The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, by Mark Bauerlein

This was intense!

I read it all in one horrified sitting, and can't get it out of my head.

Now, sure- I know (as Bauerlein admits right off the bat) that every age has had it's elders (god, I guess at 33 I'm an elder? I don't know) looking at it's youth, and saying what a pack of idiots they seem, but Bauerlein comes at this armed with an almost overwhelming array of studies that seem to point pretty damn conclusively to one tragic fact- that the high school graduates of today have learned less, comparatively, than high school graduates of previous generations, and by a lot. Also, high drop out rates skew those numbers further, and test scores of young Americans have plummeted over the past 15 years in comparison with other developed nations. Add to that rapid drops in college students being judged ready for college work, and even more disturbing drops in students majoring in maths, physics, or engineering, and we're looking at Idiocracy, man.

Oh so many tidbits and statistics pounded it home, with a passion and an eloquence that was really impressive.

One of the most interesting aspects for me, was the impact of a large vocabulary upon entering kindergarten, and the incidence of "rare words" on television and in print. I'll just give this one bit:

"One criterion researchers use is the rate of "rare words" in spoken and written discourse. They define "rare words" as words that do not rank in the top 10,000 in terms of frequency of usage. With the rare word scale, researchers can examine various media for the number of rare words per thousand, as well as the median-word ranking for each medium as a whole....

Rank of median word Rare words per 1000

• newspapers 1690 68.3
• adult books 1058 52.7
• comic books 867 53.5
• children's books 578 16.3
• prime-time adult tv 490 22.7
• prime-time children tv 543 20.2
• Sesame Street 413 2.0"

All very interesting, no? And add to this that the kids today, our so-called Digital generation spend so much of their time online- for some reason, this seems to fill folks with all sorts of giddy hope that these kids are going to learn things online. Well, I have seen teens online for hours- hour after hour of gorgeous sunny day, and they can't tear themselves away for the stupidest junk available online. It's pathetic. They can't spell, they can't type, they are not learning how to program or design games, they are learning to buy and shop and that it's cute to misspell things and in general being misled in every possible way by the only adults who are looking at them in an interested fashion, the marketers.

Bauerlein makes the sad but true point that adults who wish to influence the future can't pretend that all this MySpace/Gaia crap will let them absorb computer skills, let alone language and maths skills that will not only allow these kids to get a job, but might help our country survive.