Are Americans getting dumber?

Psychology Today article

Are Americans getting dumber?


Is America getting dumber?
Published on March 28, 2011 by Ray Williams in Wired for Success


Is the American populace getting dumber? So say critics who see this as part of America's current decline.


Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, "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."

There has been a long tradition is anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries. Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his book, Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, describes how the vast underlying foundations of anti-elite, anti-reason and anti-science Americans has been infused into the political and social fabric.
Journalist Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America, wrote, "the rise of Idiot America today represents--for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power--the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert than nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert."

Morris Berman in his book, the Twilight of American Culture argues for the need to preserve what was best in American culture, including all works of art and science. Mark Bauerlein, in his book, The Dumbest Generation, reveals how a whole generation of youth (Gen Y) are being dumbed own by their aversion to reading anything of substance and their addiction to digital "crap" via social media.
Is there evidence to support these critics?


Here's some data:

• The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs commissioned a civic education poll among public school students. A surprising 77% didn't know that George Washington was the first President; couldn't name Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence, and only 2.8% of the students actually passed the citizenship test. Along similar lines, the Goldwater Institute of Phoenix did the same survey and only 3.5% of students passed the civics test.
• Fox News, the most watched news program in the U.S., has on numerous occasions recommended that school science classes be "fair and balanced," meaning by the teaching of biblically-inspired creationism alongside Darwin's' scientific theory of evolution.
• According to the National Research Council report, only 28% of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13% of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or "intelligent design."
• On the eve of the Iraq War, 69% of American's thought Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks; four years later, even though proof had been provided that he was not, 34% still believe he was.
• 18% of Americans still believe that the sun revolves around the earth, according to a Gallup poll.
• According to another poll, the average American voter believes that U.S. foreign aid consumes 24% of the Federal budget, when it is only 1%.
• The American Association of State Colleges and Universities report on education shows that the U.S. ranks second among all nations in the proportion of the population aged 35-64 with a college degree, but 19th in the percentage of those aged 25-34 with an associates or high school diploma, which means that for the first time, the educational attainment of young people will be lower than their parents'.
• In a Newsweek poll, of U.S. citizens, 29% couldn't identify Joe Biden as the Vice President, and 44% couldn't describe the Bill of Rights.
• In a 2009 survey of a number of European countries and the U.S. on international affairs, a significant majority of Europeans could identify the Taliban, and just over 50% of Americans could, despite the heavy presence of the U.S. in Afghanistan.
• 74% of Republicans in the U.S. Senate and 53% in the House of Representatives deny the validity of climate changes since despite the findings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and every other significant scientific organization in the world.
• Researcher Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary analyzed 300,00 Torrance Creativity Test scores of children and adults in the US. Kim found creativity and IQ scores rose steadily until 1990, and were in decline thereafter, and the most serious decline occurring for the youngest children.
• In 1966-67, approximately 1.4 million students who took the verbal portion of the S.A.T and a score of 700 or more was achieved by 33,000 students. In 1986-87 over 1.8 million students took the test and a score of 700 or higher was attained by fewer than 14,000.
• A new global study of educational systems in major nations ranks U.S. 15 year olds 14th in the world in reading skills, 17th in science and 25th (below average) in math.
• According the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 68% of public school children in the U.S. do not read proficiently by the time they finish third grade. And the U.S. News & World reported that barely 50% of students are ready for college level reading.
• Of the 21 countries participating in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, American high school seniors did better than only 2 countries--Cyprus and South Africa.
• According to the National Endowment for the Arts report in 1982, 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later only 67% did. And more than 40% of Americans under 44 did not read a single book--fiction or nonfiction--over the course of a year. The proportion of 17 year olds who read nothing (unless required by school ) has doubled between 1984-2004.
• Renowned T.V. producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who has produced many successful T.V. shows, was once quoted as saying, "it is getting harder and harder to underestimate the intelligence of the American public. It now averages well below the previous 6th grade level."
• Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988 the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidates-featuring the candidate's own voice-dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the bite was down to 7.8 seconds.

One need only look at the social interactions of students in high schools to see the predominant views of the well educated or intellectual. Well-educated and intellectual students are commonly referred to in public schools and the media as "nerds," "dweebs," "dorks," and "geeks," and are relentlessly harassed and even assaulted by the more popular "jocks" for openly displaying any intellect. These attitudes are not reflected in students in most European or Asian countries, whose educational levels have now equaled and and will surpass that of the U.S.
So whether the critics are accurate or overstating their case, and whether it reflects a historical tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, the results of educational assessments and pronouncements by political leaders, gives many a legitimate cause for concern, a concern that may seriously affect its economic and social future.

