Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

[piratefish08]

GREAT book I just finished on the 'dumbing down of America'.....

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free --- by Charles P. Pierce

Book Description:

The Culture Wars Are Over and the Idiots Have Won.

A veteran journalist's acidically funny, righteously angry lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States.

In the midst of a career-long quest to separate the smart from the pap, Charles Pierce had a defining moment at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where he observed a dinosaur. Wearing a saddle... But worse than this was when the proprietor exclaimed to a cheering crowd, “We are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!” He knew then and there it was time to try and salvage the Land of the Enlightened, buried somewhere in this new Home of the Uninformed.

With his razor-sharp wit and erudite reasoning, Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States, and how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons more apt to vote for an American Idol contestant than a presidential candidate.

With Idiot America, Pierce's thunderous denunciation is also a secret call to action, as he hopes that somehow, being intelligent will stop being a stigma, and that pinheads will once again be pitied, not celebrated.

http://www.amazon.com/Idiot-America-Stupidity-Became-Virtue/dp/0767926145

[Deep13]

1. marking for future reference nt

[Donnachaidh]

2. the movie *Idiocracy* covers it very well too

It's quite the documentary of our times.

[live love laugh]

19. It should be required viewing. nt

[Motown_Johnny]

3. I consider that all Willful Ignorance more than stupidity

They don't want to believe the truth so they refuse to learn or try to understand anything that supports what they don't want to believe.

It seems like more of a mental illness than a lack of intellect IMO.

[Ikonoklast]

4. It was how DimSon was elected.

People like that wanted someone just like them as prezdent. They could relate to another simpleton.

[piratefish08]

5. There is a great synopsis of the Terry Schiavo trial in this book.......

Somebody mentioned Schiavo in another thread, which is what reminded me that I wanted to post this thread re: the book.

Recommended reading for all DU'ers.....



Happy 'Whatever You Are Celebrating' To All of you this season!

[tblue37]

6. On my _Teacher, Teacher_ website I have an article on this topic,

entitled "It's Stupid to Be Smart." Here is the link, if you are interested in reading it:
http://teacherblue.homestead.com/stupidsmart.html

Here are the first 3 paragraphs:

Surely one reason why American students rank so low when compared academically to students from other countries is that for the most part Americans think it's stupid to be smart.

We admire "smarts," of course, the sort of cleverness that allows one to manipulate people, play the game, acquire power and wealth, and get away with almost anything. But a love of learning for its own sake, or even a willingness to be taught something by someone more knowledgeable than oneself or to study diligently to master a subject--these are the hallmarks of the geek, the nerd, the loser.

Nor is it just students who convey to their peers the message that intellectual excellence is at best a second-class achievement. In high school or college, a championship sports team is lionized, and classes are sometimes even cancelled for victory parades. A student is more likely to get a full-ride scholarship to college if he is an exceptional athlete, even if he is only a marginal student, than if he is a talented scholar. Teenaged athletes, even merely adequate ones, are glorified as the elite in most American public schools, while students who focus primarily on academics receive only the sort of recognition that provokes jeers in assembly--plaques, certificates, or perfunctory verbal congratulations.

<SNIP>

Other countries are amazed that we offer college scholarships to people for their athletic prowess, even if they can't do junior high level academic work, yet our brightest students are expected to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt to get a college degree--at the undergraduate level, not even at the graduate level. If they even get a job after graduating, which is not at all certain, they are likely to make $25,000 to $30,000 a year, hardly enough to pay down such huge loans!

[lazarus]

14. My sister and I

both received free rides to Alabama for academics. I was also offered a free ride to another college just to compete on the College Bowl team. Academic scholarships are out there, you just have to look for them.

Sports scholarships are actually kind of rare, just a few hundred at most institutions.

[tblue37]

15. My daughter had a full academic scholarship, and my son had a 50% academic scholarship. I know

they are out there, but they are not common, and they are not usually full scholarships, as athletic scholarships are. Way too many excellent students are priced out of a college education while athletes who are not necessarily able to do college level work are offered full-ride scholarships.

Because of their scholarships, my own kids got their undergrad degrees without going into debt, but I teach college, so I see how many bright kids struggle to find a way to pay for a bachelor's degree--and end up in deep debt to do so. Just because my own kids got scholarships, that doesn't mean I don't feel bad for all the bright kids who don't.

