More Thoughts From THE DUMBEST GENERATION

"Few things are worse for adolescent minds than overblown appraisals of their merit. They rob them of constructive self-criticism and obscure the lessons of tradition. They steer their competitive instincts toward peer triumphs, no civic duty. They make them mistrust their guides, and interpret cynically both praise and censure. They set them up for failure...

"The twenty-first-century teen, connected and multitasked, autonomous yet peer-mindful, marks no great leap forward in human intelligence, global thinking, or "netizen"-ship. Young users have learned a thousand new things, no doubt. They upload and download, surf and chat, post and design, but they haven't learned to analyze a complex text, store facts in their heads, comprehend a foreign policy decision, take lessons from history, or spell correctly. Never having recognized their responsibility to the past, they have opened a fissure in our civic foundations, and it shows in their halting passage into adulthood and citizenship. They leave school, but peer fixations continue and social habits stay the same. They join the workforce but only to realize that self-esteem lessons of home and class, as well as behaviors that made them popular, no longer apply, and it takes them years to adjust. They grab snatches of news and sometimes vote, but they regard the civic realm as another planet. And wherever they end up, whomever they marry, however high they land in their careers, most of them never acquire the intellectual tools they should have as teenagers and young adults....the knowledge and culture traits never catch up....

If young people don't read, they shut themselves out of public affairs. Without a knowledge formation in younger years, adults function as more or less partial citizens. Reading and knowledge have to enter their leisure lives, at their own initiative....

As the rising generation reaches middle age, it won't re-create the citizenship of its precursors, nor will it ranks produce a set of committed intellectuals ready to trade in ideas, steer public policy, and espouse social values on the basis of learning, eloquence, and a historical sense of human endeavor. This is one damaging consequence of the betrayal of the mentors that is often overlooked."

From pp. 201-203 of The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein