kevin_standlee | The Dumbing of America

I don't think Americans are getting dumber, and I don't think radio and TV has either. I'd put Sesame Street and The Electric Company up against Howdy Doody or the Mickey Mouse Club any day as far as intellectual content goes. And while Jay Leno and Dave Letterman are not going to dethrone Albert Einstein in the IQ department, the perpetually 29-year-old Jack Benny and his sidekick Rochester didn't strike me as having any educational value either. We wouldn't stand for a Rochester stereotype on the air today - we know better.

I would agree that the integrity and intelligence of TV and radio news has degenerated greatly since Murrow, Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley went off the air, but that's because the marketing droids who now run the broadcast industry know that entertainment sells more ads than serious fare.

The article contradicts itself by complaining that people don't read, they spend time surfing the web and creating pages on social networking sites. You can't do that without reading and writing. Children are reading and writing orders of magnitude more on the web than they ever did in classrooms. And they've developed their own shorthand for text messaging, something our generation is pretty clueless about.

It's not a dumbing down, it's a paradigm shift. We are in an era where images are easily shared, and if a picture is worth a thousand words, how many more words do I need to replicate a video? Yes, there has been a decline in spelling skills, but who cares? The important thing is to communicate, and I kan haz convers8shun jus fyne widout dem rulez.

Sir, Mr. Benny was perpetually 39 years old, not 29.

oops.

And here, Kevin Drum points out, correctly, that in that "Dumbing of America" essay, "Susan Jacoby spends 1,500 words telling us that Americans are getting dumber but doesn't offer a single piece of evidence to support this notion. Not one."

I find it remarkable how willing so many smart people of my acquaintance are willing to swallow everybody's-getting-stupider assertions without any backup whatsoever. Why, you'd think smart people were just as prone as any other human beings to groupthink and collective self-pity.

You're probably right. I want to believe that you're right, and that it just seems like people are getting dumber because with higher availability of information, we hear about more dumb people than we used to hear. It just seems to me that American society these days embraces stupidity with pride.

I think that in Lisa's case, she has always had difficulty understanding that just because she grew up among people who were generally more intelligent than her (her father was part of the scientific community at Los Alamos NM), that doesn't mean it was representative of society at large, and she's not really stupid herself. This has left her with considerable impatience with people less intelligent -- or possibly I should say more foolish, which isn't quite the same thing -- than her.

Asserting that one should have evidence of if we're getting dumber is fair. What sort of evidence should one consider in trying to decide the matter? Tests results? Number of high school grads? Is there an absolute as what measurement this is or can the evidence go either way depending on what one chooses to measure? It seems to me that this has been a topic for a number of years and the experts are still divided on what to look at.

Well, it might depend on examples. Have you ever seen Fox's Are You Smarter Than a Sixth Grader? I made the mistake of watching a few minutes of it while I was setting up the VCR a few weeks ago. It was painful in the extreme. Singer Kelly Pickler (who is destine to become the poster child for dumb blondes, taking it from Jessica Simpson, imho) was being "tested." When asked which family of instruments had the piccolo in it, she chose "percussion" because they both started with "P". I would have thought someone who was in the music business would have some familiarity with musical instrument. But, sadly, no. Then, she was asked while European country's capital was Budapest. She opened her blue eyes wide and declared she thought Europe WAS a country. I'm not sure how, but she settled on "France," even though she wasn't sure France was a country. I turned off the TV and left at that point. If she was acting, she did an excellent job. A friend said she saw Pickler on Ellen the next day, and, yes, she was that dumb.

On Monday the Today program had two people talking about this subject - are we dumber - and the clip of Ms. Pickler was one of their illustrations.

I'm with Patrick here. The only real evidence for increasing dumbness I could see was the knee-jerk assumption that anything presented on video was automatically less intelligent than anything presented as a book. And that, I'm afraid, was Ms. Jacoby being stupid, not Americans. Inability to adapt to new technology is not something to be proud of.

None of which is to say that there isn't a large amount of anti-intellectualism out there. I'm just not convinced it is getting any worse just because the media and politicians now pander to it rather than condescending to it.

My response is to look at the cultivated anti-intellectualism of Movement conservatism, and the simple numbers on evolution denial, and say, yep, we're dumber. Not necessarily less intelligent, but deliberately choosing as a culture to turn away from rationalism.

I don't think anyone is disputing the fact that there's a lot of dumbness around. But, as Patrick says, we'd like to see some evidence that people are actually dumber now than they were in previous generations. Remember that one of the things about mass media and the Internet is that they allow people to be visibly dumb in ways they never could be before.

And in any case, even if people are dumber, putting the blame on TV and surfing the Internet is just, well, dumb. If, as you say, certain political groups are cultivating anti-intellectualism, then that is their fault, not the fault of the medium they use to transmit the message.

