Are Americans hostile toward knowledge?

Hold it.

 

There's certainly nothing wrong in being innately familiar with practical knowledge and book knowledge.

I'm happy that I can find countries on a map or am able to determine which foreign language I am hearing is. But I'm also equally happy that I know how to tie a knot, dress a boar, fix a toilet or retool code for my computer, too.

Trust me on this when I tell you the disconnect and almost seemingly war against intellect is not just a U.S. problem. There is much ignorance here in Unoccupied Europe both in young adults and older people, too.

The key difference I have noticed, however, is that the Europeans I have encountered -- indeed Asians, Africans and Middle Easterners, too -- don't frown on reading not just one newspaper but several. They read books, voraciously. They seek to understand the world they live in.

The last time I was stateside, visiting friends and family, no one could recommend any good books but boy they sure could talk about the latest episode of American Idol or Lost or the latest fashion victim on gofugyourself.com

Hell, I dig entertainment news and gossip, but I also believe there is something to be said for being politically, geographically and historically aware of past and current events so as to get a bean on how the future might unfold.

Being smart is something that should not be looked down upon despite this new culture of everyone must be made to feel they're OK.

 

Part of the problem is that with the advent of the internet, USA Today (and its 4-5 inch stories), Headline News, MTV, etc. that people's attention spans are reduced. There are a growing number of people with the attitudes: Why bother watching a 30-minute special on an important topic when the newscast can summarize the key points in 3 minutes? Why bother reading a 15-18 inch in-depth piece on an issue when it can be summed up in 5-8 inches in a story on the internet?
If you know where to look up a pertinent fact on the internet, why bother memorizing it. If you're spending more time texting or IM'ing or message board posting where the information can be at your fingertips with a couple of mouseclicks or keystrokes, why bother memorizing it?
Not ranting that the internet has made people hostile to knowledge, just saying that in the changing culture with reduced attention spans and more information readily available people are becoming dumber.
Or you could make the argument that rather than try to remember the various factions in Iraq or the economic factors that are leading to a recession and what it is that people are lazy and it's easier to remember the name of Britney's latest boyfriend or hospital or who was kicked off the island on Survivor (or off the show on AI).


On other knowledge topics touched on in this thread. I don't have a good mechanical knowledge. I can see how a toilet works. But I don't have the coordination/confidence to attempt a tank rebuild or something like that myself. Replacing the flapper easy enough. Replacing the balance ball or other equipment in the back of the toilet? Nope. Computer coding I could learn. I know enough with computers (graduated from Chubb in the late 90s with honors in Help Desk Support, but only jobs I was being offered paid less than half of what I was making part-time in journalism, so I turned them down) where I can install drives into the computer if I have to and do other fixes I need.

 

Likewise, it could be said that there's a common mistake among conservatives. It's a self-righteous conviction that they know what's best for everyone else; for example, which TV programs we should be allowed to watch or whom we should be allowed to marry.

 

I never come across people as stupid as articles such as these claim are out there.
Around this board, there are people who all the time blow me away with their knowledge, whether I agree with their opinions or not, and I consider myself a reasonably smart person.
I honestly don't believe there are two educated people in Manhattan who don't know what Pearl Harbor was about. No way.

 

Intelligence, as a whole, is not down and has not changed.

Rather, our exposure to ignorance - via television, movies, trashy magazines, rotten music, the Internet - is through the roof. These mediums have equalized smart and stupid. It's also introduced a new phenomenon: The smart analyzing the stupid.

Finally - and this point cannot be discounted - the rise of extracurricular activities in the school has altered the fundamental purpose of attending school for most children. High school and college is a blur for most kids. They don't go there to acquire knowledge. They go there to get through it.

 

Only could be said?

And again: The concept of Hondo criticizing someone else for acting smug and superior to everyone else is irony clearly beyond his feeble means.

 

Yeah. They do. Even the smart kids. The premium isn't on acquiring knowledge as much as the list of AP courses, extracurriculars, community service, and whatever other extras you need to get into the same top school that everyone else wants to get into.

 

I don't know about the 1930s education of Oklahoma and Texas, but I do know that the majority of my graduating class would not have graduated from my high school in the 19th century, when it opened. Until the 1920s, it awarded bachelor's degrees, and students who made it out were fluent in two languages (English and German, French or Latin) and had taken classical studies and advanced arithmetic. It was, in simple terms, a school that the "intellectual" type attended.

The problem in America is simple to identify, but it isn't simple to fix. First, it's not cool to be smart. It's not cool to show up on test day and be the kid who spent two hours studying the night before. It's not cool to listen to your group of friends bitch about Cs and Ds while you have straight As. It's cool to make a cheat sheet the hour before the test or to stress about how the hell you're going to get your 3rd period homework done before 3rd period because you didn't do it the night before.

It just isn't cool to be smart.

Second, we teach for the test. Even before NCLB, the move to standardized tests started. Now it's moving 150 m.p.h. and it isn't slowing down. It's a bad way to teach and a bad way to learn, and it's an even worse way to evaluate how much students are learning. It turns students into robots and it emphasizes how much we can teach instead of how much they can learn.

As a country, we have an air of superiority that we think means we don't need to learn a second language, we don't need to know calculus and we don't need to know what continent Namibia is on.

And because of that, departments at universities are filled with Asians or Middle Easterners that do want to learn that stuff. Americans bitch about the fact that they have to go see a foreign doctor without even realizing that it's because the majority of our country is too lazy to go to med school.

 

My observations, completely unsupported by anything resembling research or study, lead me to believe that the problem isn't that people are "dumb" vs."smart", or "willing to learn" vs. "not giving a damn about the world around them" or "well-rounded" vs. "myopic" or whatever. It's that for most of us, education is functional; the means to an end. Once we learn it, we either use it or we flush it, and usually the determining factor is "how will this affect my life today?" If you're a plumber, then "replacing a copper pipe" stays while "give three reasons the War of 1812 took place" goes by the wayside.

"Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" is bad case becoming law in the eyes of the populi because it measures two very unequal classes. Fifth-graders are spending every day in the immersion of fifth grade studies. The contestants who, assuably, all successfully attended fifth grade, either use the experience to build on loftier learnings or they dump it because, again, it doesn't affect them. But just that this show exists is fuel for the fire of those who think we're a bunch of dimwit motherfuckers. Perhaps we are, but we're also a bunch of pragmatic dimwit motherfuckers. If we don't get something out of it, we don't stress ourselves retaining it. I'm not going to get a raise at work for being able to rattle off the full names (including middle) of all our presidents and vice presidents in order. Might impress a polinerd, but that's about it.

I can't help but to wonder if there's not an undercurrent of self-righteousness at play in this thread -- "I'm smart, why can't people be more like me?" Not that anyone's said that in so many words, but the theme of a lot of the posts within take a pretty dim view of people whose areas of expertiese fall outside the realm of the liberal arts education. What's the greater crime -- that the guy at the Jiffy Lube doesn't know more about Darfur, or that I can't change my oil?

 

Great post. Reminds me of someone else's argument.

 

"Blackboard Jungle" depicts students disdain, if not open hostility, for school. The movie was filmed in 1955, and I wonder when this rebellious mindset became prominent in the classrooms?