Username: Literature

Marjorie Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature (Pantheon, 2011).

1.

The first thing Marjorie Garber talks about in The Use and Abuse of Literature is the decline of reading. Or, rather, the first subject that Garber, a Harvard English professor and prolific Shakespearean and cultural studies scholar, seems to address in her book about the current state of “literature” is the general decline in “literary” reading.

That’s a plausible enough topic. After all, if readers of literature are disappearing, then that will surely affect the “use” (and “abuse”) of literature. But it turns out that Garber is not particularly interested in a cultural crisis one of whose symptoms is the decline of reading and, what’s more, right at the outset she commits a sort of scholarly “howler” in the little that she does say about diminished reading habits (I’ll get to the latter in a bit).

Here’s what Garber writes on the first page of her book. At the beginning of the 21st century, she notes, the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts “reported a disturbing drop in the number of Americans who read ‘literary’ works.” She cites the NEA’s 2004 report, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which “showed an alarming decline of reading in all age groups across the country, and especially among 18 to 24-year-olds.” Not only does the NEA report find that less than half of the American population reads literature, and that “reading among persons at every level of education… had declined over the past 20 years,” but that the decline of reading strongly correlates with the diminution of other forms of civic participation, including volunteer work and cultural involvement with the performing arts, and an array of “knowledge deficits” in other fields.

What interests Garber most of all, oddly enough, is not that there’s a big reading problem, but the “idea that fiction/nonfiction should be the determining category” in the findings of the NEA report. She notes that “literature,” for the purposes of the Reading at Risk study, is explicitly defined as including popular genres such as mysteries as well as “literary fiction,” and that “no distinctions were drawn on the quality of literary works.” So, a Harlequin romance or Tolstoy’s War and Peace are equally counted as literature, but not, say, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because it’s a work of nonfiction. Garber agrees with the NEA’s “democratic decision not to judge works on their putative ‘quality’,” since such judgments are notoriously unstable over time. She also understands the desire to make some sort of distinction between categories, but thinks that “the decision to exclude ‘nonfiction’… does seem to undercut a little the message” that, as the report itself puts it, “anyone who loves literature… will respond to this report with grave concern.” Or, as the NEA chairman Dana Gioia declared, the findings are an indication of a “national crisis” that reflects “a general collapse in advanced literacy,” and a loss that “impoverishes both cultural and civic life.”

Rather than expressing some alarm about this “national crisis,” Garber simply goes on in the next and succeeding sections of her introduction to discuss the ambiguous and historically determined ways in which the term “literature” has been and is used to describe everything from high quality writing to the instructions that come along with your package of pills in the drugstore. The central aim of her book, she declares, is “to argue for… the ‘uses’ of reading and literature, not as an instrument of moral or cultural control, nor yet as an infusion of ‘pleasure,’ but rather as a way of thinking.” This “radical reorientation” of “what it means to read, and to read literature… is the only way to return literature to the center, rather than the periphery, of personal, educational, and professional life.” I’ll come back  to these portentous intentions shortly. For now, I’m simply puzzled about how you put literature back in the centre of life if people are not reading.

Amazingly, Garber’s commentary on the decline of reading in the first pages of her book is also the last time she mentions the subject. There’s not another word in the following 300 pages about whether people are reading or not and whether that means anything. Instead, Garber is primarily interested in the use of the term “literature,” which is separated from nonfiction in that NEA report on reading. This is like witnessing a terrible auto accident and, instead of being concerned about the injured victims, focusing on, I don’t know, whether it was a hybrid or an electric-powered vehicle in the crash. Garber’s perspective seems inexplicably off-kilter.