Kevin, where I stand kids aren't getting "dumber". It is a lifestyle shift, nutritional shift, and cultural shift. Here is one of the third grade test questions that was recently given my students:
"This poem is an example of: A) Onomatopoeia, B)Alliteration C)Personification D)Rhyming prose" (It was a poem about a cat with lots of onomatopoeias). Yes, they are taught all those concepts and more. Eight and nine-year-olds. Shocking, isn't it? Tell me, did you know the difference of these concepts at eight?
This is just scratching the surface. Being in the trenches over the past 29 years I have seen a dramatic change in education. I have also seen parents who are really trying to keep up with those changes, and parents who often "shoot the messenger" with blame as to the current standards. Nutritional standards have also been an issue, and kids who don't go out to play have drastically changed over the years. We have parental paranoia (and justly so) about kids going out to play. God forbid they get out of the confines of the viewing area and get snatched, or scratched, or bruised. It's easier to set a child in a cushion of safety of the great babysitter (video) than to deal with a child suffering a cut or scrape. Some of my third graders have better skills than our IT department, so I'm just not seeing this "dumbing down" thing in that area. I am seeing a health crisis though, and that is frightening.

Well, now, that's an angle I really appreciate. You, after all, are out on the front line and see the students themselves. Thank you!

I don't remember at what grade level the poetic structure question you asked was introduced, although I do remember doing it. Maybe not until eighth grade, however.

The over-protectiveness meme is something to worry about, I guess. Personally, I think the fact that I was raised by my grandparents means I'm about a generation behind other 40-year-olds as far as my attitudes go. And of course I don't have children, so I don't have the emotional feel for this that they do. (If I had stuck with the family tradition, I'd have grandchildren by now.)

On the other hand, the dreaded NCLB has revolutionized teaching to the test, and offers very little life skills assessment. What I do find a good tool in education, the field trip, has been tragically albeit removed from the curriculum. It even made Newsweek.
Read on... http://www.newsweek.com/id/107596

Onomatopoeia was the answer to a question on Mastermind last night. My mind blanked. My mother got it wrong.

Susan Jacoby was on Bill Moyers last Friday and I found their conversation very interesting. You can read the transcript here:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02152008/transcript4.html

I always watch Bill Moyers (PBS). He has interesting, intelligent guests and I even end up listening to topics I thought I wasn't interested in. He discusses a wide variety of excellent, important topics.

And on Monday, Feb 18, 2008, page B2, The Washington Post had several articles about teaching Critical thinking in the "Schools & Learning" section in the larger "Metro" section.

Links are provided:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/02/18/ST2008021800038.html?sid=ST2008021800038

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/17/AR2008021702207.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/17/AR2008021702205.html

NOTE -- The Post only leaves articles in the public domain part of the website for 2 weeks. After than, the link goes dead and you will have to pay for the content. So copy/save/print actual text now if interested. (yes, I'm local to DC area)

This topic comes up every, oh, year or so, and it's back again. I've been reading about it and watched several articles on TV about it.

I thought one article really got close to the actual problem, if you will, when it pointed out that years ago people were encouraged to find out about places, such as using a map to follow where the fighting was going on in Europe. Today, people don't feel it's important to know where countries are. How many people are aware that Czechoslovakia is no longer a country, that it split into two countries (Czech Republic and Slovakia) over ten years ago? In my experience in talking with people, not many.

I'm not sure the word "dumb" is accurate (well, for some people it is), I think a more accurate word is "ignorant". I was talking with a 20 something who is fairly well educated, but she had no idea what part creating the atomic bomb had in ending WWII. At least she didn't think I was around during WWII as one 20 something did. I'm not THAT old, I just know history.

I think people are more ignorant than they used to be. There is no sense of history - nothing existed before Internet - and this is not a good thing.

I'm one of those few people aware of the country changes, but of course I need to know this stuff so I can do international transportation projects. Besides, I like maps and geography. My favorite category on the old The Joker's Wild game show was "Maps of States," a category I noticed people would pick only if they were absolutely forced to do so with a natural triple or something like that. (I seem to recall someone going "off the board" for a $50 question in a different category rather than take a $200 game-winning question in Maps of States.)

It drives me to distraction when I get relatively recent data extracts that still use the old codes for those countries. Mind you, it shows the way my mind works that my first reaction to the Kosovo's declaration independence was, "Oh, great, now I'll have to watch out for the new ISO-2 country code and make sure I don't misroute something the next time we do a European routing project."

The Dumbing of America

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Well!

Re: Well!

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Keeping up with the demands of education, not "dumbness".

Re: Keeping up with the demands of education, not "dumbness".

Re: Keeping up with the demands of education, not "dumbness".

Re: Keeping up with the demands of education, not "dumbness".

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Then The Post followed with Critical Thinking

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