Whoa whoa whoa…. dunces?

The Argument 

A week or two ago, author Susan Jacoby wrote an opinion essay in The Washington Post called: “The Dumbing of America.”  The tagline for her article: “Call Me a Snob, but Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces.”

Jaconby introduces her three-part argument:

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

She goes on to flesh out her argument by discussing how video (and all other “digital media”) reinforces the continuous shrinking of our attention spans and the general disintegration of our reasoning and intellect.  Indeed, she segues into what she observes to be an ”erosion of general knowledge” among Americans.  She reports that

nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.”

One can’t help but point to the unfortunate episode from the Ms. Teen South Carolina pageant as an illustration of Jacoby’s point.

Finally, she concludes that Americans are comfortable with their lack of intellectual drive.  She sees this as “a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse.  Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism.”

My Take 

Jacoby makes some good points in her column.  Arguably, people are reading less.  We rely more and more on gadgets and the web to be our second brains.  Americans do exhibit a certain ignorance about the rest of the world and what happens in it.  And I can personally attest to a shortened attention span.  But I disagree with the foundation of her argument, the smugness with which she delivers it, and her general lack of ideas for solving the problem she has highlighted.

First, she draws a shaky causal relationship between what she sees as the “dumbing of America” and the rise of digitial media.  She posits that the past twenty-five years that saw a decline in reading among youth ”encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.”  Yes the two time frames coincide and show correlation… but is it really cause-and-effect at play here?  I have no evidence otherwise, but she has weak evidence in favor of it.

She simply responds with “balderdash” to an argument made by Steven Johnson in his book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter – that toddlers are focusing, rather than wasting, their minds when they watch video.  She admits that she can’t prove that reading books is any better than surfing the web as far as educating citizens and enriching their lives, but that it simply “seems to her” that that’s the case.

Again, I don’t deny that her argument might have some merit.  She does cite many studies and statistics to demonstrate the “dumbing of America.”  But she makes an intellectual blunder herself in hypothesizing and running with a causal link between that trend and the rise of digital media.  I’m all for finding the malady behind anti-intellectualism, but let’s not just open up the guns on the easiest target just because she prefers encyclopedias to Wikipedia.

Speaking of Wikipedia, founder Jimmy Wales wrote a response to Jacoby’s column which you can read here.  The money quote:

Students write to me in volumes I can only hope to respond to, reporting on their own personal experiences and breakthroughs. These are not people whose use of the Internet has resulted in an “inability to concentrate for long periods of time;” as Jacoby says. I hear from students who have spent hours reading and learning from Wikipedia entries just for the sake of general knowledge. Better still, I hear about collaborative campus parties devoted to making thousands of quality improvements to young articles in one night — or uploading gigabytes of public domain source material.

Digital media doesn’t automatically erode intellectualism.  Take this blog: we strive here at Tropophilia to highlight some of the biggest debates in the world today.  We talk about technology, privacy, the enviroment, energy, and politics.  People have engaged in discussions in the comment threads that never could have occured in real life because distance, cost, and time barriers.  I can link to supporting materials and images in a way that is expontentially more useful than footnotes in a scholarly journal or a bibliography at the back of a history book.  Sure there’s a whole lot of crap out there in the tubes, but there’s a whole lot of fresh water too.

This is Jacoby’s closing paragraph:

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. (“Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture,” Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a “change election,” the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

OK.  So we need to have a conversation?  Would you like to lead it, Ms. Jacoby?  You just called America a nation of arrogant dunces.  Good start.  We do need a conversation about this, but you can’t cure arrogance with arrogance.  So, please, wipe that smirk off your face and let’s talk about how to make digitial media and intellectualism not only coexist, but reinforce each other.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user ChrisL_AK.