Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

A lot of people don't. No biggie. Now you know!

Absolutely right and I'll even take that a bit further.

Our youth have lost their focus. Case in point:

Ask a kid who Maya Angelou is and you will probably get back Maya who?

Ask a kid who Kanye West is and you will get a sermon on modern hip hop hero worship.

How can we expect our youth to take ANY sort of account in education when the current government cuts spending on education (just got notice my 5 year old's school will be closing and of this year) to alot money to pay hig dollar military contractors for a war that NEVER should have been waged?

Our amazingly gifted and intelligent 17 year old dropped to butt stupid over the weekend. When confronted with his current rash of absences from school, his reply to his mother and I was:

"My plan is to drop out, go to the Vo-Tech to get my GED and get a job. Uncle Dan didn't go to college and he makes good money."

Uncle Dan does say college is NOT necessary (I still want to pop him in the chops for that one) and he makes good money because he is a charismatic East Suburban Seattle Realtor. My child seems to think his acting abilities will guarantee his "wealth". Society has started to worship the almighty buck and glorify certain artists who do not really espouse education. No wonder kids have no idea of just HOW important an education is.

Curt Cobain commits suicide and millions mourn, grieve, and act like the world has ended. Norman Mailer dies and not a whimper.

Granted Cobain's death was untimely, tragic, and by his own hand, but who made the more crucial cerebral contribution? The guy who sang Smells Like Teen Spirit or the man who spent his life writing novels, getting people to read, inspiring thought, and winning a Pulitzer Prize?

At least the answer to that question doesn't require an education...

It would require someone to think or read though.

I concur.

For those ignorant of the differences:

Ignorant is lacking in knowledge, training; uninformed; unaware.

Stupid is lacking ordinary quickness or keenness of mind; unintelligent.

Dumb is lacking power of speech; inarticulate.

One can have any one, or any combination, or none of these qualities. A person can be very bright, intelligent, and still be ignorant.

As mentioned, half of the world is of below average intelligence. Unfortunately, the average is in decline. Almost everyone in Western civilisation has access to the internet (whether it be at home, internet cafes or libraries), and in turn, they have access to near infinite information. They have televisions with around 1000 channels, with something on offer for everyone.

The problem (not so bad problem) is that people have the choice of what they want to know. They can watch National Geographic, or they can watch MTV; they can watch the History channel, or they can watch ITV1 (U.S. equivalent possibly Fox?). They can read tabloids or they can read broadsheets. They can visit wikipedia, or they can visit LPSG. It's entirely up to the individual whether they want to learn something new, or simply be entertained. Current affairs are viewed by the majority in colourful tabloids with a picture of Britney on the front page.

I can guarantee that people in Britain are just as ignorant towards knowledge as any American. This thread should've been about the Western attitude towards modern policies.

Governments don't want a public who are capable of questioning their movements. Just keep entertaining us 24 hours a day and we'll keep quiet ;)

It never fails to astonish me that what passes for news here is mindless, repetitive and focused primarily on celebrities. When vastly greater swaths of news time are spent on some celebrity's being sent to jail as opposed to informing Americans how our Constitution is being undermined and subverted by the Bush administration, not to mention what's happening of significance elsewhere in the world, it reveals exactly why too many citizens are ignorant of not only the rest of the world but of their own country.

With half the people polled in a reputable national poll believing that evolution and natural selection are myths and that "creationism" is worthy of being taught in the nation's schools, it's to be expected that America is becoming dumbed-down under the influence of the irrationality of religion, particularly fundamentalist religion. It boggles the mind that one of the leading Republican candidates for the presidency holds blinkered views like this and is a former fundamentalist preacher in the bargain. Imagine a guy like that in the Oval Office or just a heartbeat way from the presidency.

So why are so many American actually and properly perceived as being hostile to global knowledge, indeed, knowledge essential to a nation's survival? Start by taking an honest look at what purports to be "news" here and at the unhealthy dominance of religion in American life. More could be said on other malign influences, but start with those just mentioned. Prediction: if America continues on its present path, look for it to become a second-or-third rate nation no longer looked to as worthy of emulation.



Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.Noam Chomsky

I believe that this is, to a large extent, a socioeconomic issue.

Some of the brightest people on this site are American, but so are some of the dullest. This thread is an ideal example. I just don't see this kind of disparity in other western countries. America's population is becoming polarized between an educated elite and an uneducated poor.

A good education can be incredibly expensive in America. I am almost sickened when I hear of Americans pejoratively refer to state schools. Is an Ivy League education really significantly better? If so, then that's a shame as few Americans can afford to go to Harvard.

When I visit the U.S. I tend to avoid the south. It seems the further south I go, the more ignorant people I find. I am very uncomfortable around people who think that someone is a freak if they use a fancy $2 word now and then. These people really only solidify my belief in the Holy Trinity of poverty, ignorance and religion: where you find two of these factors, you usually find the third.

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -- Martin Luther King.

Doubtful.

I don't think most people are inherently hostile to knowledge. Many are inherently lazy though. It seems that many people only want enough knowledge to be able to function in their own little world. They don't want to know because don't need to know.

I also think that this is a generational problem. The anti-intellectualism attitudes started to become noticeable in the sixties and seventies. I'm thinking Spiro Agnew and those types who put down people who thought differently as anti-American or "nattering nabobs of negativity". It became more acceptable to be a dumb-ass. Kids who grew up in the sixties had children in the eighties. Those kids are now having kids. As each generation becomes more ignorant they are less and less likely to be setting a good example for their kids.

