Anyone who has some acquiantance with countries other than the US has probably noticed a handful of particularities about Americans that set them apart from the rest of the world. One of them is that Americans, in average, are unusually ignorant. Living in this world may hinder appreciation of how weird it is. Unlike any other time in history, the most powerful country in the world has the best high-education system, produces some of the smartest people in the world and when not, brings over some of the smartest foreigners to work with its own thinkers. And yet they all live surrounded but people who don't know that Europe isn't a country or that France is. The gap in wealth in the US, so often discussed, could be considered a little crack compared to the gap in knowledge.
Actually the problem is more serious. It's not just that Americans in average are unusually ignorant but they hate people who are not. Or conversely, so often does one see people in the US taking pride in not knowing things (Cf. TV stereotypes like the stupid-but-hot blonde). And it sometimes becomes agressive, like when people feel threatened by someone who has a vocabulary larger than a few hundred words. They complain "why are you using such big words" as if one were cheating.
Oftentimes intellectuals (American or otherwise) overplay American anti-intellectualism because they can't relate to it. But, in fact, it can be dangerous for the US if only because it does not welcome smart people (and other things being equal, more smart people is better than less). At the very least there's thinking to be done on the issue and we celebrate recent attempts to understand the phenomenon.
Friday, February 15, 2008
American Anti-Intellectualism
Posted by Matias Bulnes at 9:31 PM
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8 Comments:
Mr. Bulnes appears to be making three points in this post:
1. American are in general ignorant of facts of facts which they should not be ignorant. He supplies evidence for this claims by linking to a video of "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?" in which a country music star displays an staggering lack of knowledge of geography. Are we expected to draw the inference that Ms. Pickler represents the average American, and so the average American is as ignorant of geography as she? If so, this is inadequate support for Mr. Bulnes's claim. Mr. Bulnes ought to supply some reliable statistical evidence to support this claim, which I must concede can be found through a Google search. Additionally, I wonder which facts Mr. Bulnes believes Americans do not know.
2. Mr. Bulnes also claims that in comparison to the rest of the world Americans are ignorant of unnamed facts. Mr. Bulnes supports this claims with the anecdotal evidence of acquaintance with both Americans and non-Americans. This is simply bad evidence; last night I spoke with a European who did not know where Wisconsin is in the United States. I do not think him ignorant because of this, but the stereotypical ignorant American appellation might be applied to me by Mr. Bulnes for failing to know where Estonia is. Is this fair? I don't believe so since there are 48 contiguous states in the US, and there are 48 countries in Europe. Similarly, I could explain how his parliamentary democracy selects its prime minister, but he did not understand the American electoral process.
I also imagine that a person of Mr. Bulnes's intellect typically only interacts with people of similar intellect when he travels; it may be that Mr. Bulnes is fortunate to meet intellectual non-Americans when he travels, but in his daily life has plenty of opportunity to meet dumb Americans. Is Mr. Bulnes so certain that the average American is dumber than the average non-American? If he is, he should marshal some facts to support this generalization. Alas, these facts seem to be available, at least when it comes to geography. Covering a National Geographic reports CNN reports America does worse than all other countries save one http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/05/02/geog.test/.
CNN spares the one country than America the indignity of being outed. What I couldn't find when I searched was a comparison between how the different countries fared. For example, if 47% of Americans cannot find India on the map, should we conclude that Americans are way dumber than Brits, if 46% of them cannot? Hardly.
3. Mr. Bulnes finally claims there is a distrust or dislike for intellectualism in this country. This may be true, but his citation of the celebrated ditsy blond stunner is actually poor evidence for this since this character is typically mocked in sitcoms. Mr. Bulnes also highlights the reaction people to large words. Now, perhaps Mr. Bulnes believes using large words is the hallmark of an intellectual, but for my money it is better to use easily understandable words to communicate subtle ideas. Indeed, I think people object to the use of big words because it makes it difficult for them to understand the discussion; I know that when I speak to a friend a lawyer friend about law, I prefer he eschew the jargon of jurisprudence.