[lazarus]

16. true, not everyone qualifies`

but, to be honest, football brings in huge amounts of cash at most schools, paying completely for all the "lesser" sports, and especially the Title IX sports. So I don't begrudge a few scholarships to that end. And not all the athletes are underperformers. Graduation rates among athletes are fairly close to those of the school population at large, IIRC. Alabama, for instance, is the top team in the country, and they have a 4.0 GPA running back who just won the Heisman, and a quarterback who's been invited to apply for a Rhodes scholarship.

[AdHocSolver]

18. The story of "M" at your website provides the essential reason why today's kids belittle education.

You wrote:

An eighteen-year-old acquaintance of mine (call him "M") made a couple of complaints to me one day while talking about two courses he was enrolled in as a part-time college student. His first complaint was that the classes were over too fast: he was enjoying both classes so much that he hated when the fifty-minute periods were up. His other complaint was that most of his classmates typically began shuffling their feet and packing up their books three or four minutes before the period actually ended. In one class, the low-level noise drowned out the last points the professor made. In the other class, taught by a young and inexperienced teaching assistant, the instructor's insecurity led her to accede to the pressure applied by impatient students and to end the class a few minutes early each day.

The key phrase is:

"he was enjoying both classes so much that he hated when the fifty-minute periods were up."

The organization of class time into arbitrary fifty-minute periods sends the subliminal message to students: "The subject matter of this class period is not worth any more of your time than even an hour."

I am repeating here a post I made at another thread a few days ago. The gist of it is that the school system itself, by the way it is organized, sends the message to many students that learning is for nerds and not worth serious effort.

######
I could write a book or two about education in America, including education at the college level.

The philosophical and pedagogical basis of the U.S. educational system was developed in the early twentieth century by the powers-that-be in response to the large numbers of immigrants and the rapid expansion of industrialization of that era.

In short, the ruling class needed to quickly train immigrants in at least minimal proficiencies in English and reading, writing, and arithmetic so that they could man the factories and offices of the corporations. Just enough history and "civics" was to be taught to indoctrinate the students in "patriotism".

I went to middle class public schools in a large city many years ago. They taught reading using the "look-and-say" method. We used the "Dick and Jane" readers.

"See Spot. See spot run. See Dick. See Dick run. See Jane. See Jane run..." Over and over again until your mind turns to mush.

I was fortunate to have, for my second grade teacher, a wonderful women who was planning on retiring at the end of the school year. She taught us phonics, which provided me with the opportunity to be able to read books, newspapers, and magazines beyond "grade level", as well as enable me to spell many words correctly without having to look in a dictionary.

Unlike many American children today, I enjoy reading, and developed skills in many areas of life through reading books and other types of reading matter, and applying what I read to problem solving.

In addition to the book "Why Johnny Can't Read: and What You Can Do About It" by Rudolf Flesch, there are the books of teacher John Taylor Gatto including the titles "Dumbing us down : the hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling" and "The underground history of American education : a schoolteacher's intimate investigation into the prison of modern schooling", among others.

Another set of books I read a few years ago are "How Children Fail" and "How Children Learn" by John Holt.

There are some book reviews of these books at a web site called LibraryThing.com, which I accessed through a local library web site.

A few short excerpts from reviews of Holt's books can explain better where I am coming from.

(snip)
***************
{A} quote attributed to William Hull (Educator). "If we taught children to talk they would never learn."...The author and Mr. Hull shared a 5th grade classroom. The book is a series of observational memos from Mr. Holt to Mr. Hull. The author intricately describes the communication gap between the school system and the child. Children want and need to learn. School systems want to teach. But the lessons often never meet in the middle."
***************

(snip)
***************
John Holt summarizes perfectly the problem with contemporary education: it emphasizes right answers rather than learning, production rather than thinking. Read this book to understand this problem and its results, as seen through his experience as a collaborative teacher and thoughtful observer. The rewards for "right answers" over thinking even persists at higher education levels. "What would happen at Harvard or Yale if a prof gave a surprise test in March on work covered in October? Everyone knows what would happen; that's why they don't do it." (p. 232)
***************

(snip)
***************
Holt blames the current system, pointing out that if a system consistently fails, the problem is with it, not its inputs or participants. In the summary section, he forcefully points out the negative effects of the current system - low self-esteem, ignorance about how to learn, and a mind trained not to want to do so.
***************

