Bianca Steele

I'm Okay, You're Dumb (The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein)

My local public library has purchased a copy of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation.  I may be the first person in eleven months to have turned pages past the midpoint of the book, but they do have it on the shelf.  I picked it up several months ago, opened it randomly, and said, “this doesn’t make sense,” so I put it back.  Then I saw it again at Border’s, and this time I noticed that there was a chapter titled “The Betrayal of the Mentors” that appeared to talk about what has gone on in academic humanities departments over the last thirty or forty years.  I didn’t agree with it on a first glance, but on a second glance it seemed thoughtful and thought-provoking.  On a third and fourth glance I’m puzzled and, strangely, almost, insulted.

I figured the book would discuss why, in spite of increasing access to higher education, young people evidently score less well than their seniors on social scientists’ measures of knowledge and skill.  Since Bauerlein is an educator who has written as a conservative activist, he would presumably focus on what liberal college professors believe and on what education schools advise regarding lower-level schools (both topics conservatives consider important).  Instead, we find a complaint to the effect that reading, of the kind Bauerlein teaches and was himself taught, and the kind of reading all educated people (according to Bauerlein) have practiced for centuries, is dying out.

That is the argument of the first two chapters, especially:  The Internet has been around for between ten and twenty years, depending on how you count.  Therefore, American kids now finishing high school and beginning college have grown up with the Internet and we can expect them to display whatever advantages Internet is actually able to confer.  The Internet contains lots of information about topics of civic and academic interest, so kids who have grown up with it ought to know a lot.  They don’t, though.  The reason for this is that they don’t read; reading provides all kinds of benefits that help kids do better in school, and readers acquire all kinds of information as they engross themselves in books and reflect on what they say.  Kids don’t really acquire information in school, so it’s natural that their leisure-time activities are what determines how well they do on standardized tests and in college.  Bauerlein pulls the elements of this argument from a smorgasbord of sociological studies.

He appears to take the incredible yet still increasing popularity of the Internet as obviously the reason for the decline he feels exists.  The book is addressed both towards people who are interested in the rise of this new technology and also towards people who are interested in culture and reading.

As Bauerlein reads the studies, working with computers appears to improve a kind of putative intelligence which is actually bad. (He does not describe what it is, or at least not in any detail, but presumably he knows it when he sees it.)  Thus, the book will make those who work with computers consider whether they have been missing anything.  And, correspondingly, it will make those who are interested in culture and reading, and who suspect that those who work with computers are missing something, more sure that they are right.

I don’t personally find this argument convincing, but Bauerlein covers the bases very neatly.  The data for the arguments are not Bauerlein’s, so if they are questionable, he is not responsible.  And he emphasizes frequently that lots of people appear to be highly intelligent yet are (in his opinion) unable to read.  Those who disagree with him and cannot make sense of his argument may conclude they fall into this category.

Which raises the question who he thinks his audience is.  Because he has lost the people for whom critical thinking involves evaluation of evidence, as well as felicity in word choice.  He has lost the people who are turned off immediately by statements like the one I peeved about last week.  He has lost the people whose response, when faced with huge metaphysical arguments like the ones that English professors today are so fond of, on one of which I presume Bauerlein implicitly bases this book, is WTF?  And I’m not sure whom that leaves, other than college professors, the more credulous sort of journalist, and maybe the clergy.  Yet his book is published by a nonacademic press. 

To a large extent, he is criticizing educators like himself, yet his book is addressed to a general readership.  I get the sense he is trying to rally nonacademics to join in his critique of a subgroup among his fellow academics, something that conservative college professors have been doing for two decades, at least.  Because the book reads, essentially, like an (ever so mildly worded) jeremiad.  Yet it seems ungracious to harangue his lessers for not correcting his own colleagues and even himself.  Why would he do that?

Perhaps to make readers feel guilty or indignant enough that they would urge their legislators and other elected officials to support the educational policies Bauerlein promotes (vaguely described as these are).

Perhaps to intrigue future teenagers who feel they are smarter and more moral than their peers, who after reading this book may feel inspired to major in English and put into practice the high-flown sentiments they’ve learned from reading it.

Perhaps to console middle-aged and retired autodidacts and former English majors, who know they know how to read and are frustrated by the fact that they can’t express their own opinions without being challenged.  Perhaps to give them talking points for responding to such (explicit or implicit) challenges. 

Perhaps to encourage what general readers may actually remain (and have time for books like his) to discuss the ideas it contains with their friends and colleagues after work or during their lunch hours.

Of course, it’s more than probable that Bauerlein had no such rhetorical intention.  Perhaps he is simply articulating the beliefs of those he considers the entire educated class.  In fact, I have little real doubt that he sees himself as doing something quite different from what I describe above.

As a conservative and an English professor, naturally, I think, he writes a kind of book that is really rather traditional.  He assumes no subject matter expertise and, indeed, prefers no such expertise.  Though he seems to have no problem turning reading itself into an expert skill.  He assumes a unitary culture and even proceeds as if one existed.  Though, at the same time, he is continually discovering individuals and groups that don’t properly belong to it.  Though he dehumanizes those he disagrees with by referring to them as a faceless horde with an ugly name like “technophiles” or “technovangelists”: almost a metaphysical cause in itself—like Tony Kushner’s imagination of what an angel is—here, though, a fallen, Satanic angel.  It’s the continual casting out of the other that really grates, but maybe I ought to ignore that.  After all, none of us are without sin.

