The Dumbest Generation How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future(Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)

This shocking, surprisingly entertaining romp into the intellectual nether regions of today's underthirty set reveals the disturbing and, ultimately, incontrovertible truth: cyberculture is turning us into a society of know-nothings.'If you're the parent of someone under 20 and read only one non-fiction book this fall, make it this one. Bauerlein's simple but jarring thesis is that technology and the digital culture it has created are not broadening the horizon of the younger generation; they are narrowing it to a self-absorbed social universe that blocks out virtually everything else.'-Don Campbell, USA Today'An urgent and pragmatic book on the very dark topic of the virtual end of reading among the young.' -Harold Bloom'Never have American students had it so easy, and never have they achieved less. . . . Mr. Bauerlein delivers this bad news in a surprisingly brisk and engaging fashion, blowing holes in a lot of conventional educational wisdom.'-Charles McGrath, The New York Times'It wouldn't be going too far to call this book the Why Johnny Can't Read for the digital age.' -Booklist'Throughout The Dumbest Generation, there are . . . keen insights into how the new digital world really is changing the way young people engage with information and the obstacles they face in integrating any of it meaningfully. These are insights that educators, parents, and other adults ignore at their peril.' -Lee Drutman, Los Angeles Times

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and has worked as a director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he oversaw studies about culture and American life, including the much discussed Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Weekly Standard, Reason magazine, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among many other publications and scholarly periodicals. A frequent lecturer, he has been called one of the Independent Women-'s Forum-'s -ôfavorite intellectuals,-ö and has been praised by columnist George Will as -ôdazzling.-ö