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.
