Mark Bauerlin The Dumbest Generation

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Elsa Barthel Mr. Campbell AP Language and Composition 3 March 2024 Synthesis Term Paper What if someone told you that they think your children- born, unborn, doesn’t matter- are 100% stupid because they’re part of a ‘dumb generation’? Such a remark is so sweeping and inconsiderate that it almost seems untrue. Nonetheless, Mark Bauerlin made such a statement; he claims that those under thirty are “the dumbest generation” because of their lack of ‘in-the-know-ness’. However, Bauerlin fails to recognize that today’s youth are more capable than past generations, and they’re using the multitudes of resources at their hands to develop new forms of intelligence at rates never before seen. Mark Bauerlin claims knowledge and intellectual habits have …show more content…

He backs this with a 2007 Pew research survey on ‘What Americans Know’: “56 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds possessed low knowledge levels, while only 22 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds did” (167). Bauerlin’s evidence is overly numeric to the point of confusion, a tactic known as the Snow Job fallacy, where the author attempts to confuse their audience into belief. Bauerlin uses numerical evidence to overwhelm his audience into agreeing with him. Once they take a closer look, they’ll see his statistics are lacking: the idea that youth possess ‘low knowledge levels’ is not a substantive statement because the audience doesn’t know what constitutes ‘low knowledge’. Therefore, his evidence is insufficient to label a whole generation as dumb. Unlike Bauerlin’s definition of intelligence, Begley’s definition leaves room for an evolved and deep insight into intellect. Begley describes intelligence as ‘the ability to think critically and logically, to analyze an argument, to learn and remember’ and qualifies this statement with the fact that since the 1930s, IQ scores have been rising on average …show more content…

Only through video games can one rerun the same situation and figure out the intimate details of the program progress. Tech has allowed for the evolution of skills that were not available to previous generations. These ideas were not seen in the world before the development of this kind of tech, meaning young people are developing problem-solving skills at faster rates than their grandparents were able to. Although technology has provided opportunities for new ways of learning, researchers still maintain concerns about general intelligence. R. Smith Simpson of the U.S. government’s Foreign Service Journal found “abysmal ignorance of so elementary a subject as the geography of the United States” among U.S. youth (Simpson, 1962). However valid Simpson’s concerns may be, the study he conducted was done 62 years ago. Those who accuse today’s youth of being ‘the dumbest generation’ were once condemned for the same issue. However, these accusations in today’s generation are sorely lacking in understanding the multitude of ways in which youth may consume and express information in ways that previous generations could

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