Despite its off-putting title, this is a very insightful book.
I had thought that my own generation (late baby boomers) might be the “dumbest,” but Mark Bauerlein, professor emeritus of English at Emory University, argues forcefully that it is millennials, partly because when we became parents my generation naïvely thought that new technologies such as the internet, cell phones, and social media were benign. Bauerlein’s central argument is that millennials were largely left to raise themselves, becoming independent consumers of culture and ideas rather than being raised to understand the accumulated wisdom of the ages.
Inside the classroom, their teachers stopped passing on timeless moral lessons and insights from Socrates, Sophocles, Dante, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Locke, Smith, the Founding Fathers, and the like, and the historical lessons that built modern civilization. Outside the classroom, book time went down, and screen time went up.
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