Reflections on Education, IQ, Democracy
So, supposedly Americans are getting dumber. We’ve all seen those man-on-the-street interviews:
—the largest country in South America is Africa
—Celsius is for water, Fahrenheit for people
—the Great Wall of China divided East and West Germany
—the Netherlands are where Peter Pan lived
—a young woman asking if other countries had moons too
—and throw in a senator, duly elected, naming the three branches of American government as “the House, the Senate, and executive”
Either a) yes, Americans are getting dumber, or b) the interviewers don’t ask smart people, and if they get one, they edit them out. I mean, there have to be some smart people on the streets, right?
People don’t look any different. The anatomy of the brain hasn’t changed. The human genome hasn’t changed. You have to think that as technology changes, people just use their brains in different ways. Remember Plato’s mistrust of writing. In Phaedrus he has Socrates denounce the static mode of writing as inferior to the living oral mode. Writing is a crutch, and has a deleterious effect on memory, and can’t function as an interlocutor.
But what sort of answers do you think you would have gotten from the ordinary man-on-the-streets of classical Athens?
At one point in Simon Winchester’s latest book, Knowing What We Know, he holds the American college entrance exams (SAT, ACT) up to comparison with those of other countries, particularly the life or death ordeal in China. The result is predictably humiliating.
But then why do people from all over the world come to America’s top universities to study? We have the quaint notion that everybody in America should attend college (more on that later), but it’s just as difficult for ordinary Americans to get in the top schools as anybody.
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In my undergraduate teaching days, I enjoyed mostly amicable relations with my students, and only when challenged (why do I have to know this if it won’t get me more money?) would feel moved to risk a spewing of cant and try to justify the ways of liberal arts to man.
I would remind them—well, hardly remind them if the thought had never entered their heads—that there were two beneficiaries of liberal arts education: themselves, and democratic society. But as you might guess, I didn’t meet too many students whose primary concern was the flourishing of the republic. For most, as I suggested, the main objective was to get money to buy leisure to pursue banality. No, I would argue, the benefit for you is the creation of new neural circuitry, new territory for the mind to expand into. The greatest wealth is not money, but curiosity—the capacity to entertain yourself. What you experience when you are alone and close your eyes. Living in this universe and subsisting on state-provided entertainment—celebrity culture, sports, TV, politics—is like going to Paris with a carte blanche American Express card, and using in only on McDonalds.
And add: we need to know what happened, and how to interpret it, rather than buy a cheap interpretation with an ulterior agenda off the shelf. I worked in higher education for over 30 years, and can tell you that most “elite” teachers are not grooming your children to be whatever it is you think they are. Okay, some are. But where in our society can you turn where people are not advocating a certain point of view? You learn to think for yourself by being challenged. If somebody is trying to sell you crap, don’t buy it. Most teachers are in the business of transferring knowledge.
The information is out there to enable you to go under the surface of cultural propaganda, but it requires work. I agree it is easier to just believe Tucker Carlson, but it won’t get you anywhere but in his pocket. Ignorance breeds gullibility—makes you an easy mark for propaganda. Liberal arts education is the enemy of lemming culture, and helps you pursue the most valuable thing in human experience: a rich inner life.
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Okay, all that said, let me quickly add that of course there is an economic function of education, and that I see vast room for improvement in the current state of higher education.
First, I think eighteen is too young for most people to start college. The brains of most eighteen year olds are just not at a good starting point. I speak from personal experience. I have long argued for two or three years of national service between high school and whatever comes next. For some this would be military service, for some environmental/conservation work, for some infrastructure work—or any way youthful energy could be beneficially applied. (And please do this without creating a Department of National Service and hiring five million bureaucrats.) Young people could make some money, do some good work, meet other young people, see the country, gain a sense of having a stake in the country, and learn through experience that their fellow countrymen may be from other states or regions or ethnicities, but not planets. They say many Civil War divisions were mended in the trenches of the first world war. As a teacher, I loved having “non-traditional” students: older, who had seen some things, fought some battles, and wanted to learn and grow.
I think there should be different tracks in higher education—based on the needs of the economy and the natural aptitude of people. After (or during) national service, everybody together for two years or so learning some basic elements of history, the arts, math, science, economics. I would add athletics, performance arts, and foreign languages. Learning another language creates a new way of rendering reality—a reward in itself—but only if we finally realize the obvious and start foreign language learning at a young age. Otherwise, for the majority, it’s too late, forget it.
I would add basic plumbing, electricity, vehicle maintenance, construction, gardening, cooking, personal finance, personal health maintenance, navigating the medical/insurance system (maybe a lost cause, that one), investment strategies, other cultures. You know, Peloponnesian War at 9:00, plumbing at 10:00, a seminar on kidney health or recognizing your own prejudices at 11:00. For everybody.
After that, let people follow their personal aptitudes and ambitions. Ideally in equally respected avenues.
