Judging a Generation

Share this article

Is the Millennial Generation just plain dumb? That’s the premise put forward by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. (The book is sub-subtitled, Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30, a phrase Bauerlein says makes his wife wince).

If one looks at this year’s Common Core history and literature results, many readers might understand why older generations might agree with Bauerlein. According to Common Core, out of 12,000 17-year-olds surveyed,

• 43% of knew that “The Civil War was between 1850 and 1900;”
• 50% knew that “The purpose of The Federalist Papers was to gain ratification of the Constitution;” and
• 51% knew that “The controversy surrounding Senator Joseph McCarthy focused on Communism.”

On a more positive note, 97% of the students surveyed could identify Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and three-quarters correctly answered questions on topics such as Hitler, Watergate, the Declaration of Independence, and the system of “checks and balances.”

The “American freshmen survey, put out by UCLA every year, and in the last few years they’ve come up with numbers of when they asked students about their leisure reading, more than half of them, 51%, recently stated that they had read less than one hour a week—one quarter of them ‘zero’—on their own,” said Professor Bauerlein at an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) forum debating the merits of this generation, born in the 1980’s and 1990’s. “And this could be reading anything, it doesn’t have to be Moby Dick, this could be reading sports books or Harry Potter, and anything for their own personal enjoyment and education.” Professor Bauerlein views reading as a “measure of intellectual curiosity.”

Bauerlein expressed his concern that today’s youth lack philosophical depth and are failing to become the educated citizens that America needs:

“An informed citizenry is an essential thing in a democracy. The Founding Fathers understood that citizens have to be active political players or leaders are going to go astray…That’s the nature of government and they built in those safeguards, but the safeguards won’t work if people aren’t aware of what’s going on and that includes having a historical understanding of the past. . .and holding your current leaders and current policy- and decision-makers up to those examples, positively or negatively.”

“And if people don’t remember the past then they’re going to end up with the leaders they deserve.”

Bauerlein points to research showing that a minority of college seniors initiate out-of-class contact with their professors and decried students’ success-oriented attitudes. “But that really makes the academic experience very very much oriented around achievement, right? You take the test, you take the exam, you get the grade and it’s not a fuller intellectual experience,” he argued.

Of course, as Accuracy in Academia has documented, many universities are now more willing to indoctrinate than educate their students. And if, as Elizabeth Kantor argues, university English professors other than the Emory scholar eschew “dead white males” such as William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer, then it is not surprising that college students lack the cultural education promoted by Professor Bauerlein, albeit for reasons other than the digital revolution.

“There is something about these comparisons which always inherently advantages the older generation, and that is you can test today’s young people according to the standards communication in 1950, but you cannot test kids in 1950, go back and test them according to the standards of 2010,” argued Neil Howe at AEI, continuing, “and there’s always a sense in which we are always testing young people to their disadvantage by using older standards.”

The president and founding partner of LifeCourse Associates, Howe has authored and co-authored a series of books on the Millennial Generation and is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

As shown by the Flynn Effect, Howe argues, IQ scores have been rising 1/3 to 2/3 a point in each year’s birth cohort. Therefore, millennials quite simply cannot be called a “dumb” generation. He also urged the audience to remember that while current U.S. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores indicate that the U.S. student scores lag behind those of international students, American scores have largely trended upward since the 1970’s. As for the NAEP reading scale, Howe said that younger students’ scores trend upward since 1970, but as for 11-graders “the worst you can say is that compared to 1971, age 17 is back where we started, but the others have improved.”

Both of the AEI panelists had decidedly divergent assessments of the Millennial Generation’s value. “And so the paradox is why is this happening and my answer is the digital age has come about and digital tools have entered young people’s lives in an avalanche,” asserted Professor Bauerlein, arguing that the value millennials place on social networking sites “is a great big window onto what they really care about: themselves.”

“Character formation is all being bounced off one another instead of vertically through adults, mentors, ministers, and so on—it’s horizontal. It is social contact, and a social life gone wild and that is a regrettable circumstance and on that note I’ll conclude,” argued Bauerstein.

Howe likened millennials to the World War II generation, arguing that youths’ new emphasis on community over philosophical nuance reflects a backlash against the over-analytical and debate-savvy boomer and “X” generations. “You know, we boomers and we Xers aren’t very good at building institutions, building community, getting national consensus behind important issues—I mean just look around in the headlines,” he said. He continued,

“We’ll be shouting at each other on radio talk shows into our 80’s, okay. We won’t need that in American life, but we will need a generation to come along and build big things and think to tell this generation. . .and we are counting on great things from them.”

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.