I dispute the claim that American culture is essentially anti-intellectual. The fact that America spends so much on the acquisition of new knowledge reflects a profound respect for knowledge. Having experienced education at a leading university in Europe, I can report that American facilities typically outstrip their European counterparts. A cursory review of Slate.com's list of the biggest philanthropists of 2007 reveals an overwhelming number of gifts to institutions of higher education. For my money, this shows that America is not anti-intellectual.
Why is there a sense that America is anti-intellectual? Well, I think in a country as wealthy and as populous as the United States there is bound to be a variety of ways that Americans choose to consume. Many Americans are intellectual consumers, but many are also consumers of lesser fare, at least by my lights and I assume Mr. Bulnes's. I actually think it is interesting that the dominant cultural idiom of the moment is "hipsterism" a lifestyle that seems to reflect consumption of art and information. Maybe we are witnessing the birth of a new stereotype for Americans to adopt.
PC must be joking.
The US has been dumbing down for a decade or more.
Various tests and surveys have supported the concept that the US has fallen behind other industrialized countries in education.
For instance the National Geographic-Roper Public Affairs 2006 Geographic Literacy Study of Americans aged 18-24 showed:
# Thirty-three percent of respondents couldn't pinpoint Louisiana on a map.
# Six in 10 could not find Iraq on a map of the Middle East.
# Forty-seven percent could not find the Indian subcontinent on a map of Asia.
# Seventy-five percent were unable to locate Israel on a map of the Middle East.
# Nearly three-quarters incorrectly named English as the most widely spoken native language.
# Fewer than three in 10 think it important to know the locations of countries in the news and just 14 percent believe speaking another language is a necessary skill.
# Six in 10 did not know the border between North and South Korea is the most heavily fortified in the world.
# Thirty percent thought the most heavily fortified border was between the United States and Mexico.
Link: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/roper2006/pdf/FINALReport2006GeogLitsurvey.pdf
From a WaPo article on the international 2006 PISA tests (study of 40 countries):
"The PISA study, conducted every three years, ranked the United States 24th out of 29 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group that represents the world's richest countries. Students from Finland and South Korea scored best in the survey, which measured the ability of 15-year-olds to solve real-life math problems.
The results suggest that, at the secondary-school level, the learning gap between the United States and its competitors in Europe and Asia is widening. U.S. students continue to lag behind students elsewhere in basic math skills, despite recent gains in standardized tests at the national level."
Article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41278-2004Dec6.html
PISA: ttp://www.pisa.oecd.org/pages/0,2987,en_32252351_32235731_1_1_1_1_1,00.html
From Engineering Trends"An International Study of Undergraduate Engineering Degrees"
http://www.engtrends.com/IEE/0405A.php
"Growth in the number of undergraduate engineering degrees over the past ten to twenty years has been substantial in China, Japan and South Korea. Degrees awarded in China and Japan have exceeded the number produced by the United States since the early 1990s. South Korea is poised to join this group in just a few years.
In terms of relative degree output (degrees per population) in 2000, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan are the international leaders. The ranking of the United States by this measure is twenty-fifth among the forty-three countries included in this report."
Then there is the dumbing down of news - the tabloidization and loss of depth of news coverage over the past decade has been huge.
PC is just not paying attention or perhaps PC is a troll.
I don't think that what PC is saying is crazy. I see where he's coming from. He is demanding evidence. Almost nowhere in his comment does he assert that I said something false; his complain is that I haven't given enough evidence to establish my point.
This isn't crazy in my opinion. In fact, I think the complain is true though unfair. In short postings like this, more than trying to argue for a point one attempts to convey an interesting outlook on an issue. The idea is to try to elicit reflection on something that we deem important. Demanding strong support for claims made in this context is asking for what can't be given.
