[Infowarrior] - Easy IO: Chronicling the dumbing-down of America

[Richard Forno]

Chronicling the dumbing-down of America
By Michiko Kakutani
New York Times
Article Launched: 04/20/2008 01:36:14 AM PDT
http://www.mercurynews.com/books/ci_8991225

There are few subjects more timely than the one tackled by Susan Jacoby in
her new book, "The Age of American Unreason," in which she asserts that
"America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance,
anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism."

For more than a decade, there have been growing symptoms of this.
Conservatives have turned the term "intellectual" into a dirty word in
politics; policy positions tend to get less attention than personality and
tactics in the current presidential campaign; and the democratizing
influence of the Internet is working to banish expertise altogether, making
everyone an authority on everything.

Meanwhile, studies show that American students are falling behind students
from other developed countries in science and math, and that ignorance of
basic civics class fundamentals, not to mention basic liberal arts concepts,
is widespread.

In "American Unreason," Jacoby, the author of earlier books like
"Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism," explores this dismaying
phenomenon. Her book is smart, well researched and frequently cogent, but
just as often the material is overly familiar, blandly reprising arguments
made by others, while failing to pull these observations together into a
coherent, new argument.

As Jacoby sees it, there are several key reasons for "the resurgent American
anti-intellectualism of the past 20 years." For one, television, video games
and the Internet have created a "culture of distraction" that has shortened
attention spans and left people with "less time and desire" for "two human
activities critical to a fruitful and demanding intellectual life: reading
and conversation."

The eclipse of print culture by video culture began in the 1960s, Jacoby
argues, and the ascendance of youth culture in that decade also promoted an
attitude denigrating the importance of tradition, history and knowledge.

By the '80s, she goes on, self-education was giving way to self-improvement,
core curricula were giving way to classes intended to boost self-esteem and
old-fashioned striving after achievement was giving way to a rabid pursuit
of celebrity and fame.

It was also in the '60s, Jacoby writes, that a resurgent fundamentalism
"received a jolt of adrenaline from both the civil rights laws" and the
later "cultural rebellions."

Another problem, Jacoby argues, is this country's insistence on local
control of schools, which means that "children in the poorest areas of the
country would have the worst school facilities and teachers with the worst
training."

The ignorance resulting from the absence of national education standards,
combined with the resurgent anti-intellectualism now abroad in the land,
Jacoby concludes, is dangerous for any country, but especially dangerous for
a democracy.

THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON

By Susan Jacoby

Pantheon Books, 356 pp., $26