Wednesday, August 29th, 2007
Is our children learning? Sadly, no.
It’s official. America is in danger of losing its status as second-to-none in just about every measurable category. First, the heavy industry sector, such as steel production, moved overseas to reduce costs. Labor-intensive manufacturing followed soon after, for much the same reason - because sweatshops are so much better than good old American ingenuity, I guess. As a result, we’re no longer the world’s number one producer of manufactured goods.
Then problems started cropping up in our financial sector. As with industry, there was a steady drip, drip, drip of scandal after scandal, from the Savings and Loan crisis (which culminated in the Keating Five) to the dot-com bust to Enron and now the subprime mortgage crisis. It didn’t help matters that the European stock market closed higher than its American counterpart for the first time since World War I back in early April.
Now, we’re losing our intellectual edge.
At first, it was just IT jobs getting sent overseas as part of the obsession with shipping all non-management jobs out of the U.S. in a vain effort to reduce costs. Then there was Bush’s order forbidding federal funds for embryonic stem cell research because a clump of cells smaller than the period at the end of this sentence is somehow more important than those already here who have debilitating diseases. We quickly fell behind other countries with more liberal policies in that important research endeavor. But the chickens may finally be coming home to roost.
Last week, an AP-Ipsos poll revealed that 25% of all Americans read no books in the last year. As distressing as that fact is, it’s nothing when you realize that the decline in American readership is merely a symptom of a larger problem: anti-intellectualism run amok.
To some degree, there is an inherent bias against intellectualism already built into the system. I’m sure you’re well aware of the stereotypical cliquishness that makes high school life such a living hell for most people that they’d rather not relive the experience - “dumb jocks” always picking on the “nerds” when they’re not making out with the “bimbo cheerleaders.” This dynamic gets played out in various forms in high schools all across the country, and sometimes the results are tragic.
But that dynamic is just one small feature of the structural impediments intellectuals face during their developmental years. Over at Group News Blog, Jesse “Doc” Wendel uses his own experience in this regard to point out because intelligent students are forced to learn alongside their less mentally well-endowed peers, this causes boredom and frustration in the intelligent, and envy among the “normal” students, thus feeding the paradigm described above.
Sadly, this anti-intellectual bent gets reinforced once one is out of school - particularly in the media. Intellectuals are consistently portrayed in American media as elitist, arrogant snobs who are out of touch with with “the common man’s” everyday experience. Subsequently, it becomes something of a sport in the media to point out every instance where the “brains” get it wrong. Remember, it was the “librul” media who painted Al Gore as a fancy-pants know-it-all elitist whom no one liked (when they weren’t disparaging him as an out-and-out liar), while The Most Holy George W. Christ was supposed to be “the guy you’d like to have a beer with.” Meanwhile, there is also a tendency in modern media to reduce news down to the rapidly digestible level, even when an important news event would be better served by more in-depht coverage. Hence, the constant coverage of every burp, fart and drunken panty-flash of the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton literally drowns out the few sound bites deemed newsworthy about Torture Czar Alberto Gonzales’ resignation, among other things. For a more in-depth analysis of anti-intellectualism in American culture, see Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter and Anti-Intellectualism in American Media: Magazines & Higher Education by Dane S. Claussen.
Sadly, this bias against intelligence frequently gets used to conservative ends. Conservatives constantly deride universities as communist-infested indoctrination centers, demanding wingnut welfare as a “remedy” to a nonexistent problem. An unnamed Bush Administration official once derisively informed Ron Suskind that those who sought to fact-check the arguments for war in Iraq were part of the “reality-based” community. It was this comment, perhaps, that prompted Stephen Colbert to quip that “reality has a well-known liberal bias” at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last year.
And then there’s just outright denial of science that contradicts conservatives sacred cows. While this is seen frequently in the global warming “debate,” it is particularly salient in the Evolution vs. Creationism debate. Denialists have resorted to ever more disingenuous arguments to replace the teaching of evolution with the latest iteration of what can only be charitably described as “creationism-dressed-as-science.” Even as conservatives attempt to stuff local school boards with sympathetic politicos willing to write creationism into science curricula (and write evolution out, to varying degrees), on the political front they attempt to portray science as faith and consensus as dogma. Young Earth Creationist and Internet Huckster (and now, Convicted Tax Cheat) Kent Hovind is perhaps most notorious for this sort of tactic. The “dissertation” that he wrote for his PhD from diploma-mill Patriot U. is filled with repeated (unsubstantiated) assertions that evolution is a religion, and his multi-part video lecture series on evolution also makes the same claim ad nauseum.
If we’re not careful, we’ll end up with a society where this is considered genius-level intelligence:
So why does anti-intellectualism have so much cache with conservatives? Well, it makes people easier to propagandize to for one. You can’t exactly convince people that Iraq had weapons of mass distruction that they could launch on 45 minutes notice, or that evolution caused Hitler’s rise, or that emergency contraception pills are addictive and ineffectual if the schmucks that you’re trying to demagogue to are able to blow apart your claims in less than a minute, now can you? But there’s another angle here, as well. Dumbing down the populace also helps to create a permanent underclass, because if they aren’t educated, they have a much harder time achieving the American Dream and getting fair and equitable treatment from their bosses.
In short, if you want equality, you need to encourage intellectualism, not stifle it.
