Scholars Diverge in Assessing the Intellect of ‘Digital Kids’

Debate centers on thinking skills of the 'millenial generation.'

Washington

Has digital overload made today’s generation of students stupid? Or, alternatively, do the “digital kids” have intellectual assets and skills that make them the smartest generation yet?

Two experts who have studied what is often called the “millennial generation”—people born from the mid-1980s to around 2000—debated those questions here last week before about a hundred journalists, lobbyists, and education policy experts and researchers.

Speaking at a Sept. 29 luncheon hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University in Atlanta, argued that students’ obsession with round-the-clock social networking and video games has led to a generation that is engaged only with itself, and that has abandoned serious leisure reading and in-depth...