The Dumbing of America
February 18th, 2008The zombie hordes are outside my window, ho hum, maybe I’ll write a piece for the Washington Post.
Via: Washington Post:
“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.
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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.
Chalk it up, first of all, to public education, which: finds a way to punish superior educational achievement by all sorts of methods from bullying “nerds” to quashing independent thought and initiative to demanding conformity. Second, chalk it up also to the lack of desire in any educational format to require the fluency in foreign languages, especially Spanish (I for one would not be too upset if fluency in Spanish or another foreign language was required to graduate high school)…it is well known that people who speak two or more languages fluently have more brain/memory capacity as well as more earning power. Finally, the most alrming reason American students are becoming dumbed down is legal prescription drug usage for ADHD, ADD, “depression” and other so-called “disorders” that “disallow” kids to function properly in schools, especially boys…and that also includes their parents. Nearly all those school shootings were done by kids on drugs like ritalin or prozac. And when the parents themselves are either boozers or on drugs like that, how can they help their kids achieve…and why would they care about this to begin with?
But, then again, it’s easy to blame all this on “religion”. As if all Christian kids were idiots and all atheist kids were geniuses. If you want to blame religion, they ask yourself why is it that Jewish kids are consistently better achievers than just about anyone, religious Jew or secular Jew? then again, what group of kids has consistently won national spelling bees? Christian homeschoolers!
For anyone on this list that’s not familiar, you should read John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education. Required reading to understand what’s happening… and why.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm
Henry Kissinger is an intellectual. The brains behind any weapons technology are intellectuals. The architects of the wetlands draining around New Orleans were intellectuals. Intellectualism fueled racism and imperialism for centuries. Anti-intellectualism is nothing but a cultural street sweeper to make room on the street for the new ideas, that are there but are being held back by the Henry Kissingers of the world. The revolutionaries of the 1960s advocated sweeping away the old ideas, and today’s anti-intellectualism is a direct result. It would be nice if the prevailing intellectuals would step aside gracefully when the world they envision no longer reflects reality. But they hang onto their decrepit ideas the way a dog hangs onto a slobbery rag in a tug-of-war game, so the the anarchists, the Nazis, the Khymer Rouge, the NASCAR and American Idol fans have to be “liberated” to do their thing. When their job is done they slide back into the sewers until they’re needed again. It’s a horrible, disgusting process, but it’s life. We all came into the world with our mothers screaming and pissing, shitting, and bleeding all over us. What do you expect?