Bookshelf: Screening is making us dumber and dumber, says David Robinson in review of Mark Bauerlein's book THE DUMBEST GENERATION

Bookshelf

Can U Read Kant?

By DAVID ROBINSON

May 13, 3008

It would seem that technology and culture both make the present a good time to be young. The digital tools that are reshaping our economy make more sense to young "digital natives" than to members of older generation, an imbalance of abilities that tips the economic and political scales in favor of young people. Meanwhile, aging boomer parents, rather than pass down a fixed, canonical culture to their kids, encourage a modern-day version of their own rebellion, inviting younger voices to disrupt stodgy cultural continuities.

To Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, the present is a good time to be young only if you don't mind a tendency toward empty-headedness. In "The Dumbest Generation," he argues that cultural and technological forces, far from opening up an exciting new world of learning and thinking, have conspired to create a level of public ignorance so high as to threaten our democracy.

So: is screening good or bad?