Wait! Didn't we just have a post saying that IQs were going up about 3 points every 10 years and all of you fetted the poster (she is a provider) for her knowledge?

Wait! Didn't we just have a post saying that IQs were going up about 3 points every 10 years and all of you fetted the poster (she is a provider) for her knowledge? Originally Posted by JD Barleycorn

Charles Murray (co-author of The Bell Curve) says the average IQ is dropping in America because the percentage of whites is steadily declining.

pretty sure I read where the US was ranked 25th (math/science) in the world.

I say cut all funding for education, and lets be dead last ..
eos

When you hear people like Rick Santorum say things like "what a snob" to Obama's comments about education for our country you have to think this article is pretty close to being dead on with the whole anti-intellectualism thing.

I completely agree. Getting rid of the unions and privatizing education is the only solution. I wouldn't let my kids go to public school if my life depended on it or I had to work 3 jobs to pay for it.

pretty sure I read where the US was ranked 25th (math/science) in the world.

I say cut all funding for education, and lets be dead last ..
eos Originally Posted by CJ7

Here's a wild idea. How about we leave education to the states. The federal government doesn't have constitutional authority to spend a dime on education. We need to close the federal department of education.

The dramatic increase in education spending per capita we've seen in the last 40 years directly corelates to the decline test scores. We need to stop the teachers unions from controlling the system. We need to introduce competition into the system by letting parents choose between government run schools and private schools. Bush made a big mistake in letting Ted Kennedy take vouchers out of his education bill.

Even Steve Jobs, a big time lefty, was a proponent of privatizing the education system.

http://articles.economictimes.indiat...al-opportunity

Impossible.

Privatization is a bad bad idea. If you want to see even more inequality in educational opportunities. Like these charter schools that I have been reading about apparently some areas shut down public schools and opened up private charter schools.

You can read this article here on the abuses of this privatized school:
Parents and Student advocacy groups critize charter schools

Fining parents for every infraction to the point it is obscene (basically robbing parents).

"
The Noble Network of Charter Schools, which runs 10 high schools in the city, has raised nearly $200,000 from the disciplinary fees last year and almost $400,000 since the 2008-09 school year, according to three parent and student advocacy groups who held a joint news conference Monday at Chicago Public Schools headquarters.
"It's nickel-and-diming kids for literally nothing that really matters," said Julie Woestehoff, executive director of Parents United for Responsible Education.
But Noble Network CEO Michael Milkie said by sweating the smaller disciplinary issues, the charter operator manages to keep a lid on school violence.
"If you have rules, you have to enforce them," Milkie said. "We maybe have one fight per year, per campus. It's an incredibly safe environment from a physical and emotional standpoint, and part of it comes from sweating the small things."
And he said students who behave poorly should be forced to pay.
"For far too long in the city, students who behave well have had their education diverted to address students who behave improperly," Milkie said. "We have set that fee to offset the cost to administer detention."
Students with Voices of Youth in Chicago Education, who have called for a new student disciplinary policy across the district, called Noble's rules draconian and totalitarian. They marched to City Hall carrying signs like "Secret Sauce Shouldn't Cost $200,000." The mayor has said the Noble Network, with its 86.2 percent graduation rate, has the "secret sauce" to providing a high-quality urban education.
At the Noble Network, which will be adding another four campuses in the next two years, that "secret sauce" includes a strict student code that issues a detention for infractions such as chewing gum, possessing soft drinks or energy drinks like Red Bull, eating chips, not tucking in a shirt after being warned and carrying a permanent marker. The three-hour after-school detention comes with a $5 fee and can include silent study period, behavior improvement work or cleaning and maintenance chores.
The costs rise if the behavior doesn't change. More than 12 detentions lands students in a discipline class priced at $140.
Critics are also concerned that the behavioral problems of students with disabilities are not being taken into consideration when doling out discipline.
"It's exploiting the parents," said Joan Blackwell, who said she has had to pay for night behavior school for her son, a student at Gary Comer College Prep who has been punished for things such as declining to shake a visitor's hand. "I don't see how it has anything to do with discipline. (Her son) was not disciplined for hurting or kicking anyone, or cursing or doing drugs. These were minor things that could've been dealt with."
Charter schools are public schools run by private groups and often have their own rules and enforcement policies.


See also the Pro's and Con's of privatizing schools:


Insuring Inequality:
The Privatization of Public Education in the U.S.

Typical liberal response. Equality above all else. It doesn't matter how bad the schools are as long as everyone goes to a bad school.

Personally we need to take money from the wealthier areas like say "Sugar Land" Texas and send it over to help fund the poorer school districts in the 5th Ward area.

We definitely need to cut the pay / salaries of the top executives who run these schools as well. I caught a good glimpse of the salary of the Principals and others in Sugar Land and its appalling that they get paid that much money.

Of course they are getting dumber, just read the forums here.

Quotes from Greedy Bastards on education:

Real Estate– Based Education Elementary and high school funding is a racket as well. There is no other country in the world that funds its public schools the way we do. As founder of the MIT Media Laboratory Nicholas Negroponte told me, “When you tell somebody from a foreign country that you come from someplace whose school system is based on real estate taxes, they look at you as if you come from a different planet.” We have nineteen thousand separate but unequal school systems. The current system takes hot-spotting, which you read about in chapter 4 on health care, and reverses it. The real estate– based education system overfunds the few wealthy schools (which need funding the least) while reducing resources for those most in need, maximizing the harm done. For proof, consider that just two thousand high schools in our country produce 50 percent of all dropouts, according to the policy and advocacy organization Alliance for Excellent Education. This reverse hot-spotting creates “dropout factories” (mostly made up of minorities) where the graduating class contains on average only 60 percent of those who’d entered as freshman. The misdirection of education money parallels the perverse misalignment of interests that we saw in the health care industry, where we pay for bureaucracy and disease treatments, when what we actually want is improved health. In education, we pay crippling amounts of money for expensive buildings, over-the-top athletic programs, high administrative salaries, frequent testing, and teacher job security rather than what we need: improved learning. A Harness of Debt Parents struggle to avoid the inferior schools, leading to bankster-funded bidding wars for housing in better school districts. As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi described in The Two-Income Trap, in some districts where new, well-funded public schools have been built, average home prices have tripled within a few years. Even the addition of a second parent’s income is not enough to keep up with the resulting price inflation. “In their desperate rush to save their children from failing schools,” Warren and Tyagi wrote, “families are literally spending themselves into bankruptcy.” To do so, they must rely on a real estate loan market run amok on government-sponsored credit. The cycle repeats when children go to college: according to Warren and Tyagi, each year one million parents take out second mortgages on their homes to pay college costs. At every step, banksters are taking a cut of the money spent chasing a good education— and distorting our choices. Once the schools get their real estate– based funding, their spending priorities are strange. Compared with other OECD nations, American schools spend far more on the parts of schools that have nothing to do with classroom teaching. A 2002 state-sponsored report by Standard & Poor’s in Michigan found that “from 1997 to 1999, while the total amount of education spending in Michigan increased nearly 7 percent, central administration spending increased approximately 18 percent.” In 2011, New Jersey imposed a cap on superintendent salaries based on the number of students supervised, while Indiana considered such a cap but did not pass it. Similar battles are being waged in states across the country. Beyond nonteaching administrators, we also lavish education money on capital investments, school buildings, renovations, and compensation for nonteaching staff such as principals in pursuit of prestige, not necessarily learning. Compared with South Korea, for example, we spend far more on buildings and far less on keeping class size manageable and making sure that teachers have ample time for lesson planning. We collect funding for public education based on real estate and then use that “education” money to build still more real estate. The end results are that greedy bastards profit from new participants in the college loan and real estate debt markets, while we trap capital that might be more productive elsewhere in the housing and student financing markets. Parents and college graduates alike wind up in a harness of debt, unable to follow opportunity around the country as Americans have traditionally done, and as our economy needs us to do in order for talent to find its most valuable expression. To find jobs that will repay their debts, many of our best and brightest choose to work in the vampire industries that put them in the debt harness. It’s a greedy-bastard brain drain. The vampire education industry has exacerbated the damage already done to social mobility by vampire banking and health care industries. As documented by Equality Trust, a British group that works to reduce income inequality, although the United States is known as the land of opportunity, the children of the rich in America are now most likely to stay rich, and the children of poor are most likely to stay poor, compared with children in six European countries and Canada. The Castle and the Ocean To be fair, education is not thoroughly under the control of greedy bastards, and the amount of waste and theft is far smaller than what you find in the other industries discussed in this book. But like any vampire industry, education increasingly gives its customers an inefficient product that doesn’t suit its present needs. As a percentage of our GDP, we spend the second most of any developed country (only Iceland spends more) but when it comes to high school graduation rates, we’re nineteenth in the world. For college graduates, we’re fifteenth. However you measure it, the decline has been steep. As bankster-turned-philanthropist Mike Milken told me, in 1960 Americans were the best-educated people in the world. The average adult had two more years of education than the average in any other