The Dumbest Generation

was written by the most frustrating author. In particular, while the argument is fairly cohesive overall and supported by backbreaking quantities of evidence, I found that it was organized in a spectacularly strange manner. While each chapter was a neatly synthesized brick of information, I found the finished piece lacking in the structural elements necessary to piece the argument together. In particular, the book lacks much in the way of a conclusion, instead substituting a historical and literary rant that quotes Thoreau, Lincoln, and Emily Dickinson, all which the author uses to bemoan the sad state he has described in his book without really tying anything together. Bauerlein also fails to return to the motifs he used at the argument's outset, and the whole segment of the younger population as described in the introduction, a problem which Bauerlein himself calls "no less disturbing," have apparently, with the exception of the collegiate political organizations which he endeavours to discredit, disappeared into oblivion, obscured behind the two hundred pages of statistics he has carefully assembled. His argument may be a profound one, and his points may be sharp, but it has been lost in a swirling ocean of numbers and facts which neglect to align themselves with the overarching theme of the treatise, and which are thus only significant if the reader chooses to make them so. Regardless however well supported and truthful, an argument that structurally unsound will always collapse.