Essay On The Dumbest Generation

The world today if filled with a vast amount of complex technologies that previous generations did not have access to. This is called the information age, and depending on a person’s viewpoint, it is either proclaimed the greatest revolution in the expansion and distribution of knowledge, or ridiculed for creating a harmful environment with too many distractions. Critics of the information age agree with the latter and have extended that statement to claim that “those under age thirty constitute the “dumbest” generation in modern history” (Source 1). However, those under age thirty are not the dumbest generation; they are merely different than previous generations and adapted to the information age of the world today. The claim of critics such as Bauerlein, who wrote the book …show more content…
This shows that people are becoming more intelligent over time, not less. Why then, is this not reflected in the evidence presented by Bauerlein? The reason, as Begley states later her article, could be that young people care about different information than older generations. She shows that many young people in the 1960s were well informed about politics because it was relevant to whether or not they got drafted, while a smaller number have the same knowledge level because it isn’t relevant to them (Source 2). The general knowledge surveys could easily be biased with questions not relevant to people today. Another point to note is the natural tendency of a person to gain knowledge as they age, so a disparity should logically be present between ages already. Therefore, the two generations have different knowledge bases, and it can be logically be said that the younger generation is no less intelligent, but there is a difference between knowledge needed today and that of older generations not caused by technology, but the natural generation