“With Myspace, Youtube, teen blogs, and Xbox added to Tupac and Brittney, Titanic and Idol, the Internet doubles the deluge of images and sounds from movies, TV, and radio. Lengthy exposure to finer things is the best education in taste, and it’s hard to sustain it when the stuff of pop culture descends so persistently on leisure time. There is no better reprieve from the bombardment than reading a book, popular literature as well as the classics. Books afford young readers a place to slow down and reflect, to find role models, to observe their own turbulent feelings well expressed, or to discover moral convictions missing from their real situations. Habitual readers acquire a better sense of plot and character, an eye for the structure of arguments, and an ear for style, over time recognizing the aesthetic vision of adolescent fare as, precisely, adolescent.”
- Mark Bauerlein in The Dumbest Generation.
I am only two and a half chapters in, but so far this book is terrifying. It shows how people up to the age of thirty are generally so immersed in the low-class pleasures of popular culture and their electronic tools — computers, video games, cable TV sitcoms, iPhones, iPads, etc. — that they never read. In fact, they neglect it to unprecedented levels. And, as a result, test scores are plummeting. These pop culture entertainments are keeping kids from growing up and developing knowledge and they are stunting academic growth; in short, making people in their teens and twenties dumber than ever before, addicted to juvenile pleasures. It’s not just about neglect of books, either. He shows how people no longer go to museums, plays, symphonies, and all other places where the fine arts still exist.
