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The Dumbest Generation?
In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!
Such is the kind of recklessly distracted impatience that makes Mark Bauerlein fear for his country. "As of 2008," the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in "The Dumbest Generation," "the intellectual future of the United States looks dim."
—Lee Drutman on The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein
Comments
(Though, in another sense of the word "prophetic," it definitely is. In other words, the film may not predict our world's future, but it sure pinpoints via hyperbole the state of our world today.)
Much of this sounds to me like pissed off baby boomers and nothing more. Like their Great Depression parents.
It gets salient when scholars like Julia Schor back it up with data. Dumbing down becomes a symptom of privatized corporate marketing. That's where Idiocracy seems dead on in it's dystopian assessment. And it's funny as hell!