Bauerlein’s tome is not an elderly screed that complains about kids these days. Bauerlein deftly weaves together personal experience, trenchant observations, and a host of social scientific studies to bolster his claim that the central problem of higher education reflects the fact that we have “cut the young off from a living past,” with the result that they’ve been deprived “of a profound and stabilizing understanding of life, of themselves.”

In his “Parable of the Madman,” Nietzsche, reflecting on the death of God, observes that “this tremendous event is still on its way,” continuing that “deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.” The Madman notes the irony that even though “this deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars,” those responsible remain ignorant that “they have done it themselves.”

They have done it themselves. I think of that line often when I contemplate the state of the next generation (including my own children). It’s not unusual for one generation to complain about the next, but oftentimes our handwringing masks the fact that, deep down, we know we are responsible for the state of things. Part of that is a certain indolence as regards the ways we raise them; part of that is our own inability to be grateful for and appreciate the patrimony we’ve inherited and to know how to pass it on; and a great part of that is a loss of faith and confidence in that patrimony. And so we squander our inheritance rather than enrich it.

Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation Grows Up follows up on his 2008 volume and lets neither generation off the hook. Despite its unfortunate title, Bauerlein’s tome is not an elderly screed that complains about kids these days. Bauerlein deftly weaves together personal experience, trenchant observations, and a host of social scientific studies to bolster his claim that the central problem of higher education reflects the fact that we have “cut the young off from a living past,” with the result that they’ve been deprived “of a profound and stabilizing understanding of life, of themselves.” To make matters worse, we have placed into their hands and their pockets the instruments of such severing. The educational specialists who advocated for doubling down on technology were “false prophets” of what “was never going to be anything but a disaster.”

The young generation is “dumb” not only in the sense that their cultural ignorance is so profound they don’t realize it, but in the second sense that their capacity to speak is muted by their inability to blend their voices with those of the past, in particular the deep and rich sounds of Western arts and letters. Students are thus both dumb and deaf, for neither can they hear the past, the dulcet tones that would remind them of their proper place in the order of things. Here the effect of teachers and mentors themselves giving up on their heritage combined with the distractions offered by electronic gadgets has left students isolated and anxious, precisely because they are no longer part of something. The earbuds are the perfect metaphor for this state: They begin by rendering you temporarily deaf to the outside world and end up making you permanently so. But youth lacks the perspective to see how this might play out 30 or 40 years from now, which makes the abrogation of such knowledge by their elders all the more tragic.

Canon Fire

Political reformers have long understood that they need to know well—indeed, need to know better than the defenders—the tradition against which they set themselves. The canon wars of the 1980s have yielded the predictable outcome: Students from that time period are now standing mute in front of the classroom because they were on the losing end of those wars. Even if these instructors thought it was a good idea to hand on the best of the past, they wouldn’t be able to do so because they themselves are ignorant of it.

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