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

[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.