The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults

by Mark Bauerlein

Back in 2008, Mark Bauerlein was a voice crying in the wilderness. As experts greeted the new generation of “Digital Natives” with extravagant hopes for their high-tech future, he pegged them as the “Dumbest Generation.”

Today, their future doesn’t look so bright, and their present is pretty grim. The twenty-somethings who spent their childhoods staring into a screen are lonely and purposeless, unfulfilled at work and at home. Many of them are even suicidal. The Dumbest Generation Grows Up is an urgently needed update on the Millennials, explaining their not-so-quiet desperation and, more important, the threat that their ignorance poses to the rest of us. Lacking skills, knowledge, religion, and a cultural frame of reference, Millennials are anxiously looking for something to fill the void. Their mentors have failed them. Unfortunately, they have turned to politics to plug the hole in their souls.

Knowing nothing about history, they are convinced that it is merely a catalogue of oppression, inequality, and hatred. Why, they wonder, has the human race not ended all this injustice before now? And from the depths of their ignorance rises the answer: Because they are the first ones to care! All that is needed is to tear down our inherited civilization and replace it with their utopian aspirations. For a generation unacquainted with the constraints of human nature, anything seems possible.

Having diagnosed the malady before most people realized the patient was sick, Mark Bauerlein surveys the psychological and social wreckage and warns that we cannot afford to do this to another generation.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Education

256 pages, Hardcover

Published February 1, 2022

About the author

Mark Bauerlein earned his doctorate in English at UCLA in 1988. He has taught at Emory since 1989, with a two-and-a-half year break in 2003-05 to serve as the Director, Office of Research and Analysis, at the National Endowment for the Arts. Apart from his scholarly work, he publishes in popular periodicals such as The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, TLS, and Chronicle of Higher Education. His latest book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30 (www.dumbestgeneration.com), was published in May 2008.

Reviews

[Cynthia Chiang · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this book on the steps of a house in Park Slope with a bunch of other thrown-away books for people to take. (Lots of publishing people live in this neighborhood so this is common.) The title intrigued me. But disappointment! It is a right-wing rant from a Trump fan who hates anyone less right-wing than Trump. Or maybe he just hates young people. I wonder how he can be a college professor dealing with them. Maybe he needs to quit his job and his sour attitude will improve. He could move to an old-age community like in Florida. Just one example of his idiotic theories about millennials: he says they are shocked that Hillary lost in 2016 because they are not in touch with "real" Americans and he blames them for organizing demonstrations. He says they have bad civics education and so they couldn't accept that Hillary lost. What??!! It was not these people who denied their candidate lost, it was the Trumpies -- plus they invaded the Capitol Building, violently assaulted police, shit and urinated in the hallways, etc. in their most unusual outfits. But the professor is mad about millenials who "could not accept" that Democrats don't win every election. I could give more examples of his hypocrisy and his ignorance, but they are on every page in this dumb book. To call any generation, people born in a decade or more, all dumb is dumb. I would say Mark Bauerlein is the Dumbest College Professor in America. He needs to grow up and study more and stop being such an ignoramus and a hater.

P.S. For an English professor, his writing style is very poor. I am a generous grader and feel pity for students so I give him a D-. Maybe English is not his first language, but still...

[Philemon - · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is flawed on every level. It posits that only an education clinging to a 75-year-old canon can primp and cajole the young into intelligent life. It argues that cultural cohesion depends entirely on the trivial references curated by elites. It mourns the passing of self-styled demigod mentors displaced by the Internet. It bristles at the threat to a Western Civilization that has utterly failed in its most critical and most basic responsibility: preservation of the planet. It winces in stylized horror at the idea of its fusty, decaying tenured academics not being daised, laureled and fawningly sung as our chosen eminences.

The Internet is Protean and readily feeds seekers of knowledge regardless of origin or class. This the self-important simply can't stand.

The literary classics are not the only source of moral exempla.

[Mads · Rating 1 out of 5]

From the synopsis alone, this screamed "I am out of touch and just want to rant about all the things I am afraid of." I mean... come on dude. Referring to twenty-somethings as Millennials isn't even accurate. Most twenty-somethings are Gen-Z, but that's beside the point. If you can't even be arsed to correctly identify the subject of your book, maybe you shouldn't be spewing your bigotry into the void.

