What Americans Know: The Dumbest Generation

Once in the sixth grade my teacher handed back some reading test that the class did poorly on and told us that if we would spend even half as much time reading a book than we do using a computer, then our performance in the class would greatly improve. A few days later our teacher got a new projector to replace the old one that was broken and he spent a good twenty minutes trying to set it up before he gave up and asked our class if anyone knew how to set it up. One girl stepped forward and in about ten minutes she got the projector working and we were on our way with our lesson. The same adult who indirectly told our class that we weren’t smart because we didn’t read took twice as long trying to set up a projector as a sixth grader did. This is the type of …show more content…
In Mark Bauerlein’s 2008 book The Dumbest Generation he makes the argument that those under the age of thirty are dumb. Since Bauerlein bases the claim off of “the 2007 Pew survey on “What Americans Know: 1989-2007” (Source 1) we can assume that Bauerlein’s definition of smart is what and how much a person knows, based off the title of the survey. That is truly a poor and incomplete definition of what smart is. If this new generation were truly dumb then it wouldn’t make sense that “IQ scores in every country that measures them, including the United States, have been rising since the 1930s’ (Source 2). To be smart not only means to be knowledgeable about certain things, it’s also about how you use that knowledge that makes you smart. Someone can memorize all the facts that they want but that knowledge isn’t going to help them solve a problem that requires critical thinking. I’m certain that many would agree that it would be more helpful to know how to be able to think critically about real life problems than it would be to know the location of “the principal rivers” that were discussed in source