A Digital Dumbing Down?

That young man who was in to see me—I was encouraging him in his course for a while, but then I pulled back and said, "You realize, I haven't been saying to you that I hope you go back to Harvard and study real hard and get good grades in your courses." I was taking that for granted. We were talking instead about his Delhi experience and what he might do next summer working in some other nonprofit sector to get to the point where he might be able to do even more remarkable things. And I don't doubt that he will.

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and worked as director of research and analysis for the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.
I would single out the decline of leisure reading as the single most disturbing development. And the reason I would single that out is that it is often underappreciated in the education world. Educators are so fixated on the classroom, on the curriculum, on teachers that I think they underestimate the importance in the past of those leisure activities that complement academic performance. And I'm not talking about reading Moby Dick. I'm talking about reading books like Conan books for boys—any leisure reading that is sustained, that requires concentration beyond a few minutes, and that requires a level of vocabulary acquisition. That is a serious activity, and there we've seen a big drop in the last few years. And I'll add that the reading of text messages, personal profile pages, and blog posts are not nearly an adequate substitute for book reading or the longer newspaper and magazine reading.

Another disturbing sign is the declining attitude—not knowledge here, but attitude—toward historical knowledge. This comes about with the ready availability of historical knowledge online that makes young people think that the memory of the past, the works of the dead, the thoughts and ideas of faraway times and places aren't really something that need to be internalized. They don't need to take those materials as part of their character, their values, their beliefs. It's all just out there as information. It's the conversion of the materials of history into nothing but bits of information. Paradoxically, the ease in obtaining that information makes it so they don't have to take it in as part of themselves.

I am possibly more alarmed about the digital culture than others because I set my alarm in the context of the general discussion of technology and education in this country. And what I see is so much money and momentum behind digitalizing education wherever we can, whenever we can, that we need stronger oppositional voices, stronger skepticism. The enthusiasm expressed in things like the MacArthur Foundation's [$50 million] Digital Media and Learning Initiative and the amount of money that futurists and game theorists receive for their speeches and consultations make it so that it's like a tidal wave. One reason I take a strong position is that I recognize that this is a genuine contest taking place between education and the status of knowledge formation and verbal skills in the classroom. I see technology—without much hardier circumspection about it—as trouble.