The Washington Post published a blunt, acrimonious, and utterly superb article by Susan Jacoby this past weekend, which took aim — and hit the mark — at the demise of true intellectualism in the nation. A National Science Foundation poll observed that as many as one in five Americans believes that the sun revolves around the earth. Shocking1. Jacoby writes that the dumbing-down of America is the inevitable byproduct of a culture who will not tolerate any source of information besides fast-paced, sound-bite-ridden visual media2. People have become wholly uninformed, and even graduates of higher education are complicit, reading less frequently and watching obsessively. What is worse, she notes that the citizenry does not seem to care. The blend of ignorance and indifference is of greatest, and gravest, concern.
An exemplary excerpt:
Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is … (Read the rest of this article »)