While reading Garber’s book, I happened to hear a radio interview with her on a program called “Bookworm,” hosted by Michael Silverblatt. The conversation began with Silverblatt attempting to empathise with how tough the current situation in teaching must be. “My impression is,” he said, “that it’s become very difficult to teach literature in college, that people from high schools come unprepared to read, and that English [enrollment] numbers have reached colossal, all-time lows.” Not at all, replied Garber, “I don’t think it is difficult to teach English… the students are uniformly enthusiastic and they actually know a great deal and want to know more.” As for the declining number of humanities students, well, that’s a situation influenced by external social factors not germane to the discussion. So, in Garber’s view, no problem at all. Everything’s just hunky-dory in academia and, she assures us, she’s not just talking about those carefully-filtered $50,000-a-year tuition-paying Harvard students. (Gee, I hope I can wangle a faculty exchange with Garber so she can get a chance to meet my students, who are sometimes slightly less than “uniformly enthusiastic,” and who don’t always give many signs of knowing “a great deal.”) Having heard Garber live-and-unplugged, I was a little less surprised by her myopia about the reading crisis, as evidenced at the opening of her book.

However, I remain astonished by what strikes me as a significant scholarly blooper. Since the point of Garber’s opening riff is that the 2004 NEA report used only “literature” (however skewed the definition) to measure reading habits, you’d think it would be professionally incumbent upon her to let readers know that there’s a subsequent 2007 NEA report, To Read or Not To Read. (You’d also think that the Shakespearean allusion in the report’s title would have caught the eye of the author of Shakespeare After All.) As the NEA press release (Nov. 19, 2007) explains, “To Read or Not To Read expands the investigation of the NEA’s landmark 2004 report, Reading at Risk. While that report focused mainly on literary reading trends, To Read or Not To Read looks at all varieties of reading, including fiction and nonfiction genres in various formats such as books, magazines, and online reading.”

Get it? The 2007 report is about all reading, not about “literature,” or historical variables in category definitions, or anything else. And then come the report’s dismal findings, which I won’t reprise except to note that they’re more dismal than the findings in the earlier report. (The whole report is available online. Just google “decline of reading” or “NEA.”) The point is: “Americans are reading less”; “Americans are reading less well”; and “the declines in reading” correlate to (but aren’t necessarily the cause of) deficiencies in a range of civic, social, and economic matters. (I should mention, as a matter of scholarly niceties, that there was also a 2009 NEA mini-report that recorded a mysterious uptick in reading, but not such a huge increase as to write home or send a tweet about. Maybe it was the Harry Potter fad that caused it.) The findings in the NEA reports also form the basis of Mark Bauerlein’s book, The Dumbest Generation (2008). Bauerlein is an Emory University English professor who was directly involved in the NEA research. That Garber doesn’t mention (or is unaware of) the subsequent NEA reports or Bauerlein’s book is, to put it mildly, intellectually disturbing.

You would think that someone in the editorial rooms of Garber’s publisher would have said to her something like, “Yo, Marj” (or however they address her), “you’re sweeping the floor with the wrong end of the broom.” Or that someone would have pointed out the glaring absence of relevant materials in her opening pages about the decline of reading (or whatever her opening pages are actually about). But no one did.

Maybe that’s because the people in the editorial rooms were too busy writing jacket copy bumpf for Garber’s book. Although Garber of course isn’t responsible for the puffery, this book jacket copy is so remarkably inflated as to merit notice. Here’s how it begins: “As defining as Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education were to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively, Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature is to our times.” I immodestly note that Bloom’s and D’Souza’s reactionary books were not the defining books of my 1980s and 1990s, but let’s not quibble. In a genre (book jacket copy writing) notorious for hyperbole, this is hype beyond the call of advertising. I’m here to assure you that Garber’s book is not, as far as I can tell, “decade-defining,” though some of its observations about the use of “use,” the “canon,” or the quarrel about what is and isn’t literature are perfectly interesting, albeit in a minor key.

We know that the copywriters got as far as the first page of Garber’s book: “Even as the decline of reading… proceeds in our culture, Garber (‘One of the most powerful women in the academic world’ – The New York Times) gives us a deep and engaging meditation on… “ etc.  I hope you like the parenthetical endorsement from the NYT of Garber’s commanding powerpoint status in the groves of academe. In any case, “The Use and Abuse of Literature is a tour de force about culture in crisis that…” Can I skip the “brio, panache, and erudition lightly carried”? Thanks.

2.

