The Bush administration has been famously populated either by the corrupt or by incompetents who couldn’t manage a third class brothel. But the fear is that this is not just bad deciding by The Decider but a more sinister trend: the country is so dumbed down that educated and literate good people (folks!) are becoming fewer.:
– In 1982 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; in 1992 the figure was 67%, and over 40% of Americans under 44 did not read a single book in a year.
– the number of 17 year olds who read nothing outside school doubled between 1984 and 2004.
– babies between 8 and 16 months have been shown to recognize an average of 6 to 8 fewer words for every hour spent watching videos. (Univ of Washington 2007).
– One in five adults think the sun revolves round the Earth (Nat. Science Foundation)
– Nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 don’t think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is made. Geography as a subject in school is disappearing.
– The astonishing lack of general knowledge, even among well educated people with PhDs, is one of the things that struck me personally when I came years ago to the Unites States.
– The video culture has meant that Presidential candidates in 1988 had only 9.8 seconds nowadays to get a point across, compared with 42.3 seconds in 1968 . This has probably got worse under the anti-intellectual government of the last seven years and with the increasing grip on the media by a small group of right-wingers.
– The steady drip-drip of anti-government propaganda and pressure to reduce taxes has discouraged good candidates from top universities from joining government service. We are getting the government we deserve.
– This is a pincer movement, not just a phenomenon of the know-nothing right wing – the academics have written Shakespeare and the greats of English literature out of their curricula and have substituted Latino, homosexual and African-American Studies, all right as short course but not subjects for degrees. Meanwhile colleges have given tenure to the professors involved (William and Mary in Virginia is a good case) . Oh, and everyone has to have an A Grade!
One could go on to the faith items: “intelligent design”, the age of the earth, the creation of Man, the plot by the United Nations to take away everyone’s guns and control the water supplies – – but I won’t. Epicurus might find better expletives than mine to attack these trends.
How will we be governed in the future? Answer: by morons proud to be morons.
(Source: largely The Week, February 29th 2008)
And huge numbers of folks is hapy and prowd to be ignirant slobs. Talk about class warfare!
Republicans have no idea how deeply offended other people are at the way the country has been governed. Torture is only one of many un- American things these people have done. As the Germans said in 1946 – never again!
But you may be right. Where are you going to find lawyers who understand the Constitution and health administrators who have any science? Just to name two.
So what will Obama do about the education in your country?
This is important to us in England because we still acknowledge the USA as the most powerful nation on earth (albeit rapidly losing this position to China). It is discomforting to think that the world is directed by such uneducated, scientifically illiterate, and misled leaders. I was about to write, but at least, unlike in China,there is a semblance of human rtights amongst these leaders, ….. am I right or wrong about that??