America the boneheaded
Polemic reviewed:
Just how ignorant are Americans, anyway? These days, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone defending the nation’s collective intellect–and, in some cases, for good reason. Two thirds of Americans between ages of 18-24 can’t find Iraq on a map. When asked what function DNA serves, two thirds of Americans have no idea. And in a recent survey that would have Copernicus turning in his grave, one in five American adults believe that the sun revolves around the earth.
Gee, you don’t think that could possibly have anything to do with increasing big-government interference in schools, and the ongoing liberal project of remaking educational institutions into politically-correct indoctrination centers, do you? Nah, couldn’t possibly be that. It just has to be that monstrous old liberal bugaboo, fundamentalist Christianity, right?
With her new bestseller, “The Age of American Unreason,” Susan Jacoby adds fuel to the public bonfire. Americans are not only increasingly knowledge-challenged, she argues: they’re also proud of it. “America is now ill,” she writes, “with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism.” This new, insidious strain–at odds with reason, objective facts, and modern science–has grown over the past twenty years, she writes, and is incredibly dangerous for American culture and politics.
…For Jacoby, Protestant fundamentalism, particularly in its resistance to the teaching of evolution in public schools, is intellectual enemy number one.
Ayup. Thought so.
At times, Jacoby’s tendency to place fundamentalist fingerprints all over American ignorance seems to blind her from the obvious. The disastrous aftermath of hurricane Katrina, she argues, illustrates “the abysmal state of public education” brought on in part by “religious fundamentalism.” Apparently, if New Orleans residents had been taught a little more science and a lot more evolution, things would have gone more smoothly.
Are these people even remotely aware of how wholly predictable and tiresome their relentless doctrinaire preachifying is? I’m guessing no, but hey, I could be wrong.
- Entries
Let's take a bunch of religious nutjob homeschoolers, and test em against a bunch of the public schools finest. Any takers?
Anyway, I have a simpler explanation: The reason why students don't know this stuff is because they aren't taught it. Instead, they spend their time doing "fun" projects that have little educational value.
I work in the field of education. The field is controlled by lefties. How they can blame anyone else for its failures is beyond me. I was recently in a classroom with seventh graders who were struggling with single digit multiplication problems (e.g., 5*9; 6*7, etc.). Seventh graders! That stuff was drilled into my head long before I left elementary school. But, "rote memorization" is a bad word in the education field these days. Just sad, really. Anyway, I could discuss this issue at length all day, but the point is, the failures of the American educational system have little to do with whether or not evolution is taught.