Embrace Your Inner Moron!
Susan Jacoby at Washington Post with a nostalgic bit about books, reading, American anti-intellectualism and how insufferably dumb we are, delivers what is ultimately, no big surprise here, an elitist Bush-bash: “The Dumbing of America: Call Me a Snob, But Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces.” Speak for yourself, Sue!
“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today’s very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an “elitist,” one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just “folks,” a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.”) Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.
The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country’s democratic impulses in religion and education. But today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.
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.
First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.
Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent 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 to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.
Like most nostalgia fests, this one envisions a past more intellectual than I suspect it actually was, tosses out all kinds of figures about how dumb we are … most of them without any prior reference to indicate whether it’s an improvement or not … and while decrying the dropoff in reading of paper products in the computer age, neglects to note that reading of material from around the world, previously unseen except in the immediate vicinity of distant publishing plants, has skyrocketed. Jerusalem Post, Pakistan’s Dawn, any number of Arabic publications, all manner of deep think, science and erudite satire, all reach hundreds of thousands through sites like these, amplified considerably by the likes of Instapundit, Pajamas, Drudge, Memorandum, Malkin, Little Green Footballs. Voices from around the world, in love with the written word. Frogs, dissident; Brits, upper lips decidely unstiffened; Canadians, small, dead and furry. From Barcelona to Belmont. Who ever knew you could find such worldly insight in the great flyover, sophistication in LA and other unlikely places, wisdom in West By God Virginia or anywhere outside the Beltway? Every man’s a Solomon. Blonde sagacity? Toldjah. Reports direct from the battlefield, and grizzled veterans and practitioners of the art of war to tell you what it all means. Not only that, but you’ll find various wiseacres slicing fillets off various sacred cows and grilling them up for your consumption, instead of being forcefed information as you might have been in the past. And that’s only the tiniest portion of what is read by millions of people each day, brought together and sahring ideas as never before. Yeah, a lot of it is inane, child-like in its wide-eyed simplicity, or like she says, just dumb. And the dunces have all the infotainment and mindless screen time they want. But the vastly democratized and expanded intellectual classes have never had it so good.
Anyway, she has no useful suggestions, so it’s basically just a snobby gripe. In ironically oversimplified terms, she denounces standardized testing, then bails with the proposal that we should discuss how stupid we are and what to do about it, once us dolts have finished electing the next moron. About achievement testing, it’s much decried by those who say it is unfair to the underprivileged, non-English speakers, over-simplifies, forces teachers to teach to the test, etc. I’d suggest it’s unfair to those who don’t study. Requiring children to actually demonstrate knowledge of math, English and science in order to graduate may be the single greatest educational innovation of our time, forcing schools that had demonstrably not been teaching at all to at least teach for the test. And rather than simply encouraging rote instruction, the testing impetus has required teachers to see to it that students to grasp the basics and become literate if they hope to graduate, something our prior system did not.
Powerline: “…not much of an article, really; more like a rant you might find on a mediocre blog.”
Driscoll: “Given … the mania of American parents to send children to college since at least the 1970s, it seems reasonable to assume that Americans as a whole are actually better educated today than they were at any time in the past.”
Smoky Mountain Family Historian, re today’s NYT:
Perhaps the most interesting article is “Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?” written by Patricia Cohen. It’s basically a review of Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason. I don’t agree with all of Jacoby’s conclusions as reported by the article, but I do think that I want to read the book and judge for myself. If the recommendations I got by adding it to my Amazon.com wish list are any indication, I may not want to read it after all. This will definitely be a “library read.”
In other moron business:
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:32 pm on Sunday, February 17, 2008
17 Responses to “Embrace Your Inner Moron!”
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February 17th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Yes, Susan, you are a snob. And you have no idea what the great mass of Americans are like, never having ventured out of your ivory tower.
February 17th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Until she said, “rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job,” she almost had me. The truth is, that is exactly what WILL do the job–or a good part of it. Years ago it became fashionable to decry and dispense with “rote memorization” and “drill” as instructional tools–mind-numbing boredom causers, you see. We know now that what replaced them hasn’t worked out so well, but no one will dare brave the outraged outcry that would result from advocating their return. Someone should. I know of no better way to teach kids the names of, just for example, foreign capitals, or foreign language vocabulary, or the products of 2 numbers (and by extension and application, the dividend of 2 numbers), or dates of historical events, than that awful “rote memorization.” It is not worthless for people to learn specific answers to specific questions on specific tests–especially if the test is a good, comprehensive one–and doing so would go a long ways towards producing an educated citizenry. Most people are pretty sure that people in earlier generations were better-educated than kids are today. One of the reasons for this fact is that people in earlier generations hadn’t the awful fear of asking kids to actually, you know, learn something. Such as how to read a map (something FDR could evidently rely on his audience to be able to do)–which involves knowing where places are and knowing how to interpret map scales, which in turn involves knowing how to compute a ratio, which involves memorizing the multiplication tables. What we have now are situations like the one I encountered a few years back while teaching a university-level geology course, in which one of my students informed me she couldn’t do the necessary long division for reading a map scale because she “isn’t gifted in math.” Say, what? You don’t need to be gifted in math to learn long division. You just have to be willing to do some of that dreaded “rote” learning and then apply it. It takes work, but it will pay off. And when you’re finished, you will have the tools necessary to become an educated person.
