The dumbing down of western populations

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Is there any real substance to this idea that there is systematic effort to dumb society down in the US and UK? Chomsky believes that the US government has lowered educational standards and is making a concerted effort to eliminate critical thought. He has some very convincing evidence referring to the privatisation of education and the consequent segregation of rich vs poor and the efforts of E.Bernays and the attempts to create a pliable population.

Is this a focused purposeful plan or is it simply a result of various economic and social circumstances?

More importantly, is the fundamental premise true? Are Western societies really being dumbed down? How do you measure the hight of general dumbness?

This is why I have a great intolerance for the US government today.

Simply put there's way too much to learn in life to ever rely on a public school to give you the keys to the kingdom.

The internet is a wide open space to grab anything one wants, one can buy a Kindle E-book on Amazon half the time cheaper than they can grab a case of beer or even a six-pack.

We've thrown personal accountability out the window and people want to be entertained and thought-for. I blame it on a media environment where all the money is to be made in catering to the lowest common denominator. It appeases everyone's worst habits.

I don't know that it is so much the government that is dumbing westerners down. I think it is consumerism. The process of marketing and selling, EVERYTHING by appealing to the lowest element of human consciousness. People become famous these days for nothing more than being dumbasses. Our "culture" has become shallow and superficial.

We can start with how poorly the US compares to other nations on standardized tests. And then we can compare political rhetoric and debate today to that of yesterday. Poorly defined words like liberal and conservative are thrown around, red herrings are commonplace, argumentum ad populum is commonplace, insubstantial talking points without any reference to critical details is commonplace, the whole game right now seems to be "diversion, diversion, diversion" and "emotion, emotion, emotion". Clearly the purpose of this is to intellectually disarm the populace, to hamper their critical thinking skills and get them to vote for whatever the oligarchy wants regardless of the actual consequences of the vote on that person voting.

I think that is the question.

Have we "dumbed down"? I would say unlikely. There may be fluctuation year on year, but there is no reason to assume we have become less intelligent or crucially less informed.

Perception and reality are often different. people often have a romantic view of the past. Crime and violence is an obvious example.

I think there is probably more voices, being recorded not all of these people are not as informed as the the intelligentsia believe, but that doesn't mean they are less inform than they would have been in the past. It is just that their views are more know.

Difficult to say though.

It is the other way around.

We need lower wage service workers that can repetitively perform a task. Perhaps we can run some biased tv advertisements of unemployed PHD people or unemployed lawyers with mountains of debt, and then show successful plumbers/electricians/factory workers/ book keepers who are living happy lives. The message can be that college people are quixotic , and blue collar people are the smart ones.

Thanks to the internet, there are certainly far more voices being recorded than in the past. The comments in 4Chan or YahooAnswers don't look too good when compared to letters to the editor sent to the New York Times in 1930 (not that I have linkable examples, but it's a good guess). But I bet the comments of 4Chan et al are no less informed than the comments overheard in a random bar in 1930 when everybody had been drinking for hours, which is a more legit comparison.

I found this on Snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp

It's a highs school test from 1895 which the average modern American adult could not pass. The point Snopes makes is the average 1895 adult couldn't pass it either because adults often can't pass high school exams, having not studied for 20 years. There is also a lot of stuff from modern high school exams which the 1895 high school student couldn't answer. Information changes. Adults forget. And just because a question is on an old test doesn't mean the people of the past could answer it correctly.

So I am not buying the premise that modern westerners have been dumbed down compared to their predecessors. That's because modern westerners don't actually get fairly compared to their peers of the past. They get compared to the highly educated elite who wrote things that have been preserved.

I also am not buying the idea that there is a conscious attempt to dumb down the public. There is disinformation and propoganda, yes, but that is a very different thing and not at all new.

Upon that we agree. However, I don't see how that is something new.

I taught at a post-secondary institution from the late 1980s to 2002. Many of my students were fresh out of high school. One of the saddest experiences I had was to see how poorly prepared they were. I had some who, even though they were studying in a technical field, couldn't manage the same basic algebra I was required to master more than 40 years ago.

As well, the sense of entitlement and the demand to be amply rewarded for minimal work had increased during the time I taught.

I quit over a dozen years ago. I don't miss any of it.

In the 1990s I attended a community college class on Joseph Campbell's Transformations of myth through time TV series. The class was taught by Cott Hobart, a friend and colleague of Joe Campbell. Cott Hobart claimed that the average Englishman of Shakespeare's time had a working vocabulary three or four times larger than the vocabulary of most English speakers today. He claimed this as evidence of humans becoming dumber over time. I am reminded of the ideas of Newspeak in George Orwell's 1984 book, that if one limits the words available then one limits the thoughts it is possible to think or express using words.

Dumb people are easier to manage and/or f**k over.

I also don't know if I agree with the premise. You won't find a more informed populace than today's.

I think that schools have failed to evolve as fast as technology did, and are ill-equipped to deal with many of today's issues and there is possible a general disillusionment about education.

Schools fail to teach critical thinking, they fail to teach students what to do with all the information that's available to them, they fail when it comes to teaching what science is and how it's done. Teachers seem to be stuck in the pre-internet age where they see themselves as the source of knowledge rather than guides, as if they could ever compete with the internet.

That being said, there will always be a healthy supply of dumb people in any society. In my opinion they are just way more obvious these days because of the internet, which makes it so much easier to see just how dumb people can be. The Village Idiot just became the Global Idiot.

I think you have a point there. Comparisions whould be made on equal terms.

Public schools teach students to pass tests, not how to think.