Posted on 02/16/2008 9:05:11 PM PST by Gondring
[...]Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”
Ms. Pickler threw up both hands [...] perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. [...] “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”
[...]
But now, [...] something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.
Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.
[...]more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.
[...] she first got the idea for this book [...] on 9/11.
[...] she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits.[...]:
“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”
Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational system or cause millions of Americans to switch off “American Idol” and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, “the empire of infotainment doesn’t stop at the American border,” she said, yet students in many other countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests.
[...]
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I dunno. So what.
I saw that episode. Kelly Pickler pretty much embodied every stereotype about Americans, blondes, and Southerners that you could possibly imagine. My God I didn't know one person could be so ignorant.
I think certain segments of Americans are.
Liberals ruined education. It’s undeniable.
maybe some people see the retarded evolution scientists pushing a false theory as though it were fact and know that knowledge without God given understanding is very dangerous and confusing.
I think it’s a problem of industrialized countries everywhere. People are taking education for granted, and thus hostile to it because of compulsorary education. It’s such a shame.
I've since recorded over it, but that show was the first thing I recorded to DVD as I was testing out my new recorder. At least Ms. Pickler won some money. The next contestant couldn't even answer "How many times does the letter 'E' appear in [the spoken worth 'mathematics']"?
Why wouldn’t Americans be getting more hostile to knowledge (not that I think this article is anything other than BS)? After all, with all of our social welfare programs, we’ve been paying the dumbest, most incompetent people to breed for generations now, not to mention the fact that our immigration policy has abandoned highly educated people in favor of all the uneducated 3rd-world masses. The real wonder is how we’ve managed to remain such a technological country despite the best efforts of our politicians to dumb us down.
The decline and fall of education can be tracked back to the invention of the TV as well.
Or so hot. She would be the perfect mistress.
I happened to catch Susan Jacoby on the Bill Moyers Journal the other evening. She is the most bizarre interviewee I’ve seen in a long time. She makes faces throughout the interview, while making snide comments about the intelligence of conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives.
I’ve never seen a more pompous, self-important prig in my life.
Liberals ruined education. It’s undeniable.Wasn't liberals, it was the factory model of education. Americans are educated to hate thinking because a democracy requires sheeple. If Americans actually thought they might do something crazy like vote for a 3rd party instead of lib and liberaller.
It’s not just students or the public. The media and the political class is just as dumb - and they’re running the country.
Examples:
A Clinton appointee denied an application because “New Mexico wasn’t in the United States.”
A DC government official was fired (forced to resign) for using “racist” language - he used the word “niggardly” in a budget discussion.
Terry McAuliffe said anyone in the Air National Guard is not in the military.
Hillary Clinton said she was named for Edmund Hillary even though she was born years before he ever became famous by climbing Mt Everest.
Half of the TV interviewers address Lieutenant Generals as “Lieutenant”.
There are two things which go hand-in-hand. One is general education of substance...which you gain in high school and university. You can ask those in their 80’s who grew up in larger towns in Kansas...and they will tell you that they actually Latin taught for a year or two in high school. They had to actually know state capitals, and calculate the value of a train-car’s holdings of corn. Some schools reach that level today, but the vast majority don’t. We cheapen this entire effort and required less.
The second thing....is absorption of reading material. We used to all read a good bit...from papers to magazines. From National Geographic to Readers Digest to daily papers. We all had neighbors in our hometown who subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post...and we’d occasionally borrow a copy. You rarely have that today. Most folks might read part of the local paper....catch the 30-minute newscast tonight...and thats it. We have cheapen our own funnel to knowledge and history in the making.
Why wouldn’t Americans be getting more hostile to knowledge (not that I think this article is anything other than BS)? After all, with all of our social welfare programs, we’ve been paying the dumbest, most incompetent people to breed for generations now, not to mention the fact that our immigration policy has abandoned highly educated people in favor of all the uneducated 3rd-world masses. The real wonder is how we’ve managed to remain such a technological country despite the best efforts of our politicians to dumb us down.Easy, we import our smart people. Been to a graduate school lately? The science labs are a mixture of New Delhi and Beijing. You'd be hard pressed to find an American citizen.
LOL
You mean every young US-American. ;) I thought the Pickler thing was staged.
Well, I’m a Southerner, Redneck and Redskin, too, used to be blonde when I was a kid, so forget the stereotype thing. I’ve met my share of Dumabass Yankees, and they still keep showing up.
My IQ tests out about 10 points ahead of George Bush, I did better 40 years ago, before the Moonshine killed off all my brain cells!
Got a blonde daughter and a blonde grandson, both of them do just fine in the brains department too.
Some of you people need to get over this anti Southern bias you have, seems to me that you’re the ones who have killed the GOP, and I ain’t a bit pleased with that!
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