Maybe this is not a fall from grace but a return to form.
I don't recall growing up that I was well-regarded by anybody BUT teachers and my own parents for being a heavy reader who retained most of the information I read. I don't recall that being knowledgeable and invested in being educated in the 1960s and 1970s seemed to actually be a requirement for financial or social success except in a narrow handful of professions.
Eggheads, intellectuals, scientists, brainiacs, nerds, etc. were treated with contempt and pity in most comfortably middle-class social settings. In most corporate workplaces, the guys getting the promotions were often not the smartest or most insightful or most knowledgeable but instead the affable glad-handers, yes-men, etc.
Meritocracy has always been something of a myth--a post-facto ideology cited by people who'd climbed the hierarchies to prettify their mediocrity.
In the early days, this is what the first wave of tech entrepreneurs exposed, up to the late 1990s or so--they recognized how recumbent and establishment-driven big companies like Xerox and IBM were, and most of them were impatient to just get on with it and make cool things and experiment with technology. A fair number of the early guys were like Wozniak--misfits who were scorned by the normal corporate world but who just kept doing "smart" things because they felt like it.
In this reading, Trumpism is the revenge of mediocrity against the brief ascension of a professionalized world that had higher demands and requirements for technical skills and intellectual creativity in the labor markets of the 1970s and 1980s, and the "normification" of nerdery. America is not getting dumber, it is just exalting being dumber, because that's how a fairly significant portion of the population has felt about education and knowledge all along.
That's one way to think about it. A more positive way might be to question whether the specific kind of meritocratic myth that was in ascension in the 1970s-1990s overvalued knowledge and intelligence by making it an imagined requirement across the board. Maybe affability is more important for most human endeavors, maybe emotional intelligence and political cunning are more productive. Maybe our sense of what education is for got sidelined by high-stakes mandatory testing, the particular requirements of STEM research, etc. and we lost a vaguer but more generative relationship between knowledge about life and communication and sociality obtained by reading literature, talking philosophy, studying religion, considering history, etc.
"America is not getting dumber, it is just exalting being dumber, because that's how a fairly significant portion of the population has felt about education and knowledge all along."
I love that.
I think the comparison isn't between now and the 60s and 70s. When these writers are talking about America getting dumber, they are looking at test scores from the past twenty years. Things really tanked during 2020 and show no signs of recovering to the reading/math scores from 2000- 2020.
This is where the way social science--including experts on education--have trouble synchronizing the datasets they privilege with the generalized outcomes they allegedly predict. This first hit home for me when I was reading the development of a consensus within social psychology about children, media (television in specific) and violence--that more viewing of media combined with more representations of violence would equal more violent behavior in the world. That constituted a prediction given that by almost any metric you could invent, children watched more television and it contained more content that could be labeled as violent, but in fact, by most measures, violent behavior by those children fell over time. Notably, a lot of the researchers selling this connection originally in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in alliance with parental advocacy groups, used it to explain student protests and rising urban crime in those years, but the people they were explaining hadn't grown up watching 'violent' television, they'd grown up watching no television or watching shows like Howdy-Doody.
Similarly in this case if test scores are the metric that show that Americans are getting dumber, then looking to 2000-2020 as an era of relative improvement compared to post-2020 AND to the 1980s-1990s should mean that Americans in their late 20s-early 40s should be smarter both than Americans in their 50s-70s and Americans in their teens and early 20s. But most of the concern about rising dumbness is focused on people in the late 20s-early 40s, in fact, which is a tip-off that the data and the public discourse don't match up.
Thank you, Cassandra. I like the evenhanded condemnation. My question is, where will a new work ethic come from? My answer is, reorienting education away from something adults arrange for young people, recognizing that young people, in organized systems of paid peer and near-peer teaching, can not only learn through hard work, but can produce knowledge through hard work in their communities. jaygillen.substack.com
I’m not sure how to shift the tide. I suspect that there’s not one answer. We’ll need to create a meaningful system, that shows a correlation between hard work and reward.
Yes, exactly. There's an opportunity that is adjacent to the school system, because the economy has changed in crucial ways affecting teenagers. The last 50 years has seen the end of the possibility that teenagers could leave school (at 14,16, or 18), and earn enough money to survive and raise a family. This is new, because of first, the shift from agricultural to urban employment, and second, deindustrializaiton. This economic uselessness depresses most adolescents and contributes to the evils you describe. However, young people can be employed (and in many small-scale examples are employed) in decently paid knowledge work. We've paid more than $5 million in Baltimore for math and self-advocacy peer-to-peer work, for example, since 2001. A debate league here has paid hundreds of thousands to teenage debate coaches. Many drama programs, especially in summers, pay high school drama coaches--though we are talkiing year-round, because the economic need is year round. The idea is not to replace schools, but to supplement adults with young people both during the school day and out of school tiime. Adolescents are a vast underutilized educational resource, and nothing helps someone learn better than trying to teach. The whole system depends on young people's roles changing from passive to active--the money reward isn't the whole reward, but it gets their attention, at virtually all income levels.
Maybe this is not a fall from grace but a return to form.
