Today the paperback edition of The Dumbest Generation comes out (see here and here), and you can read an excerpt from the preface here.

The cloth version appeared exactly one year ago, and attention to the issue it raised — both positive (New York Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, USA Today) and negative (Newsweek, Washington Post, Toronto Globe & Mail), along with some 135 media interviews so far — indicated, I think, that the time was right for arguments and cautions counter to the techno-enthusiasm and pro-digital policies...

Back in 1969, it was tough to be a pro sports fan in Baltimore, especially if you didn’t like New Yorkers. I was a kid outside Washington D.C., and I loved the Orioles, Bullets, and Colts.

The year began badly with the biggest upset of the era, Super Bowl III. The Colts went in as 18-point favorites, making Broadway Joe’s prediction of a win sound laughable (although you have to concede that he had the most elegant throw ever). Johnny Unitas wasn’t the star, as many people might think. The Colts’ quarterback was Earl Morrell, who stepped in for Unitas early on and ended up winning the MVP. No go, though. Score one for New York.

Next came the NBA playoffs, with the Bullets heading in with playmaker (and second-best scorer in the league) Earl Monroe and MVP Wes Unseld, whose outlet pass has never been matched. They won 57 games in the regular season, tops in the league, but in the...

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has a video here recounting the now notorious residence life program at University of Delaware. About two and a half minutes into the story, a young man recounts one of the activities students in the program underwent.

Students sat in a circle with a bowl of marshmallows in the middle. The leaders read a series of statements, and for every "yes" answer, a student would put a marshmallow in his or her own mouth. The statements included:

Have you felt afraid to express affection for a significant other in public?

Have you been afraid to walk through a dark alley at night?

According to the young man who participated in it, the statements were heavily slanted toward forms of racial and sexual tension.

For FIRE, the issue is one of ideological indoctrination, but the first thing that strikes me on hearing the rendition is how personal...

One of the standard lines about the Millennial Generation is that they have more civic awareness, more selflessness, more charitable feelings, and more political engagement than any generation in recent memory.

Steven Johnson, for instance, says that they are "the least violent, the most politically engaged and the most entrepreneurial since the dawn of the television era." And Michiko Kakutani chose Millennial Makeover (by Winograd and Hais) as one of the top 10 books of 2008 precisely because it showed that "2008 would be a 'change' election, informed by new technology and by the outlook of a new generation of millennial voters, who tend to be more inclusive, optimistic, and tech-savvy than their elders."

Two recent reports from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement temper the enthusiasm, however. The first one is entitled “Downward Trend in High...

This week the Audit Bureau of Circulations released figures for newspaper circulation for the last six months, and it’s a bleak picture. (See this story in Wall Street Journal.) Here are numbers for major dailies:

USA Today -7.5% Wall Street Journal +0.6% New York Times -3.5% L.A. Times -6.6% Washington Post -1.2% New York Daily News -14.3% New York Post -20.5% Chicago Tribune -7.5% Houston Chronicle -14.0% Arizona Republic -5.7%

One of the consequences of the drop is reductions in newsroom staff, such as what happened yesterday at the Baltimore Sun, where 61 people were laid off (see here).

Part of the declines are due...

The National Assessment of Educational Progress issued another of its Trends reports yesterday (go here and click on the pdf), and stories from around the country picked up on the mixed results it provided, such as this one from The Washington Post with the headline “‘Nation’s Report Card’ Sees Gains in Elementary, Middle Schools.”

The Trends reports provide long-term comparisons in reading and math achievement since the early-1970s for three age groups, ages 9, 13, and 17. The 2004 report also contained abundant data not only on test scores but on leisure habits and home life as well.

The good news is this. Nine-year-olds are going up. Their average score in 1971 was 208, in 2004 216, and in 20...

In his presidential address delivered at the Modern Language Association Convention last December (go here and scroll down to “Listen to the 2008 Presidential Address”), Gerald Graff made clear his approval of various developments in literary studies associated with positions on the left of the ideological spectrum.

Education conservatives believe that progressivist and multiculturalist imperatives have weakened the humanities curriculum, but Graff maintains: “The 60s are still often seen as having dumbed education down, but I would argue that, in the humanities at least, the post-60s college curriculum has been far more intellectually challenging than the relatively tame and circumscribed affair I experienced as an undergraduate in the 50s.”

Indeed, while conservatives have complained that the flood of critical theories of various kinds...

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a long column by one of the Taste page editors, Naomi Shaefer Riley, on the issue of adjunct labor in today’s financial climate. It begins with another trend, the lowering of graduate admissions for the coming year. (My school, Emory U., is cited as reducing doctoral lines by 40 percent.)

Riley raises the standard explanation that graduate programs are darned expensive to maintain. Ohio U. economist Richard Vedder “estimates that schools send anywhere from five to 15 times as much on graduate students as on undergraduates.” They take small classes with senior profs, and they usually don’t pay tuition, instead receiving a stipend of $10k to $20k each year.

Then again, Riley notes, they also provide a financial service for universities. They teach lots and lots of freshman and...

OK, so we’re half way through the fiscal year, and the budget deficit is reaching the 13-figure mark — $1,000,000,000,000. The Wall Street Journal outlines here some of the numbers. In March alone, the costs of interest payments on the debt hit $20-billion.

These sound like insurmountable figures, but put them into the context of expenditures for drug enforcement and incarceration compiled here at www.drugsense.org.

The prime tally: $40-billion per year on the war on drugs.

Drug Sense calculates the financial turnabout if drugs were decriminalized and monitored, distributed, and taxed the same way alcohol is. It cites Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron’s determination that “the United States spends...

The latest National Endowment for the Arts survey of literary reading found a welcome rise in fiction among old and young adults, but poetry continued its slide. (Go here and click on the pdf “Reading on the Rise.) In 2002, 12.1 percent of adults read a poem on their own in the preceding 12 months. In 2008, the rate slipped to 8.3 percent.

That goes with my experience teaching literature to students over the years. More and more, they groan when it comes to poetry days. Often I teach a lower-division survey course in American literature from the Civil War to the present, and when it comes to post-1960 verse pieces, well, the freshmen and sophomores can’t wait to get past them. They like the fiction — standards such as “A & P,” “Lost in the Funhouse,” “Good Country People” — but lines such as these by John Ashbery leave them cold: