George F. Will
Washington Post, July 8, 2022
“Bauerlein is telling the origin story of today’s cohort of aggressively illiberal, censorious young adults: “The fractious, know-nothing thirty-year-old is what we got when we let the twelve-year-old drop his books and take up the screen.”
Time was, conscientious parents fretted about “summer learning loss.” Now, when much of what schools do subtracts from understanding, summer could at least be a time for recuperation from educational malpractice — were summer not just another season of screen addictions for young people deformed by this digital age.
In 2008, Americans were being inundated by journalism performing anticipatory sociology. “Techno-cheerleaders” — Mark Bauerlein’s term — predicted that millennials (born 1981-1996), the first generation suckled by their digital devices, would dazzle the world with the sublime personal and social consequences of their mind-melds with those devices. And their emancipation from the dead hand of everything prior. Bauerlein, Emory University professor of English, dissented.
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