I don't blame the schools as much as I do parents. It takes constant and consistent effort to raise kids. Kids are little sponges and will absorb whatever you give them. They need to be exposed to the right kind of material. If you give them MTV instead of National Geographic, guess what they'll pick up? When they grow up they'll be more interested in "Oscar Night" than in who will make the best President or why people are dying in Darfur. If asked what should be done about the mid-east they'll tell you something like "all them fucking arabs should be bombed back to the stone age".

TV has made it cool to be ignorant, but street smart. Al Bundy, Homer Simpson and Archie Bunker are admired characters. (There must be worse ones, I'm just not exposed to much U.S. TV) Reality TV, MTV, and the rest are EASY to watch. Just park your brain under the couch and relax. The McNeal-Leaher News Hour is not easy.

I think western society is becoming richer and lazier with each generation. I live in a second-world country. It has a poor educational system, but it seems to me that the people here are way more interested and knowledgeable about world events, world history, and geography than the average American. I put it down to laziness and the media feeding the population what they will consume.

You and I often have our disagreements, but we agree solidly on this. It's a sad state of affairs when athletes have multi-million dollar contracts, and a staggering number of our educators receive pay hovering at the poverty level; and Faux (pronounced: Fox) News would rather report on Britney's latest trip to rehab than real news and current events.

I received a fine education in the public school I attended in the south, and the state school I attended isn't well known, but it is top quality. My freshman year, I did attend a better known, larger, "better reputation" school, but the quality sucked. The professors might well have been teaching to a video camera, and even at semester's end, none of them even knew any of the students' names. In the smaller state school, the professors actually cared. The education was excellent and personal.Most of the south is actually much more cosmopolitan than the midwest. I would much rather spend time in Georgia or Arkansas or Louisiana than in Ohio or Indiana or Illinois or Wisconsin or Michigan.

I agree, but I am more sickened by the sheer amount of money some criminal middle school drop outs get for spewing hate ridden lyrics and screaming about "The Mann" keeping them down. How can you be down in a $5,000,000 house, driving a $365,000 Bentley, and pulling in about $100,000 weekly?

The teacher:

Struggling to keep payments on a $200,000 home, driving a few year old Toyota, Honda, etc., and making chicken scratch for a salary.

In a society where salary is truly based on what you have to offer, the rapper would be on the street with his can and the teacher would be living in Trump Tower.

There are some bad school systems out there, but there are more excellent public school systems than there are crappy ones. Having gone to private school for K-5, then public school 5-12, then to an Ivy League school, then to a Community College. I have to agree. I got the much better education for free. All the money my parents spent on the "posh" schooling? Total waste of money.

You had at least better be amenable to a trip to Kansas City, Missouri for Blues and Barbeque otherwise my friend I'll be meeting you in the schoolyard after school.

Oh shit. Now I'm going to have write some horrible long essay nobody will read explaining American anti-intellectualism goes back to Plymouth colony and is backed by a number of social factors.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Many times, I feel that people are getting dumber each day. But I won't put the blame entirely on television because there's plenty of things worth watching besides "America's Next Top Model" and "I Love New York" that stimulate the brain and educate as well.

Shows like "Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader" do a good job in illustrating how people selectively forget things that are told to them. All of the questions on that show are not terribly difficult. They're all elementary school level questions so an adult should have no problems remembering any of this stuff. We just decide not to remember certain things that we feel are not relevant to our daily lives. If you're just a cashier at a supermarket, why should you care if Chuck Yeager was the first to break the sound barrier? If you're an accountant for a bank, why should you even remember that Marie Curie, with help of her husband & lab partner, discovered Polonium & Radium? In an attempt to try and make our lives easier, we try to treat knowledge as if it was data being analyzed on a computer. Constantly applying the GIGO procedure to our brains, till it gets almost barren of any real knowledge at all.

As adults, I think we get so wrapped up in our regular routines to survive that we tend to overthink certain situations and fail to use basic common sense. A friend of mine lives at a home with a complex buzzer system where you're supposed to press the number next to their last name and then a button ro ring the bell. He always has the hardest time getting food delivered to their home! Many times I've heard him say to the restaurant, "The delivery person has to press two buttons at the door. First, they press the button with number 8 on it. After that, they press the button with the picture of a bell on it." Every delivery person does the same thing... "But the bell is 8, isn't it", "Ring bell #8, right"? Completely overthinking the situation, instead of going by the exact instructions that were given. They always wind up calling the house saying, "I'm at the door. What do I press?"

Ironically, I put my 9 year old nephew at the door and gave him those exact instructions. And wouldn't you know it, he rang the doorbell.

Lots of things track back to the puritans, don't they?

Ha, is that a typographical error for "FIFO?" Or am I ignorant of a similar term?

It's much more than that.

Here's a Nast cartoon from the 19th century showing a boxer and an intellectual.

Here's a more modern one.

GIGO is a nerd term used by programmers meaning, "Garbage In, Garbage Out."

I'll read it.

Yes.

Americans aren't hostile to knowledge. We'll learn whatever is necessary that will be more profitable for us..

After reading today's news, I think we're just hostile.