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Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Unreason, says that Americans are growing dumber and dumber. From Salon.Com
To top it all off, when she was invited back to her alma mater, Michigan State University, to receive an honorary award, she struck up a conversation with an honors student in the College of Communications Arts, only to find that the young woman had never even heard of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats. Apparently, even when students felt like talking they didn’t know enough about their own disciplines to be worth talking to.
Such are the little disillusionments that vex a public intellectual’s soul. Furthermore, as Jacoby sees it, they are telling the same story as those shocking polls that show most Americans can’t list the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment or find Iraq on a map. All of it confirms her suspicion that “the scales of American history have shifted heavily against the vibrant and varied intellectual life so essential to a functioning democracy.”
She seems to be preaching to the choir, obviously the folks who buy and read her book don’t fit the description of the uneducated masses. To the educated, Jacoby isn’t saying anything new (Wow! Americans watch a lot of TV? I never knew that!), and the people she’s criticizing will never read the book.
From VioletEclipse:
The problem is, when someone — even someone I generally agree with — throws out a shock statistic like “99.99% of adults haven’t opened a single book this year,” you have to wonder about the data collection methods behind the statistic. Swallowing the numbers without knowing where they came from is participating in the dumbing-down. One might even say that throwing out such shock stats is helping to dumb down America.