The solution? Be more flexible, mobile, adaptive! High school students bombed NAEP exams (“the Nation’s Report Card”) in U.S. Bill Gates and Margaret Spellings and Barack Obama told Millennials they had to go to college to acquire twenty-first-century skills to get by in the information economy, and the schools went on to jack up tuition, dangle loans, and leave them five years after graduation in the state of early-twentieth-century sharecroppers, the competence they had developed in college and the digital techniques they had learned on their own often proving to be no help in the job market. Instead of heeding the signs, people in positions of authority rationalized them away. Even as the cheerleaders were hailing the advent of digital youth, signs of intellectual harm were multiplying. There should have been many, many more critics. How could the older and wiser ignore the dangers of adolescents’ reading fewer books and logging more screen hours? The following is excerpted and adapted from The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults, out today.Ī dozen years ago, those of us watching with a skeptical eye couldn’t decide which troubled us more: the fifteen-year-olds averaging eight hours of media per day or the adults marveling at them.
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