He is writing for a general audience: not political, not professional or technical.  He is writing an old-fashioned kind of book, the kind of book that can be read by all educated men and women.  His book is not at all of a type that can be read and be of use only to wonks, to bureaucrats and technocrats and low-level government clerks.  His book is, precisely, a book that informs educated men and women of what’s going on behind the scenes in the social and governmental institutions that determine what their lives will be like (on those infrequent occasions when they interact with such institutions).  His readers do not themselves work within those institutions, and they don’t have any influence on the controlling beliefs within those institutions either (except the small incremental influence any one of us has, and uses when we talk among ourselves or raise concerns with authority figures).  His readers are educated and at least vaguely conservative and much like himself.

This interpretation, however, while generous to Mark Bauerlein, leaves this particular reader out in the cold. 

Peeving The Dumbest Generation

I’ve been reading Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, a screed against kids today and the culture that formed them, the scapegoat being the Internet.  I’m planning a longer post on the book, and I don’t intend to make style a main object of criticism.  But I wanted to get this off my chest: I just came across the following sentences, on page 107:

“Because that glorious creation of youth intelligence hasn’t materialized.  The Web expands nonstop, absorbing everything it can, and more knowledge and beauty settle there by the hour.  But no such enhancement has touched its most creative and frequent users, the digital natives [i.e., youth who’ve grown up with the Internet].  There is no reciprocal effect.  Digital enthusiasts witness faithfully the miraculous evolution of the digital sphere, but they also assume a parallel ascent by its consumers, an assumption with no evidence behind it.” 

This isn’t even a mixed metaphor, because there is no metaphor here.  There’s just words.  All the words apply to “[t]he Web.”  The Web expands, the Web absorbs things, and it’s possible for good things to settle on the Web.  (We don’t have to suppose the subject should be replaced.  We can just redefine the predicates to make them fit.)  Like God according to some medieval philosophies, the Web can have any and all attributes applied to it.  But the Web isn’t really any more like God (or a god, or a divine-like kind of something or other) than anything else is.  When people write in the style Bauerlein has chosen, it’s just that words can be used any way that seems convenient.  Again, this isn’t zany creativity, which would imply there are limits being pushed up against—rather, everything just kind of seeps around everywhere.

Miscellaneous Friday

Angels and Mullets

How can anybody resist the word mullet?  I wouldn’t say mullet is one of my favorite words, in the sense meant in this thread on Language Log.  I don’t think saying “mullet” is a pleasure in itself, or hearing “mullet.”  It’s the idea that I think is fascinating, with all the cloud of connotations and historical references and visualized images that follow in its trail.  I first saw a mullet, I think (at least as a distinct look, up close), in 1984, as a freshman in college, on an engineering student from one of the more distant villages of Queens County, and first heard the word about fifteen years later.  In between, I’d seen lots and lots of them.  I really didn’t know there was such a word.  By way of pointing to Christopher Orr’s review of Angels and Demons as a film about a haircut:

Robert Langdon, has returned, but without the mullet, which in the interim evidently detached itself from his scalp, crawled off to some dark corner, and grew up to be Danny McBride.

Orr says the film has been “lightly reworked.”

The Producers is being produced in Berlin.

Despite coverage of the show in local newspapers, not all Berliners have been clued in to its comic nature, Bech said. City police have received a number of complaints about posters for the production, which “provoked associations with the Nazis” despite the fact that swastikas have been replaced with images of pretzels in order to conform to German law. (Swastikas can be used onstage as part of an “artistic statement,” Bech said, but not as part of the show’s promotional materials.) 

Here's the poster, complete with pretzels.

Every so often, Michael Bérubé

. . . finds himself witnessing . . .

. . . or sometimes actually taking part in, exchanges that go like this:

First Person: Hey, what do you think of this proposal?

Second Person: Excuse me, but I wasn’t consulted about this.

First Person: Beg pardon?

Second Person: I wasn’t consulted about this.

First Person: Um . . . but that’s why I’m asking what you think.  I’m consulting you.  This is the consultation right now.

Second Person: I can’t believe you went ahead and did this without asking for anybody’s input.  I really think we need to talk.

First Person: ??

And no, I am never the Second Person.  When people ask me what I think about X, I simply say “kewl” or “meh” or “ZOMG” or “do not want” or some other Internets locution. 

Clive Crook: Blogs are destroying the credibility of academic economics

It’s difficult to want to write a blog post about somebody who’s just called bloggers the root of all evil -- particularly when he’s also just accused bloggers of politicizing issues that previously had been seen entirely objectively. It’s difficult to write without either condemning yourself or proving him or her right by getting all angry and polarizing.

Before piling on the blogosphere, Clive Crook, here, attacks academic economists who write for a popular audience. He suggests that when they write for an audience “not of their peers” (their real peers are their fellow Ph.D.’s who have access to JSTOR and huge libraries, presumably), their writing is no longer informed by the theoretical knowledge they possess as economists. Instead, he charges, they are using their economics knowledge -- and more importantly their prestige -- to promote one political party over the other: what they are telling their readers is different from what professional economists would accept as true. What they are really doing, he implies, is providing political partisans with “the economics they want”: an “economics” that is useful for achieving political results, not an economics that accurately describes the world in which they live (and, as a consequence, is useful for achieving results in that world).

I don’t know what could make Crook want to say a thing like this. But he goes on to blame the web for at least “aggravating” the problem. The blogosphere, he writes, “[c]elebrate[s] exasperation and incivility as marks of intellectual authenticity” -- as if such attitudes were not prevalent everywhere.

Hiring editors and fact checkers is probably not an option except for those employed by mainstream media outlets like The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times. What should bloggers do then? Write only what could be awarded an “A” in an econ class at any major university anywhere in the US? Write only what’s been given the imprimatur of one of the designated “political economics writers” from their selected party (e.g., Krugman for liberals, Barro for Republicans)? Or just go away?

Henry Farrell, as usual, has a useful response here.

Have you ever been hugged by a registrar?

Asks beloved BU history prof and author Howard Zinn:

Writing a play is more fun than writing a history book. And when somebody decides to produce it, it's wonderful. You are taken out of the cold world of the academy and you're in a world of movies and plays where you are hugged by everybody - the director, the cast, they all hug you. Have you ever been hugged by a registrar?

Zinn's twenty-odd year-old play, Daughter of Venus, is being produced by Suffolk University and BU's Boston Playwright's Theatre.

Columbia College's Core Curriculum

President Obama, like me, is a graduate of Columbia College, the 350 year old Ivy League undergraduate college in New York City. (When he attended the College, it admitted only men. Columbia was the last school in the Ivy League to go co-ed. It began admitting women to the freshman class only in 1983. However, women were permitted to cross-register for classes if they were enrolled at Barnard, across the street, or at the graduate schools and affiliated schools in the neighborhood such as the Manhattan School of Music and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Barnard and Columbia also shared most non-first year dorms, but as a transfer student, Obama would have had almost no chance of getting into oncampus housing.)

Therefore, he would have been required to enroll in the College’s famed Core Curriculum, established in the wake of World War I in order to provide students with a background in Western values. The Core was one of the College’s best selling points -- for those who were interested in that kind of thing -- for others, especially science students (it was relatively easy to place out of the one-year science requirement, at the time, if you had taken AP courses at your high school, but the Core was absolutely mandatory), it was an unpleasant opportunity to read lots of boring books and write a lot of essays. (Barnard women and engineering school students were permitted to enroll in a limited number of Core courses, though the latter found it extremely difficult to find a slot in their class schedules for a liberal arts elective.)

The Core consists of four courses (at least it did in the mid-eighties when I attended): two year-long courses, Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, and two half-year courses, Arts Humanities and Music Humanities. The year-long classes were small and taught by professors from various departments. (You can find the current reading lists here.)

However, transfer students (of which Barack Obama was one) were required to take only half of the Core, one each of the full-year and half-year courses. It seems amusing to wonder which half of the Core Obama elected to take. But it doesn’t seem too difficult to guess. Surely he would have enrolled in CC and Music Hum. Those would have been my choices, if I had had to pick at the age of seventeen. I’m glad I didn’t have to. I enjoyed Music Hum a lot, and learned a lot too, but I probably would have picked up most of it over the years even without taking the course. If I hadn’t taken Lit Hum, I would not have the following books on my shelf now: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (pants I break-a your leg), Aristophanes; Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Inferno; Gargantua and Pantagruel -- but, again, I might have found many of the same books, and read them in the same way, after I had graduated. The one core course I would never have taken the equivalent of unless I had been forced to do so was Art Humanities.

My mother had a handful of art books in the house, but I’d never really gotten much out of them. I don’t think I got much out of school art, either, except that I knew who Leonardo da Vinci was (he was a multifaceted genius, unlike us Penn- and Drexel-bound sixth-graders, who couldn’t even do one thing poorly). In Art Hum, I learned that painting, sculpture and architecture were traditions that each successive artist learns to emulate and to excel. I spent time at the Met, in class groups and by myself, taking the crosstown bus through Harlem, in order to write essays about an eighteenth-century oil painting or a Baroque sculpture of Bacchus. I learned that one of my classmates thought it was either interesting or funny to ask -- of each and every painting we looked at as a class -- how much it had cost. I learned words like “painterly” and “atmospheric perspective.” I learned enough to know that Dan Brown is full of it, and so are whatever people persuaded him of the art-historical “facts” he writes about.

There are a couple of arguments people use to defend the liberal arts from the accusation that studying them is useless; one of them is that when you are old or middle-aged, you will be glad that you know about them, and glad you had learned to read them. That argument is usually made about reading, though, not about art. But at age forty-two, I am glad of the ability to spend an hour or two at an art museum and enjoy it.