Celibating Education: Part Too

In an earlier critique of the Amarillo Globe-News the term “moranification” was offered as an alternative to “stupidification” to describe the process by which the newspaper was idiofying the local populace. While moranification would certainly appear apropos given that the brainless are making a public effort to dim-witticize themselves further and definitely has cultural and political resonance, I have been advised that academically speaking it is imprecise. In clinical use moranification cannot be a legitimate development because “moran” is a state of intellectual and social impairment, whereas “stupidification” is a process under which individuals may achieve stupidity, or as the German philosophers called it deweisenheimerherstellung, to make (to do) or think stupid things, thus validating the term stupidification.

With due apologies to prodigal son, I must therefore continue to use the technical term in straight scholarly discourse, leaving “moranification” to more satiric work.

Turning now to the object at hand, previous disparagement of the Amarillo Globe-News as hostile to science, objective facts, intelligence, Constitutional law and exceedingly large cats may have given some readers the impression the paper’s assortment of boobs and contributing half-wits were America’s single source of stupidification. Now a new book by Susan Jacoby contends our entire nation is in the throes of the phenomenon.

Excerpted from “Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?”, The New York Times, 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?”

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.

[. . .]

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.

[. . .]

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.

[. . .] The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the [New York Public 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.

[. . .]

I am unable to answer Jacoby’s thesis directly, having not yet read the book because I am currently studying a Georgian underground classic on the British-Islamic clash-of-civilizations and its dramatic socio-political ramifications explicated in “Penelope and the Swarthy Barbary Pirates.” Any remarks then must be confined to the book review, however much Penelope enjoyed Captain Alhurkan’s scimitar.

A minor quibble with Jacoby is the implication that the stupidization of the country may be accounted for by recent failures in education. A perusal of the Globe-News, from its old farting dolts to its young whippersnappering chowderheads, would indicate our educational system has been failing throughout the entire 20th century. Either that or the system has successfully matriculated generation after generation of prating morans.¹

Obviously ignorance and anti-intellectualism is not just a local predicament. What is troubling is how fervently the proponents of unabashed ignorance and unbridled anti-intellectualism are dedicated to the cause. Thanks to the Amarillo Globe-News students will believe the Earth is 6,000 years old, George W. Bush ran a surplus and D*ve H*nry won the Nobel Prize for literature, another generation sadly, irretrievably Simpsonized.<sup>2


1</sup>Dr. Berliner argues in an upcoming monograph in “Philosophie in Wirklich Schlechtem Deutsch” that these dunces have filled American provincial journalism with “speichellecker schwachköpfe.”

²Less, not Homer.