The smarter our gadgets get, the dumber we get. That's the paradox at the heart of American life, according to a score of recent commentators who view the growing disconnect between what we should know and what we don't know with profound unease.
Ted Gup, a journalism professor who writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, recently expressed awe that his students -- who came to class equipped with laptops, who were living in an alleged "Information Age" -- knew virtually nothing of the world around them, knew nothing of history, and knew precious little about their own country.
As anyone who's seen one of Jay Leno's interviews with random students knows all too well, this isn't surprising. The glut of information that came with the Internet should, in theory, have spawned a savvy and alert generation, one better informed than any generation in history. Instead, it caused an entire generation to take information for granted to the point where they stopped caring about learning.
Today's teenagers, snorts Mark Bauerlein in his new book "The Dumbest Generation," have "a brazen disregard of books and reading." It's sad but true. When polls for the "best books ever" are taken among the public, they're invariably stocked with books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" that are most widely read in high school, because most Americans quit reading books after high school. (Those are the better polls; the worse ones are crammed with right-wing crackpot Ayn Rand and con-artist hack L. Ron Hubbard.)
Bauerlein expresses amazement that, with every opportunity in the world to learn, to act, to cause change, Americans don't bother. The answer is that virtually every source of power in the American republic is acting to deprive them of the belief that they can change anything.
Where will they learn civic courage? Not from our corrupted schools, besieged by federal insistence on "accountability" and "standards." Not from our servile and shallow media, infatuated with trivia at the expense of news. Not from our political leaders -- at least, not many of them. That leaves the people -- allegedly the real rulers of the country -- more or less on their own.