If you find my mild-mannered comments about Garber’s book too tame for your tastes, then I recommend William Deresiewicz. Writing in Slate about The Use and Abuse of Literature, he begins, “Marjorie Garber’s new book brought me back to my days as an English professor; I thought I was reading a freshman essay.” Ouch! “My marginal comments” says the professor emeritus, “might as well have been written in red: ‘What is the point of this paragraph?’ ‘Where are we in the argument – and what exactly is the argument?’ ‘Sloppy thinking.’”, und so weiter (as they say in German when they don’t want to say, “Etc.”).  Though Garber’s book “purports to be a rallying cry for serious reading,” “once you pick your way through its heap of critical detritus – its mildewed commonplaces and shot-springed arguments, its half-chewed digressions and butt ends of academic cliché – you uncover underneath it all a single dubious and self-serving claim: that the central actor in the literary process is, what do you know, the English professor.” (William Deresiewicz, “The Right Questions To Ask About Literature,” Slate, Apr. 4, 2011.)

Deresiewicz is underwhelmed by Garber’s handling of “the ancient question of pleasure vs. use. Is literature valuable because it feels good or because it’s good for you?” Garber’s answer, at noted above, is neither. Rather literature is valuable as “a way of thinking.” Deresiewicz rolls his eyes. “The argument is both remarkable and banal.” Banal, he says, because the “self-enclosure” of literature “has been a commonplace of theory since the New Criticism of the 1930s” – “close reading,” and all that. The argument is remarkable “because it cuts literature off from the very thing it most obviously wants to connect to: the world.” The answer to the use-pleasure conundrum “is not neither, but both.” Literature is “useful,” says Deresiewicz, “because it wakes us up from the sleepwalk of self-involvement… and shows us the world, shows us ourselves, shows us life and experience and the reality of other people, and forces us to think about them all… Pleasure is use, use pleasure.” Didn’t Keats once say something similar about “beauty” and “truth”?

Garber’s repeated insistence on “the way something means rather than what it means” strikes Deresiewicz as “equally false.” He modestly counters that “form” and “meaning,” the “what” and the “way” are inextricably interrelated. It was ever thus. As for the “old warhorse” question, “What is literature?”, he notes that Garber says it’s not the right question. “A better question,” she says, “might be ‘Is it responsive to literary reading?’ Are these texts… ones of which… a critic can usefully ask literary questions?” Snorts Deresiewicz, “The critic, again, at the center of the enterprise.” He, too, thinks “Is it literature?” is the wrong question, “but the right one is, ‘Is it good?’”

Okay, okay, I’ll stop. Like Borges’ Pierre Menard “re-writing” Don Quixote word for word, there’s a tempation to quote the whole of Deresiewicz’s uncompromising critique, or at least to insist you google up the link. Because if there’s any tour de force going on around here, it’s not in Garber’s book, but in Deresiewicz’s review. I cite it at length because it’s so rare these days to find a critical piece that doesn’t indulge in what I think of as thumb-on-the-scale style reviewing; i.e., don’t say anything too harsh, we don’t want to bring down the fragile edifice of (already declining) reading. In any case, if Garber’s Use is one of those books that makes you ask, about 150 pages in, What the heck is this book about?, Deresiewicz leaves us with no doubt about what he’s thinking.

3.

I’ll keep the sermon short: There are books that say important things about reading and writing. There are even some books that face up to the decline of reading and the current forms of cultural impoverishment. Garber’s book is not one of them. Is there anything worth reading that does something interesting with these topics? How about, just to think of the ancient past for a moment, Jean-Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1949), or more immediately, David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010)?  These, at least, are books that take seriously both writing and the world. They implicitly understand the poet Charles Olson’s “useful” battlecry, “Art is life’s only twin.”

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2387 words, Berlin, June 25, 2011.

Is Mark Kingwell Getting Dumber?

University of Toronto philosophy professor Mark Kingwell was sitting in his office last week. It was the end of term, graduation time at post-secondary institutions across the country and he was thinking about how perople at this time of year are always asking him, “Are the kids getting dumber? Can they even write?”

The media-ubiquitous philosopher suddenly had an inspiration for a clever op-ed squib that he could dash off and post to the Globe and Mail’s opinion pages. Kingwell’s thinking went something like this: people are always dopily worrying about whether the kids are getting dumber. Rather than argue the question, how about cleverly challenging it instead? Instead of worrying about kids getting dumber, maybe we should be worrying about whether we’ve become too smart for our own good by our over-emphasis on smarts and intelligence.

After all, smartness, whether of the book larnin’ or tech twittering variety, not only ensures human survival, it also produces problems. Problems like “environmental degradation, weapons of mass destruction, hedge funds, sophisticated forms of torture and the justification thereof.” Perhaps the net good effects of intelligence are being outweighed by the bad. What if we’ve made a cultural evolutionary mistake by emphasising smart over dumb, and thus reducing our chances of survival?

Then, still in his inspired state, Kingwell recalled Jonathan Swift’s satiric pamphlet of 1729, “A Modest Proposal,” in which the ironic Dean Swift proposed that a lot of problems could be solved in Ireland by eating Irish children as an upscale food delicacy. Swift was protesting England’s oppression of Ireland, and the empire’s creation of conditions of overpopulation and poverty such that a savage “modest proposal” of eating children might be amusingly but chillingly plausible for a moment. Swift was also sending up the can-do climate of the times in which over-clever bureaucrats and consultants regularly came up with preposterous but perfectly logical schemes.

So, Kingwell amused himself by coming up with a “modest proposal” of his own. Instead of “selecting” for smartness, maybe we could solve our problems by selecting for dumbness, and thus produce a generation of young people who wouldn’t be smart enough to think up “smart” bombs, SUVs, tar sands oil, “American Idol,” and the like. Perhaps, he suggested, tongue in cheek, “we will breed our way out of this mess and back into a simpler age.” Then, when Kingwell’s academic successors are asked if the kids are getting dumber, they can enthusiastically reply, “Yes. It’s working.” We’re making them dumber.

Kingwell’s modest proposal, under the heading, “Too Smart for our Own Good” duly appeared in the op-ed pages and screens of our national newspaper (May 29, 2009). Perfectly harmless, mildly amusing filler for a readership wondering if, in The Who’s legendary phrase, “The Kids Are Alright.” Except for one tiny, little problem.

Before Kingwell can get to his humour-piece punchline, he has to dispose of the questions at the top of his piece: “Are the kids getting dumber? Can they even write?” You notice that Kingwell has put a little blurriness into the question by asking two questions. What’s more, they may not be equivalent.

One way to get rid of the question is to say it’s unanswerable, and probably irrelevant, like arguing about the designated hitter rule in baseball. “The answer says more about you than about the state of play,” says Kingwell. “Answer yes and you brand yourself a bookish curmudgeon, a fogey no matter what your age. Answer no and you align with new cognitive models, social networking websites, early gadget adoption and freewheeling music download. In other words, it’s cool versus uncool.” See? No real question there at all.

In fact, according to Kingwell, “the more you look, the more it becomes clear that the dispute is about apples and oranges. If smart means clear writing, linear thought and sustained self-organization, then yes, those skills are in short supply; if it means quick-witted talent for hyperlinking, multitasking and other compound gerunds of the screen age, then no, there is no evidence of cognitive deficit — on the contrary.” Since the argument is unresolvable, “this is the point where the dispute typically hares off into a hand wringing discussion of what universities are for and whether they’re any good at doing whatever that is. Socialization machine or crucible of citizenship? Job training centre or gateway to wisdom?” Since those hand wringing questions are also hopeless, “let’s ask a different question: What is intelligence for?”

With that, Kingwell is off the hook and also off to a bit of fun with modest proposals.

Alas, it’s all too-clever-by-half, even for a prof with time on his hands while waiting for this year’s grads to adjust their robes, flip the tassels on their mortarboard hats, and get in step for the first strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.” Since he noted in his brush off of the are-the-kids-getting-dumber question that “there are even duelling books on the subject,” he might have spent his time more usefully and less glibly by looking at them once more.

The “duelling books” Kingwell is referring to but doesn’t name are Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation (2008), Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason (2008), Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values (2007) versus business and education consultant Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital (2008), an update of his 1999 book, Growing Up Digital. (By the by, Tapscott’s titles, wittingly or not, play on Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, 1960, an education book about how the conditions of American society then were making it particularly difficult for young people to know anything or to do meaningful work.)

If you read, say, Bauerlein’s account of the present generation, you learn that reading, especially book reading, is in decline, and that there are substantial knowledge deficits when it comes to knowing about history, geography, civics, and just about everything else except the trivia of youth culture and celebrity gossip. Despite the title of the book, Bauerlein doesn’t deal with whether young people are becoming “dumber.” Rather, he shows that they’re not becoming measurably more knowledgeable, despite the available high-tech accoutrements. In fact, the use of the word “dumb” is misleading, both in the title of Bauerlein’s book and in Kingwell’s question. The word that should be used is “ignorant.” Kids (and lots of adults) are ignorant of history, geography, civics, etc., and one of the tools by which they might remedy that ignorance, book reading, is in declining usage.

The question is not do we over- or under-value intelligence but, What should we know? Which leads to the question, What should we know in order to do what? Which leads to the further question, What are universities for? Though Kingwell wants to throw up his hands rather than wring them, I think the question remains, and that it’s not hopeless.

Rather than ragging poor Professor Kingwell, who is after all just trying to get out of the office and onto summer holidays, let me answer the questions. If we want a democratic society in which people are capable of critical thought, are cultured, and are citizens, then we want to dispel young people’s ignorance about history, geography, civics, science, art, literature and book-reading and, yes, we also want them to learn some things that will help them get jobs. These are not unanswerable questions, though there’s no denying that they’re debatable.

But they’re on the net, reply the techno proponents, such as Tapscott, when faced with claims of ignorance. Yes, young people (and older ones, too) are on the net, but the evidence suggests that most of their net time is twittered away on social networking sites, music downloading, YouTubing, porn(ing), and buying and selling, frequently all at once (the famous “multitasking”). The facts, as best we can know them, are in Bauerlein’s, Jacoby’s and Keen’s books. The picture is not all black and white, and some of the claims about knowledge deficits, unreason, and the destruction of society are overblown, and overhyped. But while there may be “duelling books,” we might also remember that not all duels end in a draw. Some of the books are better than others.

As for “smarts,” and “intelligence,” pace Kingwell, it shouldn’t mean merely “clear writing, linear thought and sustained self-organization” (whatever the latter murky phrase means), nor should it mean “quick-witted talent for hyperlinking” and “multitasking.” The problem is not “intelligence”; there’s a sufficient amount of whatever it really is to go around, simply by virtue of the kind of evolutionary animal we are. The question is development of intelligence, and to discuss that you can’t divorce the content of a developed intelligence from its techniques. The content of a developed intelligence brings us back to the questions of, What do we need to know, for what purposes, and thus, how should we organize our educations?

Professor Kingwell needs some summer beach time. As for the kids, while The Who thought they were alright, their successors, The Offspring, argue in their counter-tune that “The Kids Aren’t Alright,” and they lament, “Chances blown, nothing’s free.” As for the rest of us, whether fearful of being tagged fogeys or not, we had better figure out what to do to dispel ignorance, or else Kingwell’s modest proposal will become more than a tongue-in-cheek quip at graduation time.

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Berlin, May 31, 2009

How Dumb Can You Get?

Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future [Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30] (Tarcher/Penguin, 264 pages, $27.50, 2008)

I’m a feet-on-the-ground kind of guy, so I seldom have visions. But a year or so ago, while I was in the library of the little university where I teach, something odd happened. At first, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Downstairs, the students were busily at the computer terminals, looking up stuff on Wikipedia or checking their Facebook “wall” or doing whatever it is students do on the library computers.

I went upstairs to the stacks, where the library’s collection of books is housed, and where, off to the side, are the carrels, filled with students in various states of study and/or slumber. Clutching the slip of paper on which I’d scribbled the call number of a book that I was looking for–a book written in the 1930s by literary scholar Edmund Wilson–I slipped into the forest-like rows of bookshelves. Maybe it was the odd silence that engulfed me as I browsed in the stacks, or maybe it was something else, but a moment or two later when I arrived at the shelf where Edmund Wilson’s books are kept and reached up for the one I wanted, I was hit by a multiple realization.