I beg all of you to ponder the context of the statistics he provides, because without comparison they truly say nothing. This is all just confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance wrapped up in an angry bow. Just say you're racist, homophobic, and ageist and be done with it.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bauerlein is a caustic writer, and he spares no punishment for the curriculum designers and activists who, he argues, have systematically removed great works from the Western canon. He sets a narrower focus than Haidt and Lukianoff; his thesis is that anxious and rebellious college students have little to no hope of winning moral high ground if they aren’t grounded in the contributions that Western Civ has delivered for twenty-first century living.
The beginning and ending are strongest, where Bauerlein discusses Marcuse and Malcolm X at appropriate length. The middle is repetitive.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

The kid who failed Maths in school, comes back armed with a good knowledge of grammar. And he knows a whole generation is not just stupid, but ”the dumbest”. At first I thought this is satire, but no, the guy is really angry.

[T.]

FT review here: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2...

No prizes for guessing to which age group my think-tank guest belonged: Yes, she was a fellow millennial. Her combination of grandiosity, ignorance, and fragility made her a poster case for the crisis detailed in Mark Bauerlein’s searing new book—less an anti-millennial polemic than a condemnation of parents and teachers, for having failed to transmit anything resembling a cultural inheritance to their sons and daughters.

The Dumbest Generation Grows Up is a follow-up to the author’s 2008 blockbuster, The Dumbest Generation. The earlier work warned that, far from shaping a confident, public-minded, and multi-tasking generation, the distractions and anti-cultural ideology barraging millennials would form a cohort that was narrowly skilled but lacking historical memory and depth of soul, floating aimlessly on digital ephemera.

Millennial boosters greeted this critique with jeers. Demographer Neil Howe wrote an op-ed countering that “generational putdowns, Bauerlein’s included, are typically long on attitude and short on facts.” Here was the latest old fogey to lament “kids these days,” a phenomenon as old as biblical complaints about “this evil generation.” Well, few cultural critics deserve their I-told-you-so victory laps as richly as Bauerlein does. The sequel details just how right he was. ...

Yet it is with millennials’ spiritual lives that Bauerlein is most concerned. As the data also show, millennials are far less likely to enjoy literature, drama, and poetry than are prior generational cohorts. This doesn’t just occasion embarrassment when millennials are called to do intellectual work (witness my think-tank visitor, or the millennial culture site that listed Evelyn Waugh among the greatest female novelists of all time). Their profound illiteracy also means that millennials lack the interior solidity needed to understand others’ motivations, to keep steady amid the topsy-turvy of the market society around them—or even to rebel meaningfully against that society. Contra the typical boomer fears of “radical millennials,” the author suggests, millennials don’t even make good radicals.

[Elliott · Rating 1 out of 5]

“In the hope of keeping him quiet for a few hours Freddy & I have bet Randolph [Churchill] 20 pounds that he cannot read the whole Bible in a fortnight. It would have been worth it at the price. Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud ‘I say, I bet you didn’t know this came in the Bible “bring down my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave”‘ or merely slapping his side & chortling ‘God, isn’t God a shit!’”
-Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford

How do you read this,

“The fifty-year-old English professor had passages of Wordsworth in his head line by line, and he could recite the arguments of all the best scholars on Romantic poetry, but his expertise didn’t apply so much anymore. He assumed that his many years of study and teaching had formed him into a worthy mentor. In truth, they had only conditioned him to old ways of knowing.”

and keep a straight face? Later on Mark will say that us Millennials are too emotional- I can’t help but feel he spent a whole afternoon on that paragraph, turned in, and either jerked himself off into a plaid sock (because you know they’re plaid), or else he cried himself to sleep. I felt like Randolph Churchill reading the Bible for the first time in reading this book.
It all felt like a joke.
What’s more is that I’m an English Major. I read and have read a varied range of works from the classic to the Classical to fluff, speeches, rants, plays, and poems. I’d consider myself conservative as far as literature and literary tastes go (politically I’m of the dreaded Marxist-left that Mark throws out). I have a broad degree of approval for the so-called Western Canon- although I believe that it has room for newer texts, or classic works from other lands. I’ve read the King James Bible. I’m familiar with all these works of art and literature Mark references. Did I respect my teachers, and have elders mentor me? Of course I did. I had a teacher who took me under her wing in high school. She saw the things I was reading for pleasure, took me aside, and told me that she’d give me a perfect score in the class but in exchange she’d give me harder books, harder assignments and grade me more harshly with pointed criticism and provided that I continue to read those sorts of more difficult books and deal with more difficult ideas our agreement would hold- and it did. She encouraged me, as an equal and from this sort of mentor-mentee relationship Mark intimates came ISIS (no, I’m not joking)

