The Dumbing of America

[kevin_standlee]

As it happens, Lisa and I were discussing this very subject yesterday, to varying degrees of despair. Thanks to jaylake for spotting it.

The Dumbing of America -- not only are Americans getting dumber, but we're proud of being dumb, too. Possibly this is why intellectual throwbacks like Lisa and I enjoy old radio programs like Jack Benny more than most modern fare.

Comments

[pnh.livejournal.com]

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.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

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.

[nwl.livejournal.com]

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.