(snip)
***************
So far, one of the great quotations I've found is:"It used to puzzle me that the students who made the most mistakes and got the worst marks were so often the first ones to hand in their papers. I used to say, 'If you finish early, take time to check your work, do some problems again.' Typical teacher's advice; I might as well have told them to flap their arms and fly. When the paper was in, the tension was ended. Their fate was in the lap of the gods. They might still worry about flunking the paper, but it was a fatalistic kind of worry.... Worrying about whether you did the right thing, while painful enough, is less painful than worrying about the right thing to do." (74-75)
***************

(snip)
***************
The main message of the book is 'trust your children' - they are natural learners, and you are not going to have to force education down their throats. In fact, the less you do the better.
***************

(snip)
***************
In a similar vein, Holt also suggests that children be left alone to examine things, and given as much time as possible to get to grips with a task or challenge before receiving any instruction on it. He writes this with regard to maths and science experiments, but I think the principle could be widely applied.
***************

I do NOT blame teachers for this system. They are just as much victims of the system as are the students. The corporations, the politicians, the idiot academics, and nowadays the right-wing religious fanatics have so politicized education that it is difficult to imagine how meaningful education can be salvaged from the morass that we have today.
######

Civilization developed because people applied their brains to solving problems that interested them. Even if a student can get beyond "See Spot run." for three semesters to find some topic that interested them enough to want to learn more about it, fifty minutes a day in class, less the time for taking attendance, handing in homework, returning and discussing yesterday's quiz, provides about 25 minutes, if you are lucky, to discuss today's lesson.

Moreover, having students spend hours at home doing boring homework from five or six different classes totally on their own is NOT the same as getting instruction from a teacher. The teachers I learned the most from were the ones that displayed a love of their area of expertise, and inspired me in some way to learn more of what they knew.

The lucky students will have parents at home who are able to help them with homework. This gives students from affluent families an advantage in "getting good grades" over students from families whose parents have limited educational backgrounds.

Schemes of "grading" teachers to determine the amount of pay they get (so-called "merit" pay), and the funding of their schools, is such a fraud.

[chemenger]

7. " ... a secret call to action,"

Yea ... good luck with that. Like trying to stop a landslide.

The comedian Steve Allen wrote about this 10 years ago.

"I wrote a book a few years ago called Dumbth, a word based upon length and breadth and depth. The book addressed the deteriorating intelligence of the American people. We are now demonstrably dumber than we were even 25 years ago. There's occasionally a glimmer of hope with news of an effective teacher or school, but the general direction is still quite sharply down on the chart."

[Taitertots]

8. Our whole system raises the intellectually vacant on a pedestal

Who are the people most visibly making money?
Rock Stars, Rappers, Sports Stars, Actors/Actresses, and Bill Gates. There is no fame or glory in being intellectual. Even most inventors just end up working for the investor class who keep the intellectual rights on their inventions.

[Echo In Light]

9. Official Culture - A Natural State of Psychopathy? (interesting read)

http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/official_culture.htm

[arcadian]

10. Idiot Americans should be shamed.

[Echo In Light]

11. The brainwashed are unable to acknowledge and identify their affliction

Which, I s'pose is the entire point of the matter, don't you see.

[snagglepuss]

12. .

[david13]

13. "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life". Richard Hofstedler, about

1964? He documents the phenomena throughout the entire history of the usa. Don't forget what a dirty word Adlai Stevenson was referred to as during his two unsuccessful bids for the presidency in the 50's.
The epithet? A ... college professor!
dc

[AdHocSolver]

17. Another good read on the subject: Deer Hunting with Jesus by Joe Bageant.

The book's subtitle is "Dispatches from America's Class War."

It discusses how and why a large part of America's working class, who also often are right-wing religious fundamentalists, continue to work against their own interests.

This link is to the book's page on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Deer-Hunting-Jesus-Dispatches-Americas/dp/0307339378/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261725001&sr=1-1

[JCMach1]

20. Was so impressed that Britney Spears can count to three in her new song

Of course, she is not as smart as Pit Bull who can count to found in two different languages none the less. He's well on his way to being the new poet of our time alongside WillIam of Blackeyed Peas...

[Kablooie]

21. Sounds like we are walking in the footsteps of Chairman Mao.

[KrR]

22. Add KillTheBillers to the Idiot Americans list n/t

[Le Taz Hot]

23. I would think blind partisans

would fall into the "idiotocracy" category.