Don't know much about anything: directionless youth

.....In this weekend's New York Times (Growing Up for Dummies), Charles McGrath reviews three new books about the current generation of high school and college kids. A grim subject, mostly.
.....Some exerpts:

........Mark Bauerlein has a catchall term for all these young people, especially the ones now in high school: he labels them “the dumbest generation,” which is also what he calls his new book, subtitled “How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.”
.....…[M]ost high school students, Mr. Bauerlein says, don’t really do a whole lot. They don’t read, they don’t go to museums or get involved in community life, they don’t do much homework.
.....And according to Mr. Bauerlein, they know next to nothing. … They’re six times more likely to be able to name the current American Idol than the speaker of the House of Representatives. On tests of competence in math and science, American high-schoolers do worse than students from countries that we used to think of as backward.
.....In fact, that’s the great paradox of the dumbest generation, Mr. Bauerlein says: never have American students had it so easy, and never have they achieved less. Material gains and intellectual performance seem almost inversely related….
.....As you read along, it all seems pretty convincing (if depressing), especially when he gets around to naming a culprit: the digital revolution, which he says has empowered students in certain ways while also eroding their attention spans and analytical abilities. Sounds about right. But then you pick up William Damon’s book, “The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life.”
.....Mr. Damon, director of the Center on Adolescence at Stanford, says that students today are “working harder and learning a bit more, at least judging from the most recent test-score results.” (Not the ones Mr. Bauerlein has been reading.) But he also says that most of these students are drifting aimlessly, with no clue as to what they want to do or become in the future. The only thing they seem to know for sure is that they don’t want to run for public office….
.....Young people are now so purposeless, Mr. Damon says, so uncertain and fearful of commitment even when it comes to finding mates, that many of them may never marry, and they’re so hesitant about picking a career that they may wind up living at home forever….
.....According to Christine Hassler, author of “20 Something Manifesto: Quarter-Lifers Speak Out About Who They Are, What They Want and How to Get It,” they’re not just floundering, they’re often anxious and miserable, suffering from something like menu overload: there are just too many choices to make. The result is often a feeling of stasis and letdown that Ms. Hassler calls Expectation Hangover, a phrase she is so fond of she has trademarked it.
.....“20 Something Manifesto” is actually less a manifesto than a breathlessly optimistic self-help book designed to help its audience peel back the layers of their “identity onion” and sort out the poles of the “20s triangle”: “Who am I, what do I want, how do I get what I want?” She talks a lot about the need for the floundering to feel self-gratitude and spend “quality time” with themselves; for the lovelorn, she suggests palliative remedies, like sending yourself flowers and writing yourself a note of appreciation.
.....In fact, “20 Something Manifesto” is an almost perfect illustration of the kinds of things that both Mr. Bauerlein and Mr. Damon are worried about. It’s a book about purposelessness that’s written not just for dummies but for people who are practically comatose….
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.....It stands to reason … that parents must be part of the problem. Some of us have raised dummies and the disengaged not on purpose, surely, but perhaps because we listened to Mr. Rogers and told them too often that we liked them just the way they were.