First, I was the only person browsing in the stacks. There were lots of people around, but none of them was browsing in the book stacks. I was all alone in the forest of books. Second, it became clear to me why, whenever I looked for a book in the school library, it was almost always there: because the students seldom took out books to read. The collection was pretty much intact. Finally, as I began glancing at the spines of the books on the nearby shelves, which often included the year of their publication, I realized that very few of the books there had been published or purchased in the last ten years. That’s because the library, I immediately understood, had bought very few books in recent years. Obviously, the “acquisitions budget,” as it’s called, had been diverted to buy the computers.

That’s when I had my little vision. The spines of the books, instead of reminding me of trees in a forest, as they often do, suddenly began to look like tombstones. Each date on a book spine recorded the death of a book. I was standing in the middle of The Dead Library. Book readng was over.

The vision lasted about five or ten seconds. Then I snapped back to my ordinary pedestrian existence, skipped down the stairs, passed the students crowded around the computer terminals, checked out my book at the checkout counter, and went off to read a few pages of Edmund Wilson.

The library is still a fairly busy place, filled with students and librarians and computers and places to study, but the students cheerfully ignore the collection. The Dead Library is up there, silent, like an unexplored forest or an unvisited old graveyard.

Like most visions, my vision of The Dead Library isn’t exactly true. There are still book readers, and books are still being borrowed from school libraries. But I notice that Mark Bauerlein, in his new book, The Dumbest Generation, has also noticed this moment of biblio-desolation. “At every university library I’ve entered in recent years,” says Bauerlein, who’s a professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, “a cheery or intent sophomore sits at each computer station rapping out emails in a machine-gun rhythm. Upstairs, the stacks stand deserted and silent,” he adds, reassuring me that I’m not just imagining things.

In a front cover book-jacket blurb, the prominent literary scholar Harold Bloom–who is sort of the Edmund Wilson of the present generation–rightly calls Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation “an urgent… book on the very dark topic of the virtual end of reading among the young.” That’s true. But there’s more.

Bauerlein suggests that young people are suffering not only a decline in reading, but also significant “knowledge deficits” about history, geography, science and art, and an ignorance of civic life that poses a threat to democratic society. However, if Bauerlein accurately alerts us to an important problem, it’s equally the case that his Dumbest Generation is a polemic that suffers from serious defects (which I’ll get to in a moment).

When he isn’t being an English prof, Bauerlein works in research and analysis for the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). He’s a report writer and reader, quite a good one, and in The Dumbest Generation he provides a painstaking and persuasive summation of a raft of recent reports. The reports reveal that young people in the U.S. have more schooling, more disposable income, more leisure time and more access to news and information than at any time in the recent past. What do they do with all that time and money? They download, upload, post, chat, and network (9 of their top 10 sites are for social networking), and they watch television and play video games 2 to 4 hours per day.

What don’t they do? They don’t read, even online, and two-thirds of them are not proficient in reading. They don’t follow or engage in politics, notwithstanding the hopeful Obama-boom/blip among the young; they don’t vote regularly (nearly half of them can’t comprehend a ballot); and they can’t find Iraq on a map. They know who the current “American Idol” is, but they’ve no idea that Nancy Pelosi is the first woman speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Bauerlein’s book intentionally doesn’t attempt to assess behaviours and values of under-30-year-olds. “It sticks to one thing,” Bauerlein says, “the intellectual condition of young Americans, and describes it with empirical evidence, recording something… insidious happening inside their heads.” It charts, he says, “a consistent and perilous momentum downward.”

Bauerlein is aware that his pessimistic findings may be dismissed “as yet another curmudgeonly riff. Older people have complained forever about the derelictions of youth, and the ‘old fogy’ tag puts them on the defensive.”

But the 49-year-old Bauerlein insists that the facts are the facts. Despite the “Information Age,” the “Digital Revolution,” and all the other slogans about access to knowledge, “young Americans today are no more learned or skillful than their predecessors, no more knowledgeable, fluent, up-to-date or inquisitive, except in the material of youth culture.” The last is a point Bauerlein reiterates throughout his book. What the young are knowledgeable about is confined to their own rather narrow, narcissistic milieu.