country. Now many other regions have equaled or surpassed us. Some of the leaders in reading, science, and math are in Shanghai, Korea, and Finland, according to scores from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a series of academic tests administered to fifteen-year-olds from around the world every three years through the multinational Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The United States comes in seventeenth in reading, twenty-third in science, and thirty-first in math. David Banks, founder of the Eagle Academy for Young Men, an all-boys public high school in New York City, likes to say that the only measure on which American students are still number one is self-esteem. Even as we fall further behind, we still believe we’re winning. This gap is a sign that all of our investment in prestige over learning is having the desired effect— just not the one we all want. The harm to American students is a theft and a shame, but this failure goes beyond education. We need education to prepare every industry to meet the challenges of the digital age with its accelerating rate of change. Education may be a small part of the entirety of American society, but it’s small in the way that motor oil is a small part of a car. If we don’t have it, we don’t keep the engine lubricated with a social culture of learning, the engine of our society seizes up, and the entire vehicle breaks down. I’ve spoken to CEOs of the many great manufacturers in this country, and I hear repeatedly their frustration at not finding sufficient numbers of qualified candidates to work in their industries. And when almost anyone with a computer and a cell phone can conduct business with anyone else, anywhere, we need an educational system that prepares us to adapt to fast, ongoing change. All major industries face steep and disorienting change, and they’re all looking to education to meet these new challenges. The breadth and depth of these changes are immense. It is as if for thousands of years, we have lived in a castle: tall, solid, reliable. Those who knew their way around the castle had the power. They could keep out the people they didn’t want to come in, as well as control the flow of information. But now technology disrupts our lives with increasing speed, like waves. We’re realizing that, all along, the castle was made of sandstone and that the digital revolution is a series of waves that will wash it into the ocean. In the past few years, we’ve felt the castle start to buckle. Panicked greedy bastards convince the government to reinforce their rigid systems with a loophole here and a bailout there. It works for a while, but in the long run, we as a society need to help people learn to stop clinging to the old model of living in a castle and start building better boats for our new life on the open water. We need an educational system that’s going to help us thrive in this changing environment. To put it another way, vampire industries are bleeding us dry of capital, but capital is not just money. Capital refers to anything valuable in creating new ventures. I asked John Hennessy, president of Stanford University, how Stanford came to be involved in creating innovative companies such as Sun Microsystems, Yahoo!, Google, and so many others. He pointed to the fact that from the engineering quadrangle at Stanford, it’s only a fifteen-minute walk to the closest venture capitalist; the people who have the capital are right next to the human capital of the students who are inventing the twenty-first century. The ideas, the vision, the relationships, and what Hennessy called the “youthful exuberance” of his students are as important as the checks that venture capitalists can write. But when our education system maintains an outdated status quo because it is profitable for the greedy bastards, that status quo chokes our human capital, threatening our ability to compete not just in education but also in every area. Frank Moss, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, told me, “It’s the system that’s broken. I have no doubt that Americans in many ways are the most innovative and creative people in the world, but if the system doesn’t encourage them to take risks, then that innovation, that creativity will eventually be beaten out of us.” Sounds nasty, doesn’t it? So follow me now on the educational path from birth onward. You’ll find that there are amazing new methods for more effective and valuable learning; ripe opportunities to nourish the human capital we need for this country to compete and thrive. Realizing these opportunities, though, is going to challenge our ideas of what good schooling is— and threaten the greedy bastards at every level.

Here's a wild idea. How about we leave education to the states. The federal government doesn't have constitutional authority to spend a dime on education. We need to close the federal department of education.

The dramatic increase in education spending per capita we've seen in the last 40 years directly corelates to the decline test scores. We need to stop the teachers unions from controlling the system. We need to introduce competition into the system by letting parents choose between government run schools and private schools. Bush made a big mistake in letting Ted Kennedy take vouchers out of his education bill.

Even Steve Jobs, a big time lefty, was a proponent of privatizing the education system.

http://articles.economictimes.indiat...al-opportunity Originally Posted by joe bloe

ok, the states responsibility it is ...


now, ready for your property taxes to skyrocket?

yes or no?

Personally we need to take money from the wealthier areas like say "Sugar Land" Texas and send it over to help fund the poorer school districts in the 5th Ward area.

We definitely need to cut the pay / salaries of the top executives who run these schools as well. I caught a good glimpse of the salary of the Principals and others in Sugar Land and its appalling that they get paid that much money. Originally Posted by Sexyeccentric1

Education money is being pissed away for so called administrative costs. I read someplace that we spend 57% of education money on bureacracy. That's why private schools do a better job for half the cost. They actually care about effieciency.