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Like many people, I have an eclectic conception of IQ. Not just a test made by people good at something to determine how good you are at it—but a measure of proficiency in anything. It’s all “intelligence”—any cooperative exertion of mind and body—which is everything. Even people whose primary work is ideas have to put those ideas into language that represents them accurately—arduous labor. Highly proficient quantum physicists, athletes, mechanics, musicians, and on and on, all have high IQs. The hierarchal ranking of those proficiencies is subjective. If you think Tiger Woods hitting a five-wood 250 yards and landing on the green with a makable putt is not intelligence, but knowing calculus is, you need to rethink. Brilliant physicists and mathematicians are wondrous indeed, but some of the most intelligent people I’ve known were craftsmen. People with extraordinary intuition and creativity about how certain things work, and how to build and repair them. And of course artists—those who create the sensory and emotional structure by which we understand ourselves and encode our era for the future. The point is, we need all the components of human ability.
The functional part of a vessel, or a building, is its emptiness, the space that is not the structure itself. This is not to minimize the importance of the structure, but to suggest that what fills the space is its raison d’être. Structure and space should live in harmony. They define each other.
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So, what do we blame for the dumbing down of democracy?
How about democracy itself?
Extremists today are advocating for its termination, mainly because of its emphasis on the equal status of “everybody”—which includes people unlike themselves. I can sympathize with that view to a point. My years working in academic bureaucracy convinced me, mainly through serving on committees where my input was requested but not wanted, that “everybody” have no business weighing in on everything. I came to understand that not only in academia, but in any social system, there is a class of people who think conceptually from the perspective of the system, and set the parameters for its operation. You know, executives. The peons on the democratic committees are just there for the details, and even that trivial input can be and regularly is ignored. I came to feel that academia is in one sense an employment agency that attracts mid-level managers whose focus is on the system, not the mission. This is the case in government bureaucracies and maybe in corporations too. As for academia, I used to joke that you could sit through an entire faculty meeting without really understanding what it was we did. I was among those who just wanted to be left alone to pursue the actual mission: interacting with students, challenging them, and passing on knowledge. We weren’t interested in the system beyond lamenting the meaningless chores it forced us to do—partially in the name of democratic inclusion, mostly to keep the managers—who did not interact with students except as customers and did not pass on knowledge and made more money than the teachers—employed.
There are serious shortcomings to democracy.
This is why Plato considered it an inferior form of government. Including everybody (which, of course, in Plato’s time was not “everybody”) brings the norm down to a very low common denominator and creates a sense of entitlement so every whiny, petty, stupid point of view gets a voice. It lets all the unwashed masses—which of course is never you and your mob—into the big show, and makes inevitable the rise of opportunistic demagogues. Wait a minute, you say, we’re not a “democracy,” we’re a “representative democracy.” You mean like—Congress? God save us. Plato’s solution was to imagine an enlightened ruling class—philosopher-kings—who would govern from the highest possible plane—disinterested, honest, devoted, wise, unmotivated by material distraction or prestige, above ego—in short, a class of people that doesn’t exist. At least not as a class; those individuals who do answer to that description are typically not drawn to government and the mind-numbing administration that parasitically attaches to it. Agitators for a “king” today, of course, imagine one who would indulge their personal concerns—I mean, after all, he said he would. Pre-coronation. I wonder if those folks would be interested in some real estate in the Everglades. Politicians in America today are philosopher-kings about like boogers are bowling balls.
People can’t be dissuaded from their belief that somebody is going to solve their problems for them—because if they’re not going to, that means they will have to solve them on their own, and they ain’t going there.
The result, of course, as Plato saw it, was inevitable tyranny.
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Another supposedly democratic idea that has become a tyranny: the internet.
An oral dialectician to the core, Socrates mistrusted writing because it transferred mental capacity and function to something outside the mind: an inert written text that, like a painting, couldn’t engage you in a dialogue. We mostly look at writing today as a brilliant innovation—and the outsourcing of our minds to technology will no doubt come to be seen in the same way. But for some of us here in the transition period, we see what looks like a disaster.
Minds hijacked by an endless stream of trivia. A system of mental control more potent and devious than any ever created. Media in which the high, the low, and the in-between mingle indiscriminately. A blurring of the line between real and virtual. Real and false. Human experience that doesn’t need memory, the ability to calculate, or any knowledge beyond how to access the above—no real need to learn with the mass mind instantly accessible in your hand.
As long as the power stays on.
Maybe this is just the destiny of the human race—to enter a virtual oneness with technology from a physical and emotional isolation more severe than ever before.
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Our word “idiot” is the descendent of a Greek word that meant—non-pejoratively as far as I can tell—a common citizen who didn’t participate in the interactions of the agora. Something like an amateur as opposed to a professional. Someone—I can’t escape it—like me. Of course we still have such people among us, most of whom are not idiots in the modern sense—and can only lament, while understanding perfectly, their distaste for public service or getting in the ring of attack-dog public “debate.”
The word took on its pejorative sense as it aged: a common, unskilled, ignorant person—even more as it was adapted into Latin—a crude, illiterate, ignorant person—then into Old and Medieval French where by the 13th century it had become synonymous with “stupid”—and its sense as a mentally deficient person firmly established in English in the 14th century. In the early 1900s, the Binet-Simon ranking of mental deficiency by “age” ranked the condition of being an “idiot” as the worst (less than 3 years old), then up the scale to low-medium-high grade “imbecile” (3 to 7), and then to “moron” (7-10).
Obviously, a democracy can’t function with idiots in the modern sense.
Or, for that matter, the ancient.
Looks like we’ll have to make do, as always, with morons.
February 10, 2024