American Anti-Intellectualism February 24, 2008

Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture

In all the hand-wringing about our dysfunctional education system, the issue that is almost never discussed is that most Americans really do not value education as an intrinsic good. We value it only instrumentally– as a means to getting a job or improving one’s salary–but not something to be intensely pursued as something worthy in itself.

Susan Jacoby assembles evidence of American anti-intellectualism.

“According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.”

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism — a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.”

There is no regime of student testing, program of teacher training, or voucher system that will correct for this defiency. If we want to know why American students are falling behind the rest of the world in educational achievement, we need look no further than the idea that knowledge is nothing but a meal ticket.

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