EDITOR’S NOTE: A year ago, Mark Bauerlein sparked a national conversation with his book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. The paperback edition has just been published. It includes a new preface, which is excerpted below.

When The Dumbest Generation first came out in May 2008, response in the media was swift and judgmental. Feature articles appeared in Newsweek, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, London Times, Haaretz (Israel), Superinteressante (Brazil), The Weekly Telegraph (Serbia), reviews in Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Toronto Globe & Mail, while 80 or so radio and TV hosts conducted interviews, each effort more or less deftly outlining the issue and many landing hard on yea or nay. A blank and broad question lay on the table. Do the digital diversions of the young cut kids off from history, civics, literature, fine art? Does mounting screen time dumb them down?

I think yes, others say no, but I never expected to vanquish the other side and end the debate. The realistic goal was to open the issue to some sober skepticism, to blunt the techno-zeal spreading through classrooms and libraries, shopping malls and children’s bedrooms. It was to counter the sanguine portraits of informed and agile teens at the keyboard with dismaying survey results and illustrations of youth insulation and ignorance, kids shunning books and vaunting their digital nativity. We won’t know the full intellectual impact of text messaging, Web 2.0, Facebook, and the rest for many years, and it will show up in distant measures such as the money firms spend on writing coaches for employees, the rate of students in remedial classes, popular demand that politicians elevate their rhetoric, and the vocabulary level of newspapers inching downwards or upwards.

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That evidence remains to be seen, but at least we can say that the general take on digital technology has expanded and diversified. For in the last year several books have joined The Dumbest Generation to set the purpose and uses of the tools in a critical spotlight. They include works by Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-Generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values), Susan Jacoby (The Age of American Unreason), Lee Siegel (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob), Nicholas Carr (The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google), Maggie Jackson (Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age), and several other popular and academic studies. Together they form an imposing countervailing force, an alliance to slow the headlong rush to technologize learning, reading, writing, social and intellectual life. They have forced a better, more reflective attitude toward the future, an appreciation of the wondrous things gained, yes, but also a sensitivity to precious goods and practices lost.

The Dumbest Generation also postulates an attitude toward the past, however, and several commentators picked up on it with a curt objection. Here we go again, they remarked, an aging schoolmaster knocking the kids. The old ones did it when Elvis arrived, and now they do it because of Grand Theft Auto. We’ve heard the grievance many times, the lament of graying folks, so let’s not take it too seriously. A fair criticism, if an easy one, and it actually points to what may be the great social consequence of the digital advent. It turns on, precisely, the relationship of generations and the duties of elders. For, we all agree, one responsibility of adults in our society is to acquaint the rising generation to a civic and cultural inheritance. They have the experience and perspective that come with aging; the young do not. Teenagers live in the present and the immediate. What happened long ago and far away doesn’t impress them. They care about what occurred last week in the cafeteria, not what took place during the Depression. They heed the words of Facebook, not the Gettysburg Address. They focus on other kids in English class, not leaders in D.C.

Maturity follows a formula: The more kids contact one another, the less they heed the tutelage of adults. When peer consciousness grows too fixed and firm, the teacher’s voice counts for nothing outside the classroom. When youth identity envelopes them, parent talk at the dinner table only distracts them. The lure of school gossip, fear of ridicule, the urge to belong — kids need a reprieve and a retreat. Adult content, civic and historical stuff, makes the current events of high school less commanding. For them to grow up into mindful citizens and discerning consumers, then, adolescents must break the social circuit and think beyond the clique and the schoolyard. But they can’t do it themselves — peer pressure is too strong — and so adults must help draw them away. Mentors can provide instruction in bigger things: the op-ed page, actions of Congress, the heroism of Martin Luther King, what transpired in the Gulag, what the First Amendment says, the fate of Adam and Eve . . . They steer young minds toward deeper wisdom and young tastes toward finer consumptions. The story of heroes and villains from history sets the eminences of senior year in bracing relief. The eloquence of Emily Dickinson nicely explodes the favored patter of the hallways.