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deleted213967
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Excerpts from an article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/books/14dumb.html
Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. I thought Europe was a country, she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. Hungry? she said, eyes widening in disbelief. Thats a country? Ive heard of Turkey. But Hungry? Ive never heard of it.
1. Embarassing for her (and for us to some extent), but her role in society, as a "Plastic", is not to learn foreign places by rote (hardly a sign of intelligence) but rather to share her natural grace with us (while supplies last), which she does pretty well.
2. Isn't the fifth-grader American as well? We can't generalize then.
But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that too much learning can be a dangerous thing) and anti-rationalism (the idea that there is no such thing as evidence or fact, just opinion) have fused in a particularly insidious way.
Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also dont think it matters.
3. Yeah, yeah, yeah...More self-flagellation...
... but why do our elite universities still attract the world's best and brightest? Let's be honest, getting into Harvard, Stanford etc. has never been so hard. The bar is much higher today than it was when mechanically reciting countries and irregular verbs was in vogue.
She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds dont think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.
4. More power to those of us who know, but I'd trade that Google-in-2-seconds information for expertise on how to spot roadside IEDs in some of those countries.
This is just like Pearl Harbor, one of the men said.
The other asked, What is Pearl Harbor?
That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War, the first man replied.
5. Lame. But again as long as the Pearl Harbor and the Vietnamese schmocks know their shit well (index-based derivatives trading?) and contribute to society, is it such a tragedy?
6. Don't get me wrong, I am mostly playing devil's advocate here yet I tend to agree with Montaigne:
"Mieux vaut une tête bien faite qu'une tête bien pleine."
"Mieux vaut une tête bien faite qu'une tête bien pleine."