Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, has just written a book that bemoans the condition of the young people in America called The Dumbest Generation, in mock homage, I suspect, to Brokaw’s book of a similar title. The problem, says Bauerlein, isn’t just the internet. It’s also the glorification of youth culture since the sixties, which – as Flannery O’Connor would say – put the bottom rail on top.

The glorification of youth was strongly reinforced by “progressive” educational theories emanating from our leading schools of education – theories insisting that the proper role for teachers is to act simply as “facilitators” who guide students in “constructing their own knowledge.” Supposedly, active young minds would do that if they were free to follow their own natural inclinations.

That theory took hold first in the lower K-12 grades and rapidly spread upward. Many college professors resisted it and continued to assign challenging reading material, only to discover that students either wouldn’t read it or if they tried, just couldn’t grasp it. As a result, professors have widely lowered their standards to accommodate the a-literacy of their students. In turn, that means that our supposedly highly educated populace actually contains a small and declining number of people capable of functioning at a high intellectual level.

Based on the review at The Pope Center, Bauerlein’s book isn’t your typical Kids-These-Days book. It’s a solid, reasonable, balanced assessment of why kids don’t really care to learn much these days and who’s to blame for it. All of us, in some way or another. The teachers who refuse to work hard at keeping high standards. The parents who complain when Johnny gets a bad grade because one teacher did have high standards. The school administrators who crave high admission rather than high thinking. The citizenry who mock intellectualism as elitist. And on and on.