Further, “they don’t know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events. They read less on their own, both books and newspapers, and you would have to canvas a lot of college English instructors and employers before you found one who said they compose better paragraphs.” The wellsprings of knowledge are everywhere, “but the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, pictures, tunes and texts back and forth, living off the thrill of peer attention.”

Bauerlein documents this ignorance in the desert by examining a dozen or more recent, major, reputable, mass surveys of the intellectual condition of young people, including one he directed for the NEA. The whole story is almost too depressing, so just a sampler:

“On the 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress history exam, the majority of high school seniors, 57 per cent, scored ‘below basic.’” That’s a polite way of saying they failed. “Only 1 per cent reached ‘advanced.’ … Two-thirds of high school seniors couldn’t explain a photo of a theatre whose portal reads ‘Colored Entrance.’”

In a 2003  National Conference of State Legislatures citizenship study, “While 64 per cent knew the name of the latest ‘American Idol,’ only 10 per cent could identify the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.” Less than half knew which party controlled the American Congress; a 2004 National Election Study found that barely over a quarter could correctly identify the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; a 2006 Pew Research report learned that only a quarter of 18-29-year-olds knew that Condoleezza Rice was U.S. secretary of state while a mere 15 per cent knew that Vladimir Putin was the president of Russia.

And so it goes, in every field surveyed, from math and science, to fine arts participation to geography, where the 2006 Geographic Literacy Survey found that 63 per cent of test takers “could not identify Iraq on a map.” Maybe that’s why GPS devices are a hot shopping item. But marketing aside, not only is there a knowledge deficit. When you ask the young to interpret some bit of the world in terms of what it means, things only get worse.

Beyond Bauerlein’s discussion of “Knowledge Deficits,” his chapters on “The New Bibliophobes,” “Screen Time,” and”Online Learning and Non-Learning,” make what amounts to a pretty irrefutable case about what is and isn’t on the minds of the present generation. If you aren’t convinced by the tidbits presented here, you’re invited to check out the text itself.

The standard rebuttal of Bauerlein’s case, which usually appears under a rock-song heading that declares “The Kids Are Alright,” claims that while book reading may have, well, changed, the young are reading more than ever, via the Internet. One review of The Dumbest Generation published by Canada’s most influential book review section, The Globe and Mail (“Are the kids all right? Depends upon whom you ask,” July 19, 2008), is a case in point.

The reviewer, Don Tapscott, chairman of nGenera Insight (a business consulting firm) and the author of a forthcoming tract, Grown Up Digital, claims that the young are “reading plenty of non-fiction on the Internet,” which, he assures us, “can be just as intellectually challenging as reading a book.” Well, if they were reading an article from the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or any of a dozen first rate magazines and newspapers available online, that might be true. But as Bauerlein documents, that’s not what they’re reading. They’re reading each other’s post-it notes on Facebook, and viewing pop star gossip on YouTube (or YouPorn or PornTube). Predictably, the deniers and would-be refuters of Bauerlein’s thesis have little to offer beyond bromides about the wonders of technology.

The problem is not with Bauerlein’s “empirical” account of the decline of reading and much else. That rings true, at least to quite a few of us in the teaching profession. What doesn’t ring true is the book’s “packaging,” its skewed explanation of the source of the deficit in reading, knowledge and civics, and ultimately, its sense of the big picture.

The first problem, which may be caused by Bauerlein’s publisher rather than by Bauerlein himself, is the over-hyped packaging of the book. Calling the book The Dumbest Generation, a phrase plucked rather out-of-context from Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), a satirical novel about the excesses of “political correctness” in the 1990s,  simply invites pointless challenges. Since Bauerlein isn’t offering an in-depth historical account of knowledge levels over several generations, or even any comparisons with other cultures, the use of “dumbest” is needlessly provocative. And while Bauerlein makes clear in his text that he’s using “dumb” to mean “ignorant” rather than “stupid,” it’s bound to cause confusion of the “who-are-you-calling-stupid?” variety.

To make matters worse, there’s a glibly earnest sub-title, “How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future” that also over-hypes the problem, and sounds like a publicity department’s efforts to make sure that all the right hot-buttons are pressed. And just in case potential readers still don’t get it, there’s even a sub-sub-title, “Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30,” a play on a 1960s over-the-top admonition about not trusting people over 30. I guess it wouldn’t have been sexy enough to more modestly call the book An Ignorant Generation: The Decline of Reading, Knowledge, and Citizenship Among Young People Today.

A far more serious defect mars the book when Bauerlein departs from his sound empirical findings and attempts to identify the source of the present decline. In the latter third of the book, under chapters headed “The Betrayal of the Mentors” (a play on the title of Julian Benda’s 1920s critique, The Treason of the Intellectuals), and “No More Cultural Warriors,” Bauerlein decides that the decline of reading was initiated by the youth culture of the 1960s, and especially by the “indulgence” of their mentors, who should have known better.

“Spend some hours in school zones,” Bauerlein advises, “and you see that the indulgent attitude toward youth, along with the downplaying of tradition, has reached the point of dogma.” Adds Bauerlein, “Like so many dominant cultural attitudes today, the final ennobling of youth motives and attribution of youth authenticity derive from the revolutionary heat of the 1960s.” Soon, we’re into a full-blown case of “blaming it on the ‘60s,” as Susan Jacoby calls this particular affliction in her recent book, The Age of American Unreason (2008).

“The benighted mental condition of American youth today,” Bauerlein tells us, “results from many causes, but one of them is precisely a particular culture-war outcome, the war over the status of youth fought four decades ago. From roughly 1955 to 1975, youth movements waged culture warfare… and the mentors who should have fought back surrendered.” Bauerlein’s portrait of the 1960s is simplistic, shallow, and skewed beyond caricature. In his version of the 1960s there’s no civil rights movement, no resistance to an American imperialist war in Vietnam, no feminist or gay movements, no birth of modern environmentalism. There’s barely a Bob Dylan song blowin’ in the wind.

Not only is this a shabby intellectual account, it also thoroughly vitiates a lot of the hard work Bauerlein has done in empirically demonstrating the decline of reading and knowledge. It isn’t at all clear why Bauerlein doesn’t blame the obvious culprits: the present-day manufacturers and advertisers of devices and especially trivial content who relentlessly push their wares upon young customers, and convince them that it’s cool.

Isn’t the aggressive marketing of the panoply of digital distractions something like the recent Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) fiasco? There, manufacturers and advertisers created a “need” for SUVs where none existed, and in North America brainwashed half the driving public into purchasing gas-guzzling, unsafe, “off-road” vehicles that 90 per cent of them weren’t going to drive off-road, unless you count the Wal-Mart parking lot as an off-road adventure.

No, it’s not the makers of Grand Theft Auto or the latest Batman superhero entertainment who are responsible for the dumbing down of the young, it’s a band of youthful radicals from a half-century ago, according to Bauerlein.

Bauerlein conveys almost no sense of the market-driven, mindless–okay, let’s say it–capitalist, cultural context driving the present era. There’s good data, but no big picture. Lately, when I review books that delineate contemporary social problems, readers often say that they get it, but then go on to ask that famous political question, “What is to be done?”

Bauerlein doesn’t attempt to discuss any solutions, apart from a few handwaving gestures. In a sense, the answers are obvious: to reverse the decline in reading, knowledge, and democracy, we have to overthrow capitalist culture, and much of capitalism. In an equally obvious sense, the problem is too big: nobody knows how to overthrow, transform, or even slightly change globalized capitalism and its cultural productions. People who are asking, “What is to be done?” are asking for a comprehensive political program, and those of us who have read history know how often “total” programs have turned into “totalitarian” regimes. For the moment, perhaps the most we can hope for is Obama’s “change we can believe in.”

And, of course, when the teaching season starts up again next month, I’ll try to persuade my students to enter The Dead Library and discover that it’s a living, magic forest.

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Vancouver, Aug. 12, 2008. Stan Persky teaches philosophy at Capilano University in North Vancouver, B.C. He’s the author of Topic Sentence: A Writer’s Education (2007).