“How could I call the Millennials dumb? They had just elected the polished, professorial Barack Obama president. What about the fact that more of them went to college than any other cohort? And all the volunteering and service they were doing? In hundreds of interviews, from CBS News with Katie Couric to BBC’s World Today to NPR, the hosts countered, Wait, doesn’t every aging generation do the “Kids these days!” thing? Well, as I said, we are now fourteen years past that publication date [his previous book The Dumbest Generation] The financial collapse of late 2008 happened, college costs continued to rise and student debt soared, the job market stagnated, ISIS emerged and gruesome killings were broadcast, the Arab Spring rose and fell, Barack Obama won a second term (but race relations seemed to worsen), Black Lives Matter broke out on college campuses, Donald Trump (incredibly) entered the White House, #MeToo sprung up and Harvey Weinstein went down…”

Because, of course, Harvey Weinstein being a rapist is one of the seminal events in recent history…
For every charge that Mark brings he provides an unwitting personal example. Is there something to the decline in literacy rates in the United States? Of course there is. But, in a self survey conducted last year Millennials and Gen-Z had read far more than previous generations. Millennials, in fact, read more than other generations in this study. They also read a fair amount of classic literature compared to Baby Boomers who typically read “thrillers.”
Are the younger generations dumber than previous generations?
Mark’s generation, in part, attempted an insurrection based upon a series of Reddit posts-that besides never coming to pass- claimed that the world was controlled by a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles and that noted philanderer (and accused pedophile) Donald Trump was working to unravel that group’s power. Mark’s generation also tanked the economy by cutting taxes and increasing military spending and then blamed the resultant deficits on PBS, and unions… but, who’s keeping track?
Not Mark.

[Damien A. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sounded interesting. Tried to read twice. He offers inaccurate conclusions based on bias. His thesis is literally based on the opinion of one student as taken to be the only way millennials think and act.

[Hollie Sikes · Rating 1 out of 5]

Had to read this for class so I’ll be damned if it doesn’t count toward my GoodReads goal. Bauerlein has no regard for media of the last 50 years or so (at least), and because of this perceived lack of value (and the assumption that any intelligent person will agree with him) he refuses to study them. Doesn’t matter if you’ve been moved to tears by Maya Angelou, gotten wrapped up in Donna Tartt’s character development, or highlighted full pages of Joan Didion; if you haven’t read Catcher In The Rye, you’re a stupid, woke millennial. Bauerlein builds an argument on generalizations/oversimplifications that are rooted in bias and misunderstanding, and his argument falls apart because of this.

Furthermore, there’s no hope for those evil, misguided millennials, nothing that can be done — the author doesn’t even do us the service of tying up his disjointed commentary with a potential solution or call to action. Hard to understand what the point was beyond a demonstration of how many quotes he knows.

[C.]

I think this author is confused. In the overleaf he keeps saying MILLENNIAL and correlates it with the vague "twenty-something" of 2022 who is "lonely and purposeless, unfulfilled at work and at home." The term that has boxed my generation in (aka the worthless Millennial), is regularly defined as someone born between 1980 and 1994. The youngest of us would then be, hmm, let me do some "stupid person" math: 28. Most of us are in our thirties and hitting 40. So is it REALLY the Millennials that you loathe so strongly, sir?

As a Millennial I can honestly say to you, MR. MARK BAUERLEIN, that I am not lonely, I have a purpose in life, I am fulfilled in my job as a degree holding full-time working professional, and I recently purchased my first home. PUT THAT IN YOUR HATRED PIPE AND SMOKE IT. Stop persecuting an already completely slandered and labeled generation and maybe, I don't know, take a year to rethink your life and why you hate others so much.

[Greg L Goldstein · Rating 2 out of 5]

Author repeats the same thing over... and over... and over, and weakens his argument instead of enhancing it. Petulant and prissy. There are of course good points to be made here, but wow, does he overdo it.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author posits that only the traditional literary canon in college can create critical thinkers with abstract reasoning skills to discern the successes and terrible failures of America and the global society at large. His disdain for Millennials as digital natives and his refusal to acknowledge the inflection point in America's race relations is stupefying. The entire world witnessed the video of a modern day lynching of a black man named George Floyd by a white cop, Derek Chauvin during the beginning of the tragic summer on May 25th in 2020 in our "free" democratic nation. Subsequently, youth from all walks of life protested in the streets of the public square. Contrary to the author's recollection, they were not rioters, as they were exercising their 1st amendment rights. His concern about core knowledge, proficiency in math and reading, screen time limits for children as well as the lack of civics taught in K-12 these days has merit. However, cultural literacy can be achieved in a myriad of ways. Instructional technology can enhance learning and bridge the inequality gap by narrowing the achievement gap in our country with an educated citizenry across racial and social classes among all of our children. His final chapter comparing Malcolm X to Congresswoman AOC also offers a false equivalence fallacy. The federal and state public policies of redlining, public segregation in banking, housing, schools, jobs etc. including the legacy of Brown vs. Board of Education established the inequality that adversely impacts Blacks in America. Professor Bauerlein might consider taking a humanities course in African American History and encourage his fellow Republicans in the state legislatures to stop banning books and true history in America. "The truth will set us free."

