If you are under 30, stop skimming this and go read it. The book is called The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30, by Mark Bauerlein. I like the title just because of how annoyingly long it is; you know everyone stops reading it once they’ve read the first three words. Also, the title of this blog post is funny.
If you’re still reading this, then I guess I’ll explain why you should stop right now and go buy that book. Firstly, I’m going to say that it was an extremely validating book, because it eloquently examines, with scientific backing, the same material that I myself focus on in my nonfiction writing (see: this blog). Basically, this blog is a lot like the book, but with almost nothing listed to back it up besides my own ego, and is much less hateful than my rants. However, about halfway through (starting with a chapter called “Online Learning and Non-Learning”) Mark suddenly gets a lot more biting with his remarks, much more flippant with his tone. I like that a lot. It excited me. Before this, you spend over a hundred pages going over statistics on literacy and intelligence aptitude testing scores and how they have changed over the last half-century. While this is interesting, and it certainly lays a foundation of scientific and statistical inquiry, it gets kind of dry. But dear reader, persevere through it, because once you get to the asshole side of Mark, there’s no end to the roller-coaster of awesome.
The latter half of the book is full of amazing quotes and themes, of which I’m not going to cover all here, but I’ll go over my favorites. (Oh god there’s so much text below this, I’m sure all of you people under 30 are going to have heart problems, but please try and wade through it. This information is vital.)