The Dumbing Of America – washingtonpost.com:
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 (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); 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.
This is the latest installment in the dumbing of America argument. The “dumbing down” polemic is pervasive in the media literacy movement and is also a subtext of Jean Twenge-inspired attacks on gen-y and the millennials so-called mediated narcissism.Though the article is compelling in its finely tuned arguments, riddle me this: if early educators in the US believed that universal literacy would produce a rational society, what happened? It appears to me that everything that the “dumbing down” crowd rails against is the product of highly rational, extremely well-educated people. From my vantage, rationality seems to be the problem, not the other way around.
“if early educators in the US believed that universal literacy would produce a rational society, what happened? It appears to me that everything that the “dumbing down” crowd rails against is the product of highly rational, extremely well-educated people. From my vantage, rationality seems to be the problem, not the other way around.”
A totally naive point of view in light of circumstances obviously evident by 2008.
The policies of the bush administration benefited corporatism to the extreme where jobs were outsourced and goods were imported. Less wages for hours worked caused the resulting effect of ‘Middle Classism’ to almost disappear while ‘dumbing down’ was encouraged.
You make a succinct mistake by ignoring the fact that education requires time and money.
Most “highly rational, extremely well-educated people’ never had a chance.
I think you misunderstand my point. I’m not anti-education. I was talking about literacy, which is a specific kind of method and approach to teaching how the world is. After all, Nazi Germany was a very literate society, but did it lead to rational subjects? My main argument is that we need to rethink “intelligence” and realize that it is not tied to literacy, though it helps. We need a more balanced curriculum that also encourages “non-literate” form of communication, such as the arts– visual, digital, environmental. As far as I can tell, a society based on books is exactly what we have. Let’s not kid ourselves.
By the way, I don’t believe your point is naive, even if I disagree with it. Likewise, I hope you would give me the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge that I don’t think and write about things because I’m naive.