[xerxes]

From the NYT link (reg req.)

$1:

Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: February 14, 2008

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”
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Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.

Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric G. Wilson, whose “Against Happiness” warns that the “American obsession with happiness” could “well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation.”

Then there is Lee Siegel’s “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob,” which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The New Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog (“you couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces”) and to praise himself (“brave, brilliant”).

Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a crank. “I expect to get bashed,” said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.

Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice.

T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said, “The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history,” adding that in periods “when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues.”

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.

Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational system or cause millions of Americans to switch off “American Idol” and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, “the empire of infotainment doesn’t stop at the American border,” she said, yet students in many other countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests.

In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. “Although people are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more,” she said.

Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism’s antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution.

Ms. Jacoby doesn’t leave liberals out of her analysis, mentioning the New Left’s attacks on universities in the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American and women’s studies to an “academic ghetto” instead of integrating them into the core curriculum, ponderous musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat that trivialize college-level learning.

Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to call herself a “cultural conservationist.”

For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard it is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. “I was stunned at how difficult it was for me,” she said.

The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and visual media made her realize just how pervasive the culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone is — even curmudgeons.

Just some food for thought

[Streaker]

Well, if one must answer either yes or no to the question it would have to be...... yes, if only because the US is socially conservative by western standards and thus has a strong anti-intellectual streak.

Excellent article.

[sasquatch2]

The American cultural emphasis on democracy and equality has always resulted in anything with the appearance of elitism being suspect.

$1:

In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. “Although people are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more,” she said.

I would agree! I have seen this infiltration of the educational system with the apparent goal of dumbing down the population----which is bearing fruit in their apparent success in foisting CO2 AGW as credible.
I recall a fellow who had succeeded in fleeing the DDR (East Germany)....
Intellectualism was viewed as a threat to communism.
The saying went that East German Police always moved in 3's.
1 to read
1 to write
1 to keep an eye on the two intellectuals..........

[Thanos]

I'm not going to deny that there's been a dumbing-down of the population as a whole over the last three decades but that's been a trend occuring in the entire Western world, not just in the United States. The British, for example, had the ingnominity of the results of a recent poll in which a sizable percentage of respondents believed that Winston Churchill never actually existed and that he was only a myth. Ask the current generation of Canadian high schoolers and college students about what happened to Canadians in Hong Kong in late 1941 and I'd wager that the dominant responses received would be blank-eyed stares.

The first place I'd point the finger of blame at is the social-liberalization of the school system, which decided to eliminate discipline and core curricula (eg, phonics, history) in favour of trendier methods (eg, whole language, "social studies") of teaching that have definitively been proven to be failures but are still being used for some inexplicable reason. Another major problem has been the "Jackass"-ization of pop culture as a whole which promotes extreme stupidity (among young males especially) as an acceptable and even admirable pattern of behaviour. It doesn't help very much either when an entire generation is deliberately encouraged by the mass media to care more about the misadventures of Britney Spears than it is about who the next President will be.

I suppose the original article could have been more useful but he anti-US bias in it made it merely into another smear job. Once it goes from being about a negative growing trend that's affecting an entire border-transcending society (i.e., the modern West) to merely another vehicle to generate mockery of "those stupid Americans", it becomes clearer that it's less about information than it is about promoting mere anti-US bigotry in the Rick Mercer vein.

[Mustang1]

Curriculum - at least Ontario's - is fine and approaches like "whole language" have been in significantly altered over the years. The education system, in many ways, sets the expectations, but it's society that affects how they're met.

[xerxes]

lily lily:

$1:

The first place I'd point the finger of blame at is the social-liberalization of the school system, which decided to eliminate discipline and core curricula (eg, phonics, history) in favour of trendier methods (eg, whole language, "social studies") of teaching that have definitively been proven to be failures but are still being used for some inexplicable reason.

Some kids don't learn in the traditional way, and for them, whole language works. I think schools are now trying to determine each child's best learning style and working around that.

Even when we were growing up, some kids graduated without learning to read. Now we recognize dyslexia and other learning disorders and have strategies to deal with them.

*edit
Too true. Also, the phonics approach is largely dying out and is being replaced by whole language again yet again.

[Tricks]

What do you mean by whole language?

[xerxes]

Whole language is the way kids can be taught to spell largely by learning to recognise whole words , how their spelled, and what the words mean. Phonics teaches kids to spell words by sounding out how the word sounds and is largely blamed as the reason why so many people can't spell properly anymore.

[Knoss]

$1:

Whole language is the way kids can be taught to spell largely by learning to recognise whole words , how their spelled, and what the words mean. Phonics teaches kids to spell words by sounding out how the word sounds and is largely blamed as the reason why so many people can't spell properly anymore.

All children should learn phonics but whole language can be useful for many children who do learn to memorise words. At age four I could read words such as Sears, Ford and Versatile from memorising trademarks. Of course the primary limitation of phonics is that English spelling is based on history: we use numerous phonetic systems, and our language was not standardised in any respect until the 1600’s when printing came to England.

$1:

Some kids don't learn in the traditional way, and for them, whole language works. I think schools are now trying to determine each child's best learning style and working around that.

That is the best way: personalise education based on students needs.

[Mustang1]

xerxes xerxes:

lily lily:

$1:

The first place I'd point the finger of blame at is the social-liberalization of the school system, which decided to eliminate discipline and core curricula (eg, phonics, history) in favour of trendier methods (eg, whole language, "social studies") of teaching that have definitively been proven to be failures but are still being used for some inexplicable reason.

Some kids don't learn in the traditional way, and for them, whole language works. I think schools are now trying to determine each child's best learning style and working around that.

Even when we were growing up, some kids graduated without learning to read. Now we recognize dyslexia and other learning disorders and have strategies to deal with them.

*edit
Too true. Also, the phonics approach is largely dying out and is being replaced by whole language again yet again.

Really? In Ontario?

[xerxes]

Well I can't speak for Ontario obviously.

[Mustang1]

xerxes xerxes:

Well I can't speak for Ontario obviously.

Oh...because currently the Ontario curriculum hasn't seen a major ministry shift since the Harris Conservative initiatives

[Tricks]

lily lily:

Google is your friend

Tried that. Still get what it was trying to say.

[Tricks]

xerxes xerxes:

Whole language is the way kids can be taught to spell largely by learning to recognise whole words , how their spelled, and what the words mean. Phonics teaches kids to spell words by sounding out how the word sounds and is largely blamed as the reason why so many people can't spell properly anymore.

Why not teach both? I don't even know what I was taught. Probably whole language.

[Mustang1]

Tricks Tricks:

xerxes xerxes:

Whole language is the way kids can be taught to spell largely by learning to recognise whole words , how their spelled, and what the words mean. Phonics teaches kids to spell words by sounding out how the word sounds and is largely blamed as the reason why so many people can't spell properly anymore.

Why not teach both? I don't even know what I was taught. Probably whole language.

You can't teach both as, depending upon the curriculum guidelines, general student expectations were implemented at the expense of individual outcomes.

Whether you were "taught" whole language depends on when you went to school. It was quasi phased out in the 1995/1997 Ontario curriculum implementation, but it did exist, especially in primary instruction, prior to that policy