"Dumbest Generation" Author to Speak Tonight
Mark Bauerlein, author of "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future," will speak at 7:30 this evening as part of the National Education Association's American Education Week at Old Dominion University.
His talk, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the Mills Godwin Jr. Life Sciences Building auditorium. Sponsored by ODU's Darden College of Education, the NEA Education Week celebration will also include a lecture by Milton Chen, executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF), today at 3 p.m. in the MGB auditorium.
Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, wrote "The Dumbest Generation" out of alarm at what he sees as the rapid decline of intellectual pursuits among the younger generation, and the potential harm this could cause as this generation takes the place of the baby boomers. He writes that the Internet, with its wealth of unlimited knowledge, has ended up being used mainly as a tool to extend cafeteria conversations among young people, making them experts on themselves and each other-and that's it, according to dumbestgeneration.com.
"The ignorance is hard to believe ... It isn't enough to say that these young people are uninterested in world realities. They are actively cut off from them. ... They are encased in more immediate realities that shut out conditions beyond -- friends, work, clothes, cars, pop music, sitcoms, Facebook,'' he writes.
Bauerlein earned his doctorate from UCLA in 1988. He has taught at Emory since 1989, except for the time he served as the director of the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003-05. In addition to teaching and writing books, Bauerlein publishes articles in the Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, Washington Post and Chronicle for Higher Education.
As executive director of GLEF, Chen leads a group dedicated to integrating multimedia resources into 21st century classrooms. Its Edutopia Web site and magazine, along with documentary films, help to communicate this message.
Before joining GLEF in 1998, Chen was the founding director of the KQED Center for Education and Lifelong Learning (PBS) in San Francisco. He has also been a research director at the Children's Television Workshop in New York and an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Chen received his doctorate in communication research from Stanford University.
The NEA's annual American Education Week, held this year from Nov. 16- 22, aims to highlight the importance of ensuring every that child in America receives a quality public education from kindergarten through college.
Free parking for these events will be on level 2 of garage A, located at the corner of 43rd Street and Elkhorn Avenue. For more information about ODU's American Education Week events, call 683-3938.