[Jason Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book: depressing and hopeless, and an insightful diagnosis of the mental poverty of the Millennial generation. Bauerlein aggressively blames the teachers and mentors of the Millennials for not passing on traditional values, especially the reading of good books. This dumbest generation has not the wisdom to think well. Without a broad and meaning-full education, this generation sees others as one-dimensional sound bites and naively think everyone should and can be happy, regardless of their background or ill-informed choices.

Personally, I benefitted from Bauerline’s chapter on the benefit of good novels. Those get us inside the minds of their complex characters, teaching us that people are a mix of motives, multi-dimensional personalities that should not be labeled right or wrong, pure hero or pure heretic. I have been tempted to do that all too often.

I wish he gave some light, some hope for this lost generation. But he doesn’t see it. My hope and prayer for these unhappy social justices warriors is that they would discover that tearing down the past has left them un-anchored and that there really is something worth fighting for in the traditions we’ve been handed, even if imperfect. As it is, they’ve been schooled to question everything leaving them nothing but the latest leftist dogma to live for.

I think this book ranks up there with The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self as a diagnosis of our current cultural state. Bauerline may be right: there may be minimal hope that reality could crack the social media-reinforced shell around Millennial thinking. But I hope that armed with this better understanding of how they got there, we may be better able to save some.

[Tonya Matheson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a great book. My son was one of the last in his peer group to receive a "smart phone." I questioned the technology and "the educational experts" from the start. After reading this book, I realize I was right. In fact, the very people who invented this technology, greatly limited or outright banned it in their own homes. In addition, this technology has distracted an entire generation and removed the importance in a solid classical education. Millennials haven't read the core books nor studied classical art and music, which gave my generation perspective and a backbone when life didn't quite work out. Instead, the utopian-focused millennials are consulting their peers while their professors are cowering to the most outspoken, for fear of losing their livelihoods. The final chapter mentions Malcolm X. He did not become a respected leader until after he met a gentleman in prison. He noticed this particular prisoner was greatly respected by everyone from his fellow inmates to the prison guards. Malcolm figured out that this man's pursuit of knowledge is what made the difference. Malcolm followed his example. He studied and copied the dictionary by hand. He read everything from the Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzche, W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter Woodson, Will Durant and many other authors. Instead of limiting his repertoire, due to social justice or some other ever-changing standard, he expanded it. If we wish to raise more men and women like Malcolm, we need to delay the technology, limit the hyper focus on the outrageous and pick up a good book.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazone

Bauerlein scores again

Prof. Mark Bauerlein documents the relentless dumbing-down of education in both primary and secondary public schools.

This is the result of the experiments on the children in our public school system by teachers and progressive child psychologists.

Both SAT and ACT scores have been steadily declining since the mid-1960s.

Half of all 30 year olds with a high school diploma cannot read and/or understand a book written for the 8th grade level.

Meanwhile a significant percentage of those who do enter college need remedial education to function at the secondary school freshman level. All while union public school teachers unions protect the incompetent.

Michael O. Willis

.......

An important work for the consequences of social media effects.

This book has some very important points to make. The author points out the reasons behind the dumbing down of the millenial generation.

Sometimes he does go a little bit overboard with a preachy tone of condescension.

He is on point though, on how this generation does not read, does not expect negative outcomes to the point of having a utopian view of all choices but are constantly disappointed by reality.

The case he makes for their lack of reading is telling. Without any knowledge of the classics and the great books of the past, added to their limited social contact makes for a viral mix.

Peter Levine

[Grouchy Editor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today is November 5, 2024, election day, and the nation is holding its collective breath to find out who gets to run the country for the next four years (or more).

I suppose I read "The Dumbest Generation Grows Up" (dumb title) in part to gird myself, because the titular Millennials could well decide whether we get Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. If they do, Bauerlein’s pessimistic book doesn’t give me much hope for the future.

The book, a follow-up to Bauerlein’s 2008 survey of this age group (which I haven’t read), paints an unpleasant picture. Millennials, he writes, were coddled by Boomers and left to their own devices (literally and figuratively) by their mentors — specifically, college professors. The result is millions of young adults who scroll smartphones but know nothing about Shakespeare, Dickens, or Dostoevsky — all of them dead, white males, of course, and therefore unworthy of study.