I don't recall growing up that I was well-regarded by anybody BUT teachers and my own parents for being a heavy reader who retained most of the information I read. I don't recall that being knowledgeable and invested in being educated in the 1960s and 1970s seemed to actually be a requirement for financial or social success except in a narrow handful of professions.
Eggheads, intellectuals, scientists, brainiacs, nerds, etc. were treated with contempt and pity in most comfortably middle-class social settings. In most corporate workplaces, the guys getting the promotions were often not the smartest or most insightful or most knowledgeable but instead the affable glad-handers, yes-men, etc.
Meritocracy has always been something of a myth--a post-facto ideology cited by people who'd climbed the hierarchies to prettify their mediocrity.
In the early days, this is what the first wave of tech entrepreneurs exposed, up to the late 1990s or so--they recognized how recumbent and establishment-driven big companies like Xerox and IBM were, and most of them were impatient to just get on with it and make cool things and experiment with technology. A fair number of the early guys were like Wozniak--misfits who were scorned by the normal corporate world but who just kept doing "smart" things because they felt like it.
In this reading, Trumpism is the revenge of mediocrity against the brief ascension of a professionalized world that had higher demands and requirements for technical skills and intellectual creativity in the labor markets of the 1970s and 1980s, and the "normification" of nerdery. America is not getting dumber, it is just exalting being dumber, because that's how a fairly significant portion of the population has felt about education and knowledge all along.
That's one way to think about it. A more positive way might be to question whether the specific kind of meritocratic myth that was in ascension in the 1970s-1990s overvalued knowledge and intelligence by making it an imagined requirement across the board. Maybe affability is more important for most human endeavors, maybe emotional intelligence and political cunning are more productive. Maybe our sense of what education is for got sidelined by high-stakes mandatory testing, the particular requirements of STEM research, etc. and we lost a vaguer but more generative relationship between knowledge about life and communication and sociality obtained by reading literature, talking philosophy, studying religion, considering history, etc.
"America is not getting dumber, it is just exalting being dumber, because that's how a fairly significant portion of the population has felt about education and knowledge all along."
I love that.
I think the comparison isn't between now and the 60s and 70s. When these writers are talking about America getting dumber, they are looking at test scores from the past twenty years. Things really tanked during 2020 and show no signs of recovering to the reading/math scores from 2000- 2020.
This is where the way social science--including experts on education--have trouble synchronizing the datasets they privilege with the generalized outcomes they allegedly predict. This first hit home for me when I was reading the development of a consensus within social psychology about children, media (television in specific) and violence--that more viewing of media combined with more representations of violence would equal more violent behavior in the world. That constituted a prediction given that by almost any metric you could invent, children watched more television and it contained more content that could be labeled as violent, but in fact, by most measures, violent behavior by those children fell over time. Notably, a lot of the researchers selling this connection originally in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in alliance with parental advocacy groups, used it to explain student protests and rising urban crime in those years, but the people they were explaining hadn't grown up watching 'violent' television, they'd grown up watching no television or watching shows like Howdy-Doody.
Similarly in this case if test scores are the metric that show that Americans are getting dumber, then looking to 2000-2020 as an era of relative improvement compared to post-2020 AND to the 1980s-1990s should mean that Americans in their late 20s-early 40s should be smarter both than Americans in their 50s-70s and Americans in their teens and early 20s. But most of the concern about rising dumbness is focused on people in the late 20s-early 40s, in fact, which is a tip-off that the data and the public discourse don't match up.
I care but my influence is limited. I enjoyed your slightly depressing article.
Thank you, Cassandra. I like the evenhanded condemnation. My question is, where will a new work ethic come from? My answer is, reorienting education away from something adults arrange for young people, recognizing that young people, in organized systems of paid peer and near-peer teaching, can not only learn through hard work, but can produce knowledge through hard work in their communities. jaygillen.substack.com
I’m not sure how to shift the tide. I suspect that there’s not one answer. We’ll need to create a meaningful system, that shows a correlation between hard work and reward.
Yes, exactly. There's an opportunity that is adjacent to the school system, because the economy has changed in crucial ways affecting teenagers. The last 50 years has seen the end of the possibility that teenagers could leave school (at 14,16, or 18), and earn enough money to survive and raise a family. This is new, because of first, the shift from agricultural to urban employment, and second, deindustrializaiton. This economic uselessness depresses most adolescents and contributes to the evils you describe. However, young people can be employed (and in many small-scale examples are employed) in decently paid knowledge work. We've paid more than $5 million in Baltimore for math and self-advocacy peer-to-peer work, for example, since 2001. A debate league here has paid hundreds of thousands to teenage debate coaches. Many drama programs, especially in summers, pay high school drama coaches--though we are talkiing year-round, because the economic need is year round. The idea is not to replace schools, but to supplement adults with young people both during the school day and out of school tiime. Adolescents are a vast underutilized educational resource, and nothing helps someone learn better than trying to teach. The whole system depends on young people's roles changing from passive to active--the money reward isn't the whole reward, but it gets their attention, at virtually all income levels.
Definitely want to hear your elongated thoughts on the autism diagnosis episode and the Somali fraud in MN.