generation yet.
I knew a 20-something once who was:
Lazy
Lacked direction in life
Didn’t have much bandwidth for adversity in life
Dogmatic
Angry at the world
Didn’t appreciate his family
Was horrible with money
From my 34 year old vantage point, all of that seems silly and I dare say deplorable.
This 20-something was me.
Admin said: “I’m kind of annoyed that I am paying so much money towards older people that didn’t bother to plan for their retirements.”
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You aren’t paying money for “older people” that didn’t bother to plan for their retirements. Those older people paid in to a system for their entire lives, and certainly they have a right to expect back what was promised them—it is THEIR money, being repaid to them!
And, FYI, they were not told to plan for retirement when they were your age (although most did so anyway) , nor were they told that the ss system would ultimately fail.
I believe ignorance is just exposed more today. I don’t believe it’s more widespread. With increased exposure to media through TV’s and the Internet this generation may careless but it’s not dumber than his predecessors.
@nicole
The problem is that we will be paying into the same system for our entire lives and not get it back. I don’t think it’s bad luck either, because the government keeps on borrowing from the Social Security fund and depleting it. It is the older generation’s fault to create a system that’s not sustainable.
Admin said: “The problem is that we will be paying into the same system for our entire lives and not get it back.”
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If you will not be “getting it back”, that means that the system has failed. If the system fails, you will no longer be paying in to it. Your statement implies that it will not fail until you are ready to begin drawing social security.
The likelihood of it failing many years prior to your own retirement is great, so it is, imo, very unlikely that you will pay in to it and see no return.
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Admin also said: “It is the older generation’s fault to create a system that’s not sustainable.”
The SS system was initially signed into law by Franklin Roosevelt in 1935. Most of those living at that time are now gone. If they were alive then, they were children at the time. Ya can’t blame the living for creating the system—it makes no sense.
In addition, were you to become suddenly disabled tomorrow, social security would begin to pay you.
Denigrating an entire generation, whether they be old or young, is always a mistake.
I love this quote that I heard or read ages ago. I have no idea who said it or where it came from. But when I was 18 or so I thought it was brilliant…”If age brought wisdom there would be no old fools.”
ha!
I read the comments section of this article and someone also pointed out that most of the soldiers and people fighting for the USA in Iraq & Afghanistan are under the age of 30. Something to think about before one decides to criticize those of us in our 20s.
Funny, when I saw “Jaywalking” I thought it would be referring to that vulnerable “lost in my iPod headphones, while looking down texting a message, while drinking a scalding hot latte, while crossing a busy city street” condition that really IS jaywalking. Very often it is a 20-something causing cars to screech to a halt while all this other sensory stuff is filling their every orifice.
LOL, etc: The trouble with abbreviations and stuff is that sometimes other people don’t “speak” them, too, so it serves to separate younger hipsters from the rest of society… and that’s problematic.
In fact I think that’s the general jist of the concerns and complaints here about gen-y-ers, that they have been separated from common connective experiences and that it has an alienating effect on both sides.
I think the oldsters are concerned, if not freaked out, at how graphic sex and violence have become so commonplace with younger people that they have entirely lost their value and weight. Think for a moment of what people used to have to do to get laid – they got married!! OMG.
Now you can play a game all day and graphically murder hookers, cut off people’s heads with chainsaw, etc and it’s just like a normal experience, just doin’ it all the time, y’all. Those things used to be really truly inconceivable/shocking, for what it’s worth. Keep that well in mind when considering the intergenerational stuff. You guys are explicit sex and graphic violence pioneers! Oh boy!!
The reading/book thing: There is a sensory delight about books. You hold them. You smell them… the old books are deliciously musty. You can carry them, you can take books off to the farthest meadow and read, read, read, way longer than a battery on any gadget will last. That is the one thing I hate to see slipping away, the sensory experience of books.
Thanks for listening to this old fart, kids, I’m forty.
Great post, I am so tired of people telling me I’m mature for my age because I know so many twenty somethings like myself: responsible and thoughtful.
@Bonnie Story – I highly doubt that we are the explicit sex and graphic violence pioneers. Violence and sex have been recorded as far back as the Bible. The porn industry was thriving way before I was born, and wars were fought over many issues. Want to see a graphically violent movie? Check out Deer Hunter, an awesome movie about the Vietnam War made in 1978. That was 5 years before I was born. Want to see sex in a film in the 60s? Just flip to Midnight Cowboy. Oh and I see that you mentioned chainsaws and cutting off heads, are you talking about Jason in Friday the 13th? Well guess what, that movie came out in 1980 when this generation was just getting born! The hippies encouraged free love and actually many Gen-Ys are more religious than their parents and actually get married fairly early. I don’t think you can blame this generation for whatever evil that has always existed.
I remember reading that same Boston.com headline for the first time. I was like “WTF?” I can appreciate people have their opinions, but to use our most valuable tools (the internet and social networking) to date to broadcast the opinions of a man who is obviously clueless? That, I don’t agree with. In fact, the whole thing bothered me so much that I started reading into his comments that were also published in a live chat hosted later on, and guess what? He really is clueless.
I made note of some of the research he cited that brought him to all his ‘conclusions’. I found that I have access to many of the same sources, which I also reference in my blogs and accompanying research; http://www.revoy.ca, and http://www.blindspot.ca. I think Mr. Bauerline conveniently left out some important facts, and if he didn’t do it “conveniently”, then I would challenge him to study his arguments more thoroughly so he’s at least got some ground to stand on. Throwing around the name “PEW Research” just for some instant credibility is not only distasteful, it’s annoying for those of us that link the name with research in a way that doesn’t contradict the context it was found in.
Also, I wonder if he realizes that most of the characteristics he’s complaining about are actually consistent throughout many teenagers in every generation.
The more I read into his accusations and comments, the more I realized, “this guy just wants some publicity”. And what better way to get attention than to stir up a fuss. Too bad he skewed his research – he might have been able to come up with a respectable opinion.
I forgot to mention I really like your blog
Are you on http://www.dotdashcreate.com?
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