Mark Bauerlein > Quotes

“For education to happen, people must encounter worthwhile things outside their sphere of interest and brainpower.”
― Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

“You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”
― Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

“When a journalist in the audience asked if sticking solely to RSS feeds made her miss the “broader picture,” she snapped, “I’m not trying to get a broader picture.”
― Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

“The Digital Age promises to amplify their being—YouTube’s original motto was “Broadcast Yourself”—but, in truth, it only delivers a horde of users with identical devices echoing one another in cyberspace.”
― Mark Bauerlein, Plough Quarterly No. 15 - Staying Human: The Tech Issue

“The story doesn't mention him, but Steve Jobs himself famously kept his own household and kids fairly tech-free, and a parallel Times story published at the same time and by the same reporter, Nellie Bowles, found more tech celebrities doing likewise. Why? Because, explained Chris Anderson, ex-editor of Wired and head of a robotics company, "We thought we could control it. And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain.”
― Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

“of writing instruction in both K–12 schools and colleges is a symptom of this cluelessness among professionals. We would not likely see such inconsistency, after all, if any one or two approaches to teaching writing had had any discernible success. To mention just a few examples of this inconsistency, some K–12 teachers (but not all) virtually equate good writing with correct grammar, but when and if those students get to college they are often told that grammar is overrated, if not completely unimportant. In some cases, students encounter these confusingly conflicting attitudes toward grammar side by side both in K–12 and college. In a similarly confusing way, “writing” in K–12 often means creative writing or personal narrative, but in college the term shifts without warning to mean rigorous exposition, analysis, and argument. This shift often comes as a surprise or shock to students—if they become aware of it at all—because neither K–12 schools nor colleges take responsibility for informing students about it, much less explaining and justifying it.”
― Mark Bauerlein, The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism