Those of us who thought that American education had finally reached its nadir by the end of the 1990s hadn’t seen anything yet. We had focused our critical attention almost exclusively on the unforced errors committed by teachers, school administrators, and ed-school professors. We weren’t prepared for the coming of the millennials, a generation like no other. We weren’t paying enough attention to the lifestyle changes young people were now experiencing because of the new world of social media and the internet. The baleful effects of this digital-age revolution on young minds was entirely independent of the quality of the formal schooling they were receiving.

The Dumbest Generation, by Emory University English professor Mark Bauerline, brought us up to date with reams of depressing data. Along with the works of Hirsch and Bloom, Bauerline’s 2008 book is essential for understanding the stupid election of 2016. The book’s title is no mere epithet. The Dumbest Generation is a thoroughly researched examination of the intellectual habits and tastes of the millennials, revealing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the country’s education collapse has reached a new and even more dangerous level. According to a host of objective national surveys, these young people have not only been shortchanged of essential cultural literacy in the schools, like previous generations, but they now disdain intellectual curiosity and the culture of books altogether. For this generation there’s no need to read any serious historical and cultural texts, since anything worth knowing can always be Googled. Bauerline makes us see that when the distractions of digital age social media were added to the breakdown of the curriculum in the schools the results— for our society and our democracy—become doubly toxic.

“No cohort in human history has opened such a fissure between its material conditions and its intellectual attainments. None has experienced so many technological enhancements and yielded so little progress,” Bauerline writes. “This is the paradox of the dumbest generation. For the young American, life has never been so yielding, goods so plentiful, schooling so accessible and liberties so copious. The material gains are clear… But it’s a shallow advent. As the survey research shows, knowledge and skills haven’t kept pace, and the intellectual habits that complement them are slipping… The mental equipment of the young falls short of their media, money, e-gadgets, and career plans.”