By Professor
Doom
A recent Psychology Today article
discusses anti-intellectualism and the dumbing down of America. While certainly it has a few things
right, it misses, often by a large margin, how education, both higher and
“public” (more accurately, “government”), has played a role in the dumbing down
of the population.
Let’s hit what passes for highlights of
the article before filling in the missing details:
It’s the dismissal of science, the
arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment,
self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.
This is a little hit and miss. Arts and
humanities departments are huge money makers on campus, with endless
classes filled with hundreds of students apiece. Granted, these students are
there because the classes are just power-point presentations and
fill-in-the-bubble tests, with no writing or reading involved, paid for by the
student loan scheme…but obviously there isn’t a complete dismissal.
Moreover, the humanities in particular
have been taken over by female-superiority and
every-culture-but-Western-superiority hucksters preaching ever more ridiculous theories.
If you’re male or white, I can totally understand why you’d be
dismissive of branches of knowledge that endlessly shout at you how you’re a
worthless monster who should be gelded and/or made to suffer.
Even when we look at Psychology--you know,
the field that’s gotten much of the country addicted to various
psychotherapeutic drugs--we still have issues. Key to the scientific method is
experiments must be reproducible. About 60% of psychological studies
fail the “can be reproduced” test. Taking addictive, expensive drugs, with side effects that
generate even more revenue for the medical/pharmaceutical/psychological industry,
based on studies that can’t be reproduced, seems pretty stupid to me. Being
dismissive of the results of this field is, empirically
the most reasonable thing to do…even if sometimes psychology has something
relevant to say.
Dismissal of other science likewise is
understandable in this day and age. Government scientists, for decades, assured
the public that “smoking is safe,” (a Gallup Survey conducted in 1958
found that only 44 percent of Americans believed smoking caused cancer) before finally admitting “yeah,
smoking is bad for you, but in our defense we were getting a lot of money from tobacco companies.” So, I totally understand
why people would dismiss government scientists, who get huge sums to say vaccines are
safe, when they say
“vaccines are safe.” Similarly, it’s tough to believe government scientists
about global warming melting the ice caps
before 2014…particularly
when it hasn’t happened, and particularly when we know our best scientists
can’t accurately guess next week’s weather, much less decades from now.
Then we have government economists
(economics being “the dismal science”) that assure us the US has a thriving
economy right now…even with record numbers of people on
food assistance, wild market swings, and steeply falling oil prices from decreased
consumption (our modern civilization runs on oil…there’s just no way you can
have growth without increase in oil consumption). So, again, I can appreciate
why people reject “science,” at least when it comes out of a government
scientist’s mouth.
But what of the dumbing down?
“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.”
Time and again I’ve tried to steer friends
and students to articles online, articles with more substance than a Facebook
post. Very often I get the response “I can’t read online,” even as I can’t pry
their eyes off their cell phones long enough to see what I’m doing at the
board. I know, it’s customary to hate on “the new thing kids are doing these
days,” it happened with comic books and TV, when, generations ago, those were
the new things. I concede a dumbing down, mind you, but I’m not convinced it’s
just social media and cell phones that are causing the dumbing down to the
point that people can’t learn on their own.
In public schools, students are forced to
read books…I can’t help but notice how often those books are gut-wrenchingly sad,
affairs, guaranteed to make the reader feel bad. I’m not just talking old
classics like Crime and Punishment or The Black Pearl, which, for
all their legitimacy, are still bleak depictions of the world, but even “pop”
novels force-read in school, like Bridge to Terabithia, are such heartbreakers
that students apparently are trained to believe “if I read a book, I will feel
sad and miserable.” And yet it’s supposed to be a puzzle why our kids don’t
read?
It really is curious how all our highly
influential educationists with their fancy degrees can’t come up with “maybe if
we made them read books with happiness in them, instead of misery, they won’t
associate reading with misery?” I’m no expert, but it seems like it’d be
something to try.
It’s very clear reading as a pastime is
dropping off:
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…
Are government schools training people
not to read? Quite possibly. John Taylor Gatto has already explored this theory in
such detail that I could not hope to add anything relevant to it…even as nearly
every mainstream article has gaps I try to fill in with this blog.
And what of higher education’s role in
all this? The article touches on it a little:
The very mission of universities has
changed, argues Liu. “We don’t educate people anymore. We train them to get
jobs.”
While I agree with the “we don’t educate
people anymore,” I have a real issue with that “train them to get jobs” part. There
is quite a bit going on at the university that has nothing to do with jobs. What
job requires students to know Game of Thrones? What job requires skill at rock climbing walls? What job requires workers to not shave? More importantly, why does it take
4 years to learn these skills? I could go on with this for quite a while but,
honest, job training isn’t a high priority at many institutions.
Should it be? Well, actually, insofar as
student loans are driving higher education, it should be…in much the same way
as tsunamis should follow earthquakes. Before my academic friends get angry,
allow me to clarify.
Next time.
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