That being said let me add a few things on my behalf. Given the circumstances of my life, I have vast first-hand knowledge of at least one country other than the US and decent knowledge of a couple more. This knowledge doesn't involve intellectuals exclusively but people from all social and economic strata. While I agree that there's a lot to be done in education in these countries as well (perhaps more so than in the US), I haven't sensed there a negative attitude toward knowledge and especially culture as I have some times in the US. Needless to say, this attitude comes from (some) individuals and not from American institutions. I insist that I have the American high-level education system in the greatest esteem.
In sum, I've spoken from my personal experience which, of course, does not constitute strong evidence but may be shared by others and elicit reflection. I wrote the posting in that spirit. Empirical/objective evidence like that provided by Gstark123 would probably suffice to build a good case for the thesis; or so I believe. But before we build the case, we have to recognize the problem and contemplate the thesis. My posting was intended as that kind of warm-up work.
Thanks for the comments.
A very interesting article by Susan Jacoby came out yesterday that addresses pretty much the same questions we've been concerned with. I can't seem to type the URL here, but you can find it by googling "The Dumbing of America Washington Post"
Needless to say, I don't have the slightest contact with the Washington Post. The dates are pure coincidence.
Mr. Bulnes, I appreciate your defense of my post, and my principle complaint was the lack of evidence. And more to the point, I think your post was not consistent with this blog's mission to fill in the gap between uncritical reporting and abstract theorizing.
I was looking around for the data about the relative lack of intelligence amongst Americans compared to non-American, and it is hard to find side-by-side comparisons. The National Geographic story Stark cited, only remarks that Americans do worse at geography than non-Americans, but it does not say how much worse.
The PISA study Stark refers to does offer side-by-side data for comparison. I looked at the mathematics data because Stark raised that issue. When the scope of the data is expanded to include the 57 PISA-surveyed countries, the US is one of 31 countries which was statistically significantly below the average. This group included Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Russia, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Chile.
What was interesting is that there are a lot of countries in which the average national is dumber than the average non-national. Now, this doesn't excuse the US's place amongst these countries; indeed, America's failure to score higher could be interpreted as a reflection of its anti-intellectualism - we don't insist on our young learning mathematics.
Stark also raised the point that America is being surpassed by China and Japan in the number of engineering degrees awarded per capita. I would suggest that it is a mistake to equate engineering with intelligence. However, a Financial Times article from 2006 questioned whether this disparity was real; it said that many of the engineering degrees the Chines Government reports awarding are for less rigorous degrees than the engineering degrees awarded by the US's colleges.
I am not raising this to disprove Stark's point or yours, Mr. Bulnes. My point is that a creditable discussion of the real or merely perceived phenomenon of American anti-intellectualism has to be conducted with reliable statistical information to back up the conclusions we wish to draw (but, then again, statistics are like assholes - everybody has one).
Anyway, I think America's anti-intellectualism may be a form of hubris; Americans think it is good enough to be the leaders in educating the elites, and consequently ignore educating the non-elites or think it is unimportant. If you're under the impression that your education is poor because you're unimportant, you may have a negative attitude to those with better educations. This is mere conjecture, and I don't want to hang my hat on it, but this might be at issue.
Just one important point on the PISA study:
When one treats all of the European countries (the EU15) as on data set the resulting mean results (and general shape of the curve) are very similar to the US. Europe's high scores in Northern European countries is pulled down by the low scores in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece. The EU 15 has a population of 320m and the US 300m, so this may be a more appropriate way to compare the US and Europe. I'm guessing that were CT for example to be tested seperately it's scores would be similar to Northern Europe. In general it is unwise to compare scores of countries with large differences in population sizes.
The US is in general similar in Europe in it's educational profile when compared this way (and in other ways too!)
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the mean were the same in the US and the EU. I myself said that some of the smartest people in the world live in the US. Ironically also some of the dumbest people live next door of the smartest. My point is about the gap in knowledge. Hence more than the mean, the really interesting indicator is the standard deviation. I wonder if that is the same in the US and EU.
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