A recent article in The Washington Post and the magazine The Week raised in its title the provocative and concerning question “How Dumb Can We Get?” Author Susan Jacoby argues that “Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mix of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism, and low expectations.” Since one of our school's central goals is to foster habits of mind that engender lifelong learning, her piece caught my attention.
Jacoby posits that “our era of 24/7 infotainment” and “the triumph of video culture over print culture” has led to a “disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science, and history.” She cites some pretty shocking statistics about reading across all socioeconomic classes, but it is perhaps the most jarring amongst the college educated. “In 1982, 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67% did. And more than 40% of Americans under 44 did not read a single book - fiction or non-fiction - in the course of a year.” Young people's reading habits are even more concerning: “the proportion of 17 year-olds who read nothing unless required to do so for school more than doubled between 1984 and 2004.”
As Jacoby says, it's old news that young people are now dominated by video, electronic, and digital forms of communication. But she makes the point that across our culture this digital dominance seems to be creating an inability to concentrate on any one thing or anything complex - and that that tendency is dangerous for our democracy.
Jacoby feels today's digital citizens aren't learning to be critical evaluators of the information that comes their way in increasingly shorter and shorter sound bites; that there is little tolerance for, or ability to follow, nuanced arguments; and that there is a general impatience with acquiring information if it requires time, effort, thought, or evaluation. This has led, in Jacoby's view, not just to an “erosion of general knowledge,” but also to the public's disdain for knowledge. She contrasts this with how in February 1942 President Roosevelt “urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio ’fireside chat' so that they might better understand the geography of battle.” Stores sold out of maps, 80% of Americans tuned in, and FDR “was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, ’they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin.'” As Jacoby writes, “it was a different country and different citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity.”
Today, according to a 2006 National Geographic - Roper survey, “nearly half of Americans between ages 18-24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it ’not at all important' to know a foreign language, and only 14% consider it very important.” Jacoby feels that these are signs not just of a lack of knowledge but of a growing “arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider that one in five American adults thinks the sun revolves around the Earth), it is the alarming number of Americans who have concluded they do not need to know such things in the first place.”
Jacoby is probably right in saying there is no quick cure for this “epidemic of anti-intellectualism.” She is also right in saying that “rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job.” We need instead to promote reading, thinking, attending, and questioning; we need to inculcate patience in acquiring, understanding, and exploring skills and ideas; we need to foster an attitude that promotes respectful and serious discussion of ideas that can't always be reduced to sounds bites; and we need to teach kids to look below the surface for what is not readily apparent, not easily digested, and is perhaps nuanced and boring. In our small way, this is a big part of what a Country School education is all about. Even though it may be counter-cultural, it's another important way we prepare kids for leadership and for the future.