Bauerlein contrasts this cohort of woke “utopians” with Malcolm X. The latter, he points out, had good reason to find fault with Western Civilization but, rather than simply dismiss it as evil, studied it so that he could make intelligent arguments.

Young people today don’t do that because it’s too difficult.

It’s possible we’ll learn tomorrow how the Millennials voted, and in what kind of numbers. God help all of us. -- grouchyeditor.com

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

When are Millennials going to catch a break? Most of the book, which makes great points, really deals with Gen-Z. Doesn’t the author realize that the oldest of the Millennial generation have entered their 40’s? Yes Gen-Z are overly sensitive, easily triggered, entitled and don’t grasp the concept of satire and irony. They don’t care about anything that didn’t happen outside of their lifespan. And think the sum-total of all history is wrapped up in race. They think socialism is a great idea that should be tried, probably because they have no real clue what that meant for countries that went through socialism, because it didn’t happen in their lifetime. Therefore it is irrelevant. But it’s about time us Boomers and Gen-Xers need to step up and admit we raised this generation. As far as Americans being uninformed and becoming dummer. Well quiz just about any person on the street basic questions on the subject of history, civics, and current affairs and you’ll find a good 80% don’t know much at all. That came about when Americans stopped reading books.

[Dennis R · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a terrific book and it stands alone even though the author's earlier book the Dumbest Generation would be a good starting point. Bauerlien writes with a lyric and intellectual style that is easy to read and conveys a lot of information without becoming a burden. He chronicles the failures of the academy and what he called the mentors to provide the Millennials with background or context of the events they will face as they grow older. Instead those who should have been instrumental in forming a new generation abdicated their responsibilities and have unleashed a generation who will be constantly angry, perpetually at odds, increasingly intolerant, and more and more open to collectivist and tyrannical schemes of government, socialistic economic theory and the pandering of demagogues.
it is not a pretty picture but unfortunately seems to be playing out in the cancel culture and the pronoun police.

[Richard Kaufman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Millennial Question Answered

I knew from working with Millennials that something was missing. They were different than other generations. I am a Baby Boomer. The lack of teaching of the humanities in college and the lack of any real education in Western History explains a lot; from the belief in 50 genders to the denigration of Western historical thought. The final passages sum the book up perfectly and provides a explanation of why the Millennial generation is different than the ones that preceded it.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Society has encouraged young people to abandon reading books for using media. In addition, woke universities have dismantled the Great Books curriculum in favor of a multiculturalist free for all. The result has been a generation with a no interest in going deep and without a usable past. Millennials may be ruined beyond repair, but we can save future generations, and still offer an inclusive education, by schools going back to a canon of great works with additions of high quality multicultural offerings. And these books need to be on paper, not on screens.

[Kevin Stumpf · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book, but I am unable. For me this book could not figure out what it wanted to be? A follow up to The Dumbest Generation? A snapshot of Generation X? An expose on what is wrong with America? I am not sure even Mr. Bauerlein knows.

What I can tell you is that within this book, there is some wonderful insights, and provocative ideas. Yet none of them are brought to fruition and that left me wanting more.

[Robert Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very sad , of course every generation brings unexpected consequences either in direct effect or in efforts to undo it Who can tell? The read is almost tedious at times .The author could spend more time on developing his rejoinder by using more examples from the great books to deconstruct the post moderns.

[Jim Teggelaar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Bauerlein tells the dismal tale of a lost generation, left to its own devices (screens), betrayed and abandoned by its supposed teachers and mentors.

[Allen Roth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sad but true. Read it and weep.

[Mike Lutz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a retired professor of software engineering, so my exposure to what students learn in the humanities and social sciences these days is second hand. However, given that, my observations support Baurelein's analysis. We're raising a generation of ignorant and arrogant numbskulls.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

He’s not wrong at all.
In fact, he’s absolutely right.

He’s just insufferably boring.
What an infinitely tedious slog of a book!

If you’re looking for a book that addresses the same subject matter, but does so in a much more engaging way, then do yourself a favor and read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Lukianoff and Haidt instead.

It’s lightyears better than this excruciatingly torturous and exceedingly repetitive, flatulent monologue.

You can come back and thank me later.

[D. Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well written insightful book that not only updates readers the problems in education and society as described by the original 'Dumbest Generation' by Bauerlein, but this book shows where it was that Alan Bloom was prophetically on target in 'The Closing of the American Mind'.