In 1987, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind was published; a wildly popular book that drew attention to the shift in American culture away from the tenants that made America—and Americans—unique. Bloom focused on a breakdown in the American curriculum, but many sensed that the issue affected more than education. The very essence of what it meant to be an American was disappearing.

Foreword—America: Are We Losing Our Mind?
Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow / vii

Introduction—The Knowledge Requirement: What Every American Needs to Know
E. D. Hirsch Jr. / 1

Part One—States of Mind: Indicators of Intellectual and Cognitive Decline

1 The Troubling Trend of Cultural IQ / 19
Mark Bauerlein

2 Biblical Literacy Matters / 33
Daniel L. Dreisbach

3 Why Johnny and Joanie Can’t Write, Revisited / 49
Gerald Graff

4 College Graduates: Satisfied, but Adrift / 65
Richard Arum

5 Anatomy of an Epidemic / 77
Robert Whitaker

Part Two—Personal and Cognitive Habits/Interests

6 A Wired Nation Tunes Out the News / 97
David T. Z. Mindich

7 Catching Our Eye: The Alluring Fallacy of Knowing at a Glance / 111
Maggie Jackson

8 The Rise of the Self and the Decline of Intellectual and Civic Interest / 123
Jean M. Twenge

9 Has Internet-Fueled Conspiracy-Mongering Crested? / 137
Jonathan Kay

Part Three—National Consequences

10 Dependency in America: American Exceptionalism and the Entitlement State / 153
Nicholas Eberstadt

11 Political Ignorance in America / 163
Ilya Somin

12 In Defense of Difficulty: How the Decline of the Ideal of Seriousness Has Dulled Democracy in the Name of a Phony Populism ‘ 175
Steve Wasserman

13 We Live in the Age of Feelings / 189
Dennis Prager

14 How Colleges Create the “Expectation of Confirmation” / 205
Greg Lukianoff

15 The New Antinomian Attitude / 217
R. R. Reno

Afterword Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow / 231

Contributors / 243
Index / 247

Mark Bauerlein is an English professor at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (Encounter Books, 2001), The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardized Our Future (Tarcher, 2008) and The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking (Tarcher, 2011). His essays have appeared in PMLA, Partisan Review, Wilson Quarterly, and Yale Review, and his commentaries and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, Reason magazine, and elsewhere.

Adam Bellow is vice president/executive editor at HarperCollins. He has also been an executive editor at Doubleday (Random House) and was formerly editorial director of The Free Press (Simon & Schuster). His essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications. He is also author of In Praise of Nepotism: A History of Family Enterprise from King David to George W. Bush (Anchor, 2004).