Summary Post

When I first started reading “The Dumbest Generation,” I was expecting to read about how technology has changed kids and how they can access anything they need to know with the touch of a button. While this proved to be partly true, I was surprised to read about the level of apathy that our kids exhibit today. Kids no longer just don’t know the basics, they also don’t care that they don’t know. At the beginning of the book, on page 13, Bauerlein states, “It isn’t enough to say that these young people are uninterested in world realities. They are actively cut off from them.” Their realities are based on immediate friends, facebook and social networking. Anything else means little. Kids today enjoy more access and more information than previous generations, yet they don’t capitalize on it. That frustrates me as a teacher. Educators tend to take the blame for lack of student achievement, but as Bauerlein points out on page 37, “The unique failings of the Dumbest Generation don't originate in the classroom, then, which amounts to only one-eleventh of their daily lives. They stem from home, social and leisure lives of young Americans, and if changes in their out of school habits entail a progressive disengagement from intellectual matters, then we should expect their minds to exhibit some consequences in spite of what goes on in school.”
One would assume that as technology improves, so would the basic skills of our students, but as the author points out, that’s not the case. Based on the popular belief that today’s students are struggling immensely in their education, and possibly technology is to blame, one piece of information really caught my attention. Bauerlein says that if we normalized scores, students from 1932 would appear to be deficient in today’s terms. Or, going the other way, today’s students would have ten times as many students “very superior” as the 1932 students did back in 1932. (Study information on page 92-92) I believe that part of this is due to the expectation that as we advance in the technological world, so should the educational outcomes of our changing educational system. “Enough years have passed for us to expect the intellectual payoff promised by digital enthusiasts to have happened. Blogs aren’t new anymore, and neither is MySpace, The Sims, or text messaging. Students consult Wikipedia all the time. If the Web did constitute such a rich learning encounter, we would have seen its effects by now.” (Page 108).
In response to this class being based on technology useage in the classroom, and making it real for the students, I fully expected this book to support that philosophy. It doesn’t. The lack of academic gains made by digital natives does not support using technology to teach. Students are using technology, yes, but they are not connecting that to the classroom or their learning experiences. In fact, some kids would rather not have the technology in the schools, and some schools that piloted the one-to-one initiative are now phasing out the laptops for their students. Kids are expected to improve academically as technology makes the world more readily available, and the money being spent in schools to ensure that is being wasted. Bauerlein moves once again to word exposure. Kids today do not engage in enough exposure to what he calls rare words. This type of exposure helps students read in context, to expand their vocabulary and even speech. I was surprised to see that cartoons ranked highest among rare word exposure for the screen, even more so that educational shows.
Bauerlein comes back to the idea that kids don’t much care about the classics, and he backs that up with a video documentary entitled, “The Artshow.” Through this the author points out that today’s kids don’t want to learn anything about those wiser than they are from the past. He states, “It doesn’t occur to him that absorbing the former might actually inspire and enhance the latter.” (Page 167) He continues on the next page, “It is the nature of adolescents to believe that authentic reality begins with themselves, and that what long preceded them is irrelevant.” The ruler of maturity no longer stems from formal learning. The attitude of today’s youth is focused on generational correctness, and has no concerns for politics or history. Bauerlein admits it takes several people to create out of our youth great policy makers and intellectuals, but he worries that with the “Dumbest Generation,” society is headed for a breakdown.
Bauerlein discovered that while some people believe that teacher centered instruction bores kids, and that student centered instruction will motivate kids, the opposite is actually true with lower level learners. (Page 189) We tend to overpraise kids and they want something for everything these days. What happened to hard work being the reward for hard work? “Few things are worse for adolescent minds than overblown appraisals of their merits. They rob them of constructive self-criticism and obscure the lessons of tradition. I can’t help but think here about the schools that don’t cut kids from sports. They create a second team so as to not hurt anyone’s feelings, which in the end deprives the kids who should have made the only team from playing as games are now split between the two teams. Those talented kids miss out on playing time which could advance their skills as a ballplayer and as a result, we end up with a bunch of mediocre kids and a lack of enthusiasm for the game.
The book concludes with a summary of “Rip Van Winkle” and a discussion of how today’s kids, “The Dumbest Generation,” are sleeping through the changes that are taking place. Rip had slept for 20 years not having a clue what was going on. Today’s youth as well have no clue about happenings outside of their immediate social circles. They have slept through movements of culture and historical events because they only concern themselves with their peers and events of the moment. Bauerlein argues that “if you ignore the traditions that ground and ennoble our society, you are an incomplete person and a negligent citizen.” (Page 233)
I very much want my students to be successful contributors to society. I worry that my students really will, as Bauerlein suggests, be “recalled as the generation that lost the great American heritage, forever.” (Page 236) I wonder as a teacher how I can prevent that title from becoming a reality, or if I even can.
While Bauerlein does not appear to approve of technology, he understands that it is here to stay, and as a result, the burden of learning to think differently lies not with the youth, the digital natives, but with the adults who must educate and work with the next generation in order to prevent societal demise.

This is important for me to realize as a classroom teacher. It is my job to prepare kids for the future, and now, not only do I have the challenges of a more rigorous curriculum, and parents who seldom anymore support their children’s education, but I also have to deal with the difficulties of teaching responsible digital citizenship as my students learn to be productive online and technological learners. I have decided that teaching technology to a generation that is familiar with about every gadget invented, even if they don’t know how to apply it to their education, is a partnership. If they can teach me how to use the technology, then I will teach them how to use it responsibly in an educational setting.