the dumbening of america

My boss asked us all to write an essay for him. Thought I might as well post it.

When recent polls show that a clear majority of Americans now believe we should not have invaded Iraq, the obvious question is “where were these people four years ago?” How is it possible that most Americans could see the Iraq war as the scam it was/is only after four years of blood, bombs, and billions of dollars in defense spending? I believe we are dealing with an American public that has been and continues to be severely “dumbened” by its government and media. The deterioration of the public school system, focusing on standardized test scores, and not on critical thinking skills is the first cause of this problem. The second is a media that increasingly insists on breaking the world and its complexities into simple, fast thirty-second segments.

The intellectual decline of America is a significant issue not only for myself and my country of origin, but for the entire world. Due to the global dominance of the United States, the stupidity of the American public can have consequences for all nations and peoples. The Iraq war is the most prominent reminder of this fact. Many Americans do not consider issues and events in any detail, or with any analysis, often failing to perceive the connections between actions and circumstances. They have very little knowledge of or interest in the complex factors that create the world we live in. In a democratic system, a country of shallow thinkers is poorly equipped to pick qualified leaders. When that country is a world super-power, the situation has global effects.

A public education system that increasingly ignores the teaching of critical thinking plays a lead role in America’s declining intelligence. Education in the United States has fallen behind worldwide standards, largely due to lack of funding. The solution to this problem has been to implement a system of monitoring schools based on standardized test scores. This leads to a situation where teachers must focus on preparing their students for the barrage of multiple-choice tests taken on a yearly basis. The problem with this approach is that standardized tests by nature cannot gauge critical thinking skills. Thus, teachers do not teach critical thinking skills, because they are not part of the standardized testing regiment. A whole generation of Americans now has memorized facts where their ability to think, question, make inferences, and see connections should be.

While the education system affects only the youth, the U.S. media makes idiots out of Americans of all ages. Most Americans no longer get their news from print (or written) media, opting instead for the speed and sheen of television. While television is not inherently bad as a media, in practice, television news is over simplified, sensationalized, and sped up to a dizzying pace. Television news usually gives multifaceted issues and events a simple treatment in a thirty-second clip, before moving on to the next story. In addition to simplification, television news fails its viewers in terms of content. Important stories that actually affect peoples’ lives are ignored, while inconsequential but sensational stories are headlines. The result is an American public that thinks in simple terms about current events, while often being completely ignorant of an important event’s occurrence or significance.

Thus, Americans are being “dumbened” by their public school system and media. This is troubling not only because of American power in the world at large, but also because of America’s influence on global culture. Will the entire world follow the U.S. down the road to idiocy?