A FB friend of mine just posted an article in “Psychology Today”, from July 2014 entitled "Anti-Intellectualism and the "Dumbing Down" of America". And it’s a lot worse than even I imagined:
- After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place. The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50% of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries;
- The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs commissioned a civic education poll among public school students. A surprising 77% didn't know that George Washington was the first President; couldn't name Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence; and only 2.8% of the students actually passed the citizenship test. Along similar lines, the Goldwater Institute of Phoenix did the same survey and only 3.5% of students passed the civics test;
- According to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 68% of public school children in the U.S. do not read proficiently by the time they finish third grade. And the U.S. News & World reported that barely 50% of students are ready for college level reading when they graduate;
- According to the National Endowment for the Arts report in 1982, 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later only 67% did. And more than 40% of Americans under 44 did not read a single book--fiction or nonfiction--over the course of a year. The proportion of 17 year olds who read nothing (unless required by school ) has doubled between 1984-2004;
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Gallup released a poll(link is external) indicating 42 percent of Americans still believe God created human beings in their present form less than 10,000 years ago;
- 18% of Americans still believe that the sun revolves around the earth, according to a Gallup poll;
The author begins the article with a bold statement and then offers some very impressive, right-on-the-money quotes from various sources. A lot of research apparently went into this piece, as well as a lot of outrage:
There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It’s the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.
Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason(link is external), says in an article in theWashington Post, "Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism."
There has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries. Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his book,Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, describes how the vast underlying foundations of anti-elite, anti-reason and anti-science have been infused into America’s political and social fabric. Famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once said: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Mark Bauerlein, in his book, The Dumbest Generation(link is external), reveals how a whole generation of youth is being dumbed down by their aversion to reading anything of substance and their addiction to digital "crap" via social media.
Journalist Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America(link is external), adds another perspective: “The rise of idiot America today represents--for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power--the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is an expert.”
“There’s a pervasive suspicion of rights, privileges, knowledge and specialization,” says Catherine Liu, the author of American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique (link is external)and a film and media studies professor at University of California. The very mission of universities has changed, argues Liu. “We don’t educate people anymore. We train them to get jobs.”
I thought this was particularly apropos:
We’re creating a world of dummies. Angry dummies who feel they have the right, the authority and the need not only to comment on everything, but to make sure their voice is heard above the rest, and to drag down any opposing views through personal attacks, loud repetition and confrontation.
Mr. Williams concludes with this:
The current trend of increasing anti-intellectualism now establishing itself in politics and business leadership, and supported by a declining education system should be a cause for concern for leaders and the general population,one that needs to be addressed now.
Personally, I think much of political correctness is actually a form of “dumbing down” in the guise of “intellectual elitism”. I suppose this would be the inverse of what is being talked about above. But it seems to me the reverse side of the exact same coin.
This whole thing is, I believe, a very profound and critical issue, which is easier to facilely cavil against than to really understand. For example: who is “truly educated”, in the first place? Ted Cruz, because he went Princeton and Harvard Law School? Or perhaps Tom Cotton, the infamous author of the “Iranian letter to Congress”, who is also Ivy educated? Let’s not forget the regally “educated” George W, Bush, who, in fact, graduated with a higher grade-point average than John Kerry (Bush Beats Kerry by a Point, at Yale.) People don’t believe me when I tell them this, but a friend of mine has a PhD in psychology from Fordham Univ, and spent most of his adult career teaching in the NJ educational system. He’s a very nice guy. But he never heard of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Marcel Proust, W. Somerset Maugham or the HIndu Avatar Krishna (who is worshiped today, by about a billion people around the world, as an Incarnation of God). I, quite frankly, struggle daily to acquire something I would remotely consider an education (in my late middle-age), despite whatever schooling to which I may have been exposed. I’ve often wondered why this should be such a struggle, and I don’t think I am alone.
What then, indeed, would even constitute a “real education”? Would the mastery of any amount of facts and data accomplish this end? But, if education must also include some, at least, familiarity with matters such as “values”, what exactly would they be? And, perhaps more importantly, whom would be generally considered qualified enough to impart them to the next generation?
No matter who one’s candidate is in the upcoming the election, if these fundamental questions aren’t meaningfully addressed, then nothing will really change, and the overall culture will continue its slide off the precipice.