In my other life in another country, I've heard a phrase when I was very young which made me wonder about its veracity for the next 40+ years. At that time, we very much admired the Japanese and considered them the model we should emulate to make our lives better. It was commonly said among us that "Individually, we were just as smart as the Japanese. The problem is, together, they are united and we are not."
Is that really true ? Could we really get much better just by uniting together ? Uniting to do what ? What can someone say or do that makes everybody else agree ? Other than a war for the sake of survival as a country, it's hard for everybody to agree on anything. And the few things that the vast majority of the populace agree on, like there should be no corruption, are almost never practiced, even among those who regularly and honestly criticize corruption.
So what's the real problem ? What makes us destroy each others and, therefore, cannot get ahead ?
Only in the past decade or so, I realize that the world is not just divided into those who are smart and those who are not. There are also those who are street-smart. The street-smarts are those who know how to win, how to get ahead of everybody else, most of the time by doing the easiest way with no consideration for anything else, like the concept or right or wrong. The only thing that matters is to win. Since that's their only parameter in life, any criticism of their misconducts will not be addressed other than the categorical counter charge of "Sore Losers".
In politics, you can easily recognize the street-smarts among Republicans, typified by the Rovian tactics when it comes to election tricks.
Do they succeed ? Sadly, they do, and not just in winning elections but also in driving the long-term direction of the country.
The most glaring example of the street-smart trick they are playing on the White House and half of the Democratic politicians is The Two Santa Clauses strategy, Created in 1974, it still makes the Democratic party march in lock step with its BS.
Democrats, he said, had been able to be "Santa Clauses" by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. Republicans could do that, too – spending could actually increase. Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people's taxes! For working people it would only be a small token – a few hundred dollars a year on average – but would be heavily marketed. And for the rich it would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts.
The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski's work. They held power for thirty years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 8 of the non-governmental workforce today, and left such a massive deficit that some misguided "conservative" Democrats are again clamoring to shoot Santa with working-class tax hikes and entitlement program cuts.
So, after playing double Santa Clauses by promoting two wars for the defense industry, giving tax cuts and the unaffordable Medicare Schedule D, they also threw in the Great Recession which reduced federal tax revenue (as a percentage of GDP) to the lowest level in over 40 years for good measure, the moment Obama took over the presidency, all the sirens went off "Deficit ! Deficit !Deficit !" and the White House dutifully attempt to clean up the elephant's shit.
It's not just limited to politics. In the car industry, there was also the Planned Obsolescence strategy to improve renenue and profits. Cars were designed not for durability but for the looks which would make older models psychologically outdated even if they had not fallen apart after 50K miles, roughly around the time the car loans got paid off. It took the German and the Japanese cars to change the street-smart concept of US car manufacturers a few decades ago,
I'm not saying that all street-smart people are immoral, a lot of time their strategies are simply amoral for the sake of winning. You can consider people in the ad industry as street-smart. they know what make people tick to buy the products so the company can make more profit but, beyond that, they're simply selling the same products. Only in rare cases, the products have new innovative features that need to be promoted in the ad so people are aware of it. In most cases, they simply provide humor or the illusion that half-naked girls will fall all over the owners of certain brands of cars, etc.
The Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Medicine, Chemistry, or those creating the computers, the internet, etc. are the smart ones. They don't get where they are by just having the ideas popped up in their heads. They get there by having very thorough knowledge of the subjects, and do more extensive researches and experiments until they come up with a hypothesis that can be independently verified. Their inventions will benefit the whole world and sometimes without benefiting themselves financially.
A lot of time, it seems the street-smarts can be much more successful than the smart ones and, almost invariably, in a much shorter time. That allows the street-smarts to lord over the smarts, deriding them as nerdy, geeky, non-trendy, tactless, etc. The face that represent a company is most likely a street-smart person who can give a quick answer to almost anything, sometimes without really understanding how it works.
Therefore, a street-smart person might consider himself smart because of his success, because he can trick and spin the smart guys around just for fun. Since they consider themselves much smarter than the smart ones, there's no reason they want to listen to the smart people. Given a choice between waiting for his turn and running the risk of missing the opportunity and the choice of giving someone "a little bribe" (or "donation" if it applies to politicians) to get things moving, they will choose the later to get ahead for themselves.
BTW, on the Democratic side, you can cite Rahm Emanuel as a typical street-smart person with his often-touted "tough" Chicago politics.
Therefore, a society with too many street-smarts people, like a society which believe in the self-serving Republican Party, will self-destruct. Some smart people, like Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, and Joseph Stiglitz might try to save it and explain how everything works but with a populace who have been brainwashed into being enamored with the clever street-smarts, their voices are consider the "unpractical" voices from the elitists. "Unpractical" is just another way to say that the approach is not street-smart enough and, more likely, cannot win. With the perspective that winning is EVERYTHING, no principles matter, such nerdy ideas will be readily rejected.
[It's going to be long and I'm sorry about that.]
Now, after differentiating the concept of smart and street-smart which took me 30+ years to formulate to hypothesize human behavior and societal self-destruction by the "smartest" people, let's move on to the battle in the schoolyards which somewhat defines the state of education in the US and the world we live in as adults.
I just ran into this article today by coincidence. It's beautifully written and should be read by both people who support and those who decry public education. The title is very modest Why nerds are unpopular but it covers a lot more than that. I think it should be read not just by Americans but by teenagers and their parents of any races. It'e been translated to French, Portugal, Spanish and Japanese.
[BTW, the only outdated comment in this article was the statement that the curriculum was the same for everybody and, therefore. the nerds felt completely bored because, other getting bullied, they had no challenges to make the time spent at schools worthwhile. This has been changed this school year, I believe. At least, my 8-year-old daughter has already learned Statistics, Algebra, Geometry and at GE of 12.9 in Math score when finishing 4th grade, covering the four years of high school math program in one year.]
The whole article should be read but I pick a few paragraphs:
We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents.
Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.
Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults don't normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage kids do it?
Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.
Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.
...
If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.
BTW, other cultures respect academic achievements much more than the US. Subsequently, teachers are also much more respected. In the US, not much knowledge is required to be (street-)smart so everybody and his Aunt Folly think they are (street-)smarter than the teachers and want to tell teacher what to do to entertain and please their children into learning better.
A recent article in the San Jose Mercury News demonstrated this. One of the person pushing for the expansion of charter schools blamed the public schools for the fact that she only had 7th grade reading level when she graduated from high school. Clearly, she didn't want to read books on her own but what does she really expect from teachers with 33 kids in a classroom (that's the number of students in my daughter's 4h-grade class). Does she want the teacher to keep her at 7th-grade until her reading level improve to 8th grade before she could progress to the next class ? Does she want the teacher to entertain her personally until she loved reading on her own ? Does she want the teacher to sit next to her and read every day ?
But it does not stop her from faulting the teachers. In the American culture, knowledge and the pursuit of if is not at all appreciated. There are simply too many street-smarts people who convince the populace otherwise.