And yet, we spend trillions on cowboy wars, whereas the usual response to budgetary problems, at least here in California, is “cut education”. We are supposedly an advanced and developed country, but we have the know-nothings fighting to replace science with mythology and problem solving with politics. And even a substantial proportion of those who aren’t actually against education see it as nothing more than vocational training.All of which is to say that the bedrock philosophy on which America is built, and has always been built, is anti-intellectualism (see Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, or Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason for details). Until such time as that changes—when, as the slogan had it, the schools have all the money they need, and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber—when people don’t make fun of smart kids as “eggheads” and “nerds”, when teaching becomes a high-status occupation, when science is respected as the only rational method of discovering truth, when parents turn off the boob tube and explain to their children that there is more to life than texting their friends, and above all, until people are accorded status based on how much they know, and how much they use that knowledge to contribute to building a better society, rather than based on how much money they have, we will continue our slide into third-world status.Not, of course, that I think there is even the tiniest sliver of a chance of this ever happening here.
And yet, we spend trillions on cowboy wars, whereas the usual response to budgetary problems, at least here in California, is “cut education”. We are supposedly an advanced and developed country, but we have the know-nothings fighting to replace science with mythology and problem solving with politics. And even a substantial proportion of those who aren’t actually against education see it as nothing more than vocational training.All of which is to say that the bedrock philosophy on which America is built, and has always been built, is anti-intellectualism (see Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, or Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason for details). Until such time as that changes—when, as the slogan had it, the schools have all the money they need, and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber—when people don’t make fun of smart kids as “eggheads” and “nerds”, when teaching becomes a high-status occupation, when science is respected as the only rational method of discovering truth, when parents turn off the boob tube and explain to their children that there is more to life than texting their friends, and above all, until people are accorded status based on how much they know, and how much they use that knowledge to contribute to building a better society, rather than based on how much money they have, we will continue our slide into third-world status.Not, of course, that I think there is even the tiniest sliver of a chance of this ever happening here.