February 17th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
My mother’s generation was discouraged from reading anything that wasn’t useful. It’s only recently, well past her 60th year, that she will read a “cat mystery” without feeling guilty about the waste of time. Her mother was like that, too. The kids reading pulp and science fiction and adventure serials *were exactly* the same as the ones today playing computer games and watching television.
I think it’s humorous how those frivolous time wasters are now held up as examples of past virtue.
February 17th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
[…] Crittenden responds to Jacoby’s slur on schools About achievement testing, it’s much decried by those who say […]
February 17th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Isn’t it ironic that the same intellectuals that denigrated Western intellectual history as the product of Dead White European Males now complain that Americans have become anti-intellectual?
February 17th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
two words: teachers’ union
February 17th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
“Snob” isn’t the word I’d use, anyway.
Somewhat related and well worth reading is Jean-François Revel’s book Anti-Americanism, which shows that the two ideas are linked.
February 17th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Synova wrote, “The kids reading pulp and science fiction and adventure serials *were exactly* the same as the ones today playing computer games and watching television.”
Well, no. At least they were READING. Reading is not the same as watching tv or playing computer games.
“I think it’s humorous how those frivolous time wasters are now held up as examples of past virtue.”
Relatively to today, they are.
February 17th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
[…] As Crittenden points out, Like most nostalgia fests, this one envisions a past more intellectual than I suspect it actually was, tosses out all kinds of figures about how dumb we are … most of them without any prior reference to indicate whether it’s an improvement or not … […]
February 17th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
No, actually, Jim.
We’ve decided that reading Harry Potter is a more worthy pass-time than programing or producing a flash video. Reading is, of course, reading. But producing a flash video is, of course, producing a flash video.
Also… try playing a video game without being able to read. Try playing an online game (though this is changing) with out being able to read and type quickly. Computer gamers communicate with text more than those who don’t play. They have to learn to be succinct and direct. They have to order their thoughts and put them into words.
It’s not the SAME as writing something longer but it’s useful and relevant.
Deciding that the vices of yesteryear are virtues and the virtues of today are vices really ought to include some support for those assumptions.
February 17th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Isn’t it interesting that contemporary “Education” teaches history without any dates; reading without phonics; writing without grammar; and arithmetic without memorizing the multiplication tables? It’s all supposed to be ‘fun’, you see. That is why our present elites sneer at any attempt to “teach to the test.” Because in their rosy world, why should they spend any time pounding the ‘basics’ into the heads of their students, when they could spend time encouraging the kids how to ‘think’ (ie, spend lots of lovely time propagandizing about the latest thought-fad.)
I have a theory that banning readings from the Bible (at home or at school) has led to drastic dumbing down of comprehension levels. At the beginning of the 20th century, Robert Service’s poems were BEST SELLERS, ie, read by a very broad swathe of the English speaking world. Today, most ‘graduates’ of our high schools cannot understand most of the words used in those poems.
You see, people WERE more intellectual, back in the day. Check out the standard texts used in schools. In the 19th century, it was extremely unusual for anyone to complete highschool, let along attain a Bachelor of Arts. Yet, check out the newspapers of the time, and popular (ie, massive sales) literature, eg, Charles Dickens.
And don’t get me going on about the current ability to add and subtract.
February 17th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
my well thought out contribution went somewhere into the ether.
February 18th, 2008 at 12:06 am
“In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did…This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.”
Whatever. Reading the latest Stephen King novel or the “Valley of the Dolls” or “The Chariots of the Gods” isn’t any more valuable than playing “Call of Duty”, which is what I’m going to do later tonight…whether Susie likes it or not.
Btw, Susie, I bet I own more books than you’ve read.
February 18th, 2008 at 7:34 am
My Great-Uncle graduated from the eighth grade around 1900. He could read and write Greek and Latin. My father graduated from the eighth grade around 1918. He could do arithmetic, and algebra in his head. He could write a coherent paragraph and had wonderfully legible cursive writing.
Neither were considered sufficiently smart to go to high school.
We now graduate students from college that are unable to do what eighth graders could do a hundred years ago.
I think it is because of all the improvements we have made in the educational system.
February 18th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Well, that was a very wordy “piece” by Susan, and I didn’t read it too closely.
I can say that our generally “failing” public education system has tended to overly emphasize standardized testing as a measurement (in the parlance “benchmark”) of their own success.
To the detriment of more complicated and difficult educational phenomena, like, you know, training a mind and encouraging more extensive neuronal connections.
Hard work, you see, and today’s cadre of (poorly trained themselves) teachers isn’t, apparently, really up to the task.
February 18th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
I would think that the percentage of the population that actually cares about the life of the mind, of the idea in and of itself, has remained surprisingly flat over the years, and has, if anything, seen a slight bump over the past century due to increased access to education. It’s funny when liberals condemn the average intelligence of the population because without a reliable herd there could be no modern Dem Party as we know it. In 2000 Gore carried precincts where his average supporter couldn’t even name his running mate.
February 21st, 2008 at 1:00 am
I’ve been seeing this dumbing down up close. I’m taking a college class in Beginning Arabic. A few days ago the prof tried to explain Arabic noun cases to the class. There are three she talked about, nominative, accusative, and genitive. Except for myself and one or two others who had studied other foreign languages the students did not even understand noun cases in English, let alone what the prof was saying about Arabic. She took up a whole hour of class time and still didn’t get the ideas across. O Tempora, O Mores!