Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation

In his book The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein states that the Millennial generation, with their dependence on technology, are the dumbest generation. He says that Millennials have an unprecedented lack of general knowledge, and this foreshadows trouble in the future when this generation takes control of the agencies of power. Bauerlein’s analysis ignores the nuances of generational ideological priorities, reaches damning conclusions from weak and sparse data, and hypocritically ignores the historical precedents for the argument he is making. In the book, the author posits that the improvement of American life on many metrics is a “shallow advent” (Doc 1). He then goes on to say that the “enlightenment” that one would expect to come along

Throughout human society, people have decried new advancements and way to disseminate information as making us less prepared for the future. After the development of the printing press and the easy production of books in the late 1400s, many scholars felt and wrote (ironically) about the fact that they thought these books would lead to the degradation of society. Additionally, a 1962 article in the Foreign Service Journal remarks on the lack of basic information among candidates for civil service posts. “My initial surprise was to find among the candidates an abysmal ignorance of so elementary a subject as the geography of the United States” (Doc 5), the author writes. Mark Bauerlein is trying to saying the advent of technology is going to make us dumb and cripple our ability to properly confront the future, while not only have people been saying things like this for hundreds of years, but Americans specifically appear to have always have had some form of a lack of general knowledge to some extent. If people applying to work for the US Foreign Service in the ‘60s don’t even know where the state of Ohio is, then Millennials aren’t unique, but simply toeing the