Guest post by Steve Witherspoon
[From your host: Something’s in the air. Today’s opening post featured a long list of “antis” and this recently submitted guest post by Steve Witherspoon also built to a similar array, with neither of us being aware of the other’s text. I almost posted on the “Is we getting dummer?’ story that triggered Steve’s essay then, like him, I decided that the revelation was superfluous.]
The first thing that popped into my mind when I read that there was a website “purporting to feature a recent ‘major study’ showing that Americans were getting dumber” was , “Someone actually thought the public needed some kind of major study to figure that out?” I wonder how many of our tax dollars were spent via federal and state grants to come up with that shocking new major study that anyone with a shred of common sense, critical thinking skills, and basic power of observation could have deduced?
Seriously, who didn’t already know that Americans were getting dumber?
Personally I think that using dumb (stupid, unwise, or lacking good judgment) and stupid (a lack of intelligence, poor judgment) have been a little overused in the 21st century. It’s not that they’re generally incorrect, I just think their overuse has undermined their cultural and literal value, much as using the word racist or fascist has over the past two decades. When words are not used as literally intended but instead become targeted insults to deflect from a specific topic(s) and shut down unwelcome discussion, their communication value is degraded. Thus we see ignorant anti-American bigots (people who are stubbornly, unreasonably, and utterly intolerant of people, beliefs, races, religions, genders, sexual orientations, or political views that differ from their own) using damning insults to crush speech and opinions that may impede their agendas.
The word we should be using to describe what’s going in our society is “ignorance,” which is lacking knowledge, education, or awareness about general topics or specific subjects. Narrowing the focus a little bit more, “willful ignorance,” exemplified by the “don’t confuse me with facts” reflex, is apt. “Indoctrinated ignorance” is better still.
We are seeing across the USA multigenerational indoctrinated ignorance that has targeted our entire system of education. Downstream from educational indoctrination are our social interactions, which infect and affect just about everything. They are like poisonous tentacles into our culture. Once, most ignorant people knew they were ignorant: they had made a choice to learn just enough to make them reasonably effective in their chosen niche in life, they put what they actually knew to some kind of productive use, and moved on with life learning what they needed as they went along. What we’re seeing now are Americans so indoctrinated into their ignorance that they don’t know they’re ignorant. They think they’re smart; they think they’re always correct, and that everyone should listen to them.
How did we get here?
Many years ago, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt warned about the impending demise of our society, both culturally and politically, in her book “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.” Iserbyt recognized the process taking place in the conglomeration of schools, the centralization of school districts, and what the Departments of Education both in the federal and state governments were likely going to do to public education and subsequently to society. She concluded that the public was willingly relinquishing the power of education to a few chosen people who were taking advantage of that power by embedding political correctness and participation trophy mentality into the minds of generations of children while intentionally lowering education standards to the lowest common denominator.
