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

[nwl.livejournal.com]

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.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

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."