George has highlighted a Wall Street Journal review, “Can U Read Kant?,” of Mark’s book, The Dumbest Generation.

Mark’s point is spot on. Today’s students who “O.D.” daily on TV, Web-surfing, video games, and other digital diversions are getting dumber, and their elders ought to be seeing that they read books and use digital technologies to improve their minds.

Reversing this digital dumbing-down becomes all the harder because of the dwindling of ranks of parents and teachers who are fully aware, or perhaps even recall, what the Journal refers to as “a weightier learning tradition” centered on books, debate, and ideas.

So many of these instructors themselves, like their charges, are knowledge-averse. Specifically, instructor and student alike have by now been educated in schools under the sway of “constructivism,” the “progressive” dogma that knowledge resides within the young human being, necessitating only that the teacher “facilitate” its inevitable, butterfly-like emergence. Another conceit aligned with this prevalent pedagogy is that “critical thinking” can somehow develop independent of knowledge, i.e., one can think critically about nothing. Touted as “student-centered” and “self-esteem”-engendering education, this approach has led to a drastic devaluing of knowledge itself.

In short, knowledge-light digital pursuits have dove-tailed with the even longer entrenchment of knowledge-light formal education, and those capable of reinstating knowledge-rich learning, electronic and classroom-based, are farther and fewer between.