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.
