It’s Their Fault

I feel bad mentioning this rather unfair takedown of Millennials by a fairly out-of-it college professor, but because of this blog topic, I must…

It’s clearly a half-hearted attention grab by writer and publisher; an idea that seemed good to an editor until, midway through work on the book, he or she realized it was wrong. I’ll let Amazon reviewer Michael A. Males do the rest:

English professor Mark Bauerlein spends 250 pages telling us what America’s young don’t know. Here are some massive trends affecting students over the last 30 to 50 years he doesn’t seem to know: the evolution from elitism toward universal education, the defunding of public education, college tuitions rising four times faster than inflation, erupting student debt, forced deferral of higher education…

Bauerlein’s limited analysis focuses only on the elitist “vertical” accumulation of knowledge (whether the average test taker is smarter today) while ignoring the more important “horizontal” gains (the spread of knowledge to broader segments of the population). If Bauerlein is really concerned about democracy, he should be cheering these egalitarian improvements.

It’s a shame Howard Bloom, whose work I am a big fan of, agreed to blurb this. He’s really lost it. For proof, see here.