I’ve been meaning to mention an op-ed published in the Feb. 17 edition of the Washington Post titled “The Dumbing Of America.” That’s a weighty headline as-is, but it was followed with this subhead: “Call Me a Snob, but Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces.”
Author Susan Jacoby makes the case that we’re entering an age of “anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.” A large portion of her argument rests on the concept that video/interactive mediums have clobbered the printed page. As such, attention spans have atrophied. “The inability to concentrate for long periods of time — as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web — seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events,” she reasons. That’s a scary proposition, one I seem to find plenty of evidence for when I venture out for a drink at downtown watering holes.
Further evidence is given in a Harvard University study finding that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news of a presidential candidate’s voice dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds. Those mere seven seconds are what we’re basing our entire democracy on, for we all know that an average American will not go further than a television to find their news.
She continues: “The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place.” This, my friends, should shoot a fear so deep into your hearts that you deadbolt your door at night while sweating in a dark bedroom. If our arrogance truly has no boundaries, will even the word “mistake” soon be erased from the rarely opened dictionary?
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, wrote a rebuttal to Ms. Jacoby titled “We’re Smarter Than You Think.” Unfortunately, his response generally comes across as flimsy and meaningless. Knowledge and learning rarely takes place from an encyclopedia, online or gathering dust in a library. Sure, it’s a great place to start… but that interest must make the same leap electricity makes in your car’s spark plugs.
Alas, none of these pieces have solutions. The Post hosted a chat session on the article that yielded some decent reader feedback. Perhaps an unbundling of education and knowledge needs to be attempted; many confuse the two to be the same. The last question posed to Ms. Jacoby regarded her credentials. “My credentials, as you put it, are that I’m interested in almost everything. I’m a generalist in an era of specialization, and I like it that way.”
Discuss.