Mark Bauerlein - The Dumbest Generation Grows Up : From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults

The Dumbest Generation Grows Up

From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults

Mark Bauerlein

Rootless, screen-addicted, fragile, aggressive, censorious, aliterate, and culturally ignorantMillennials have been betrayed by Baby Boomers, Mark Bauerlein shows. Want to understand the woke tyranny? Read The Dumbest Generation Grows Up.

R. R. Reno, editor of First Things and author of Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West

Where did the Cult of Wokeness come from? Mark Bauerlein makes a rich, detailed case that older Americans ruined the Millennial generation by raising them to believe that there should be no constraints on human natureand by handing their developing minds over to Silicon Valley. This book is in no way a middle-aged mans ranting against youth. Rather, it is a serious and persuasive analysis of the damage our society has done to its youngwreckage that the Millennial utopians are now visiting on societyand an urgent plea to refuse and resist the mass culture of idiocracy before we condemn another generation.

Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation and Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

Mark Bauerlein is one of our most percipient and insightful cultural pathologists. In The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, he outdoes himself, showing how the effort to build utopia by jettisoning tradition has bred an entire generation addicted to the mute and dehumanizing platitudes of a sophomoric and self-indulgent nihilism. This is an essential book for our timesclear-sighted, admonitory, mature.

Roger Kimball, editor and publisher of The New Criterion

A very moving book about the first generation of people raised in the Digital Age, showing the costs children pay as adults when they grow up without being given strong general knowledge and, with it, linguistic proficiency in the public sphere. This is especially tragic for the black students of the new generation, who score in reading (and in income) below 80 percent of their white counterparts. The widespread language of equality needs to be backed up with results.

E. D. Hirsch Jr., author of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know and founding chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation

In this penetrating and searingly honest book, Mark Bauerlein continues the project he began thirteen years ago, tracking the intellectual and moral devolution of the generation we call the Millennials. In this book he has followed their path as they have moved into an uneasy, unwelcome, and unhappy adulthood. What he sees are failures: our massive (and massively expensive) failure to educate our young or to form in them the traits that are needed for a life of character and generativity. The wondrous hopes of a coming Digital Age have crashed and burned, leaving behind an entire cohort of young Americans wandering around, dazed and directionless, haunted by apocalyptic fears, with faces glued to the empty enchantments of their telephones, ill-equipped for the tasks of living productively in todays world. If we are to figure out what to do about this disaster, a catastrophe we have imposed upon ourselves, we first must take the full measure of our failure. No one has done that with more tenacity and insight than Mark Bauerlein, and his book will be required reading for all Americans for many years to come.

Wilfred M. McClay, professor of history at Hillsdale College

Poor Cassandra, cursed by Apollo to utter true prophecies that no would believe: Youll regret it if you haul that wooden horse leftby the Greeks inside the gates of Troy, etc. Mark Bauerlein must have offended Apollo too; how better to explain why his 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, fell on deaf ears? He warned us that catering to the self-infatuation of the digital generation would have consequences. Among other acts of negligence, ignoring our responsibilities to instruct students how to read worthy literature; how to hear sublime music; how to enjoy sweet, silent thought; or how to weigh the perplexities of self-government would leave those young people unprepared for real life. They would face the world bereft of knowledge, faith, and sound judgment. Bauerlein now bravely faces the results. The Dumbest Generation, now in its early thirties, wanders bewildered through the decade in which it should shoulder a serious public role but remains dazzled by utopian fantasies, a pseudo-moral imperative that everyone should be happy, and the callow pleasures of the callout culture. Bauerlein, writing gracefully, reflects his own immersion in our rich civilizational heritage. I cannot think of a better cure for cultural dumbness than reading The Dumbest Generation Grows Up with a mind towards really understanding the authors, ideas, and works of artistic genius that thread through its pages.

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars

A richly argued jeremiad against a generation that is ignorant of the past and is therefore condemned to repeat itand that has thus also embraced the ideas of communist totalitarians, with little sense that they are doing so or of what the consequences will be. Mark Bauerlein has provided an invaluable service with this remarkably informative book.

David Horowitz, founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and author of Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey and I Cant Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America

I would like to be able to praise Mark Bauerleins The Dumbest Generation Grows Up as a cautionary tale warning us about what will happen to young minds if their education introduces them to no great books and offers for imitation no transcendent cultural heroes and is bereft of any vision except the empty one of perpetual and unearned happiness. I cant do that, because Bauerleins lessondelivered in tones elegiac, world-weary, and surprisingly gentleis that its already happened: The fractious, know-nothing thirty-year-old is what we got when we let the twelve-year-old drop his books and take up the screen. Entirely persuasive and entirely sad.

Stanley Fish, Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University

W hat have we done to them?

Themthe Millennials, the first Americans to come of age in the Digital Age, the cutting edge of the tech revolution, competing like never before for college and grad school, ready to think globally and renounce prejudice and fashion their profiles to achieve, achieve, follow their passions and be all that they can bebut ending up behind the Starbucks counter or doing contract work, living with their parents or in a house with four friends, nonetheless lonely and mistrustful, with no thoughts of marriage and children, no weekly church attendance or civic memberships, more than half of them convinced that their country is racist and sexist. This is no longer the cohort that in 2010 was Confident, Self-Expressive, Liberal, Upbeat, and Open to Change.

And wethe educators, journalists, intellectuals, business and foundation leaders, consultants, psychologists, and other supervisors of the youngwho flattered them as