are Americans hostile to knowledge?

[rm]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/books/14dumb.html

Worth it for the "cultural conservationist" label alone. I've been looking for a phrasing of that sentiment.

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

But our school system remains a mystery to me. We've poured trillions into our country's education, and it continues to decline. I don't know what the cause is, though I've read dozens of theories to explain it. Maybe it has to do with some of these ideas I've put forth, or maybe, somehow, we're just growing stupider for no reason.

I like to blame, among other things, self-esteem culture for this one. Everything must be easy enough for everyone to do well at or people won't like themselves. Makes me ill.

[phaenix-ash.livejournal.com]

no, at least partially because smart children are mocked by their peers and this kind of culture where everyone wins makes popularity much more important than actually knowledge and ability. children who do escape that trap and excel are motivated by something else, perhaps from home or internally or elsewhere.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Also, smart children are bored by curricula that don't just not challenge them but actively insult them.

[tdanaher.livejournal.com]

I like to blame, among other things, self-esteem culture for this one. Everything must be easy enough for everyone to do well at or people won't like themselves. Makes me ill.

I agree. Where this manifests itself to ill effect in particular is in the education of the very teachers who then go on to educate. A person who has been passed along uncritically from point to point in the process of learning to be a teacher, with so much need for people who want to be one that they are slurped up without so much as a boo at them for being incompetent or even horrible at the job, leads to class after class of poorly-educated children becoming poorly-educated adults who then become poorly-educated teachers who breed poorly-educated children, world without end.

[asa-dachi.livejournal.com]

On the overall topic, the dumber-ing of Americans, I have to say this isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Anti-intellectualism was one of the forces that helped Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson in back-to-back elections.

I think perhaps the sentiment behind this is a combination of jealousy, fear, anger, frustration... on both parts. When people who are too lazy, ill-equipped or uninterested to study a topic have their opinions questioned they choose to react from the guy instead of listening and evaluating. In contrast, idealist intellectuals who KNOW they have it all figured out tend to stop listening and start debating at the first opportunity, never stopping to think that there might be serious considerations that hadn't crossed their minds.

In the end factors such as the rise of global communication, the web-nets, the 24/7 media presence, etc. perhaps more frequently irritate and remind us of this sentiment, regardless of which aspect affects us directly.

To the specific point raised about our schools, it seems to be the biggest issue lies in the home. If kids were being raised with proper values, learning self-control, celebrating individual expression and creativity, etc. then they wouldn't need a self-esteem incubator in the public school system. They fire a teacher for adding to the sexual education curriculum beyond approved state standards. But they demonize the same faculty if their precious snowflakes are spreading STD's because they weren't taught to wrap that willy...

Okay... I'm heading back to my rocker to take a nap. :P

-asa

[heron61.livejournal.com]

On the overall topic, the dumber-ing of Americans, I have to say this isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Anti-intellectualism was one of the forces that helped Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson in back-to-back elections.

I was going to post something very similar. A distrust of knowledge and intelligence has been common in the US since at least the mid 19th century. I don't understand the origins of it all, but I do know that this anti-intellectualism is quite pervasive. I first noticed it in the mid 1970s, when I visited the UK as a young teen and listened to ordinary middle class non-academics speaking in ways that I only typically saw among academics in the US, and it's clearly been around significantly longer than that.

I'm fairly certain that at least some of it came from the process of the US distinguishing itself from Europe, which has been long-characterized in the US as a continent of people who are lazy, over-educated, and possibly effeminate, traits that were contrasted with US traits like being "hard-headed", "realistic", and placing much value in "self-determination".