Smarter Than A Fifth-Grader
I was on World Have Your Say again last night (if you’re my mom, you can download the show). The discussion was about Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Unreason, which claims that Americans are getting dumber and dumber. Most of what she had to say was an attack on “video culture”, essentially saying that Americans watch too much TV, which leads us to swallow information in smaller soundbytes with less critical thinking, which leads to a dumbed-down knowledge of the world, which leads to uniformed decisions.
The problem is, when someone — even someone I generally agree with — throws out a shock statistic like “99.99% of adults haven’t opened a single book this year,” you have to wonder about the data collection methods behind the statistic. Swallowing the numbers without knowing where they came from is participating in the dumbing-down. One might even say that throwing out such shock stats is helping to dumb down America.
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(Probably) Similar Posts:
- Live At The BBC on November 28, 2007
- Have Your Say Podcast on February 15, 2008
- On BBC Radio Again! on February 2, 2008
- On My Soapbox, With Cliches About China on February 14, 2008
- on April 3, 2008
1Hugo
wrote on 4 March 2008 at 20:41
I AGREE! you Rock!
2???
wrote on 4 March 2008 at 22:10
. . . do they have books in America
3Hugo
wrote on 4 March 2008 at 22:16
yes but only is Manga counts
4Hugo
wrote on 4 March 2008 at 22:26
ok… i ment to say and now its no longer funny but “only if manga counts” sorry
5threegee
wrote on 5 March 2008 at 0:58
I say, no more uniforms for decisions! From now on, decisions get to choose their own clothes, like the rest of us.
Silly rabbit, books are for kids.
6Meg
wrote on 5 March 2008 at 8:52
??? — Sadly, it’s not having books that’s the issue, it’s the opening and looking inside.
I actually agree with the majority of what she is saying. But it seems like she’s only reaching people who read academic books, which is either preaching to the choir of educated pleasure-readers OR cliquish backslapping, using the academic argument to prove “we’re smart, they’re not”. I can’t condemn making fun of dumb people (for proof, see previous years of blog entries) but it seems that readers of the book will respond with agreement but not surprsie, while non-readers will see it as elitist whining and go back to American Idol.
7Meg
wrote on 5 March 2008 at 9:14
by the way, Hugo boss, what have you got against comics? They’ve got words and everything!
8Anonymous
wrote on 5 March 2008 at 18:15
America is the richest and the most powerful country in the world. “If you are smart, why aren’t you rich?”