AMERICAN EDUCATION AS AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT

 In recent years, we have become accustomed to news reports and scientific warnings about "existential threats" to our species. life in general, and the planetary ecology.  These threats range from climate change to artificial intelligence agents and robots.  Our future often seems to be unfolding into a dystopia of such threats; we are being attacked by the basic elements of wind, earth, air, and water.  This dystopian future is being fueled by our educational institutions.  In 1933, John and Adele Algeo defined "dumbing down" as                          "[to] revise so as to appeal to those of little education or intelligence".                                     At the time this was movie-business slang.  It has become increasingly clear that this term describes what has been happening to the American educational system: 

                            ...school is a twelve-year jail sentence, where bad habits are the only curriculum truly                                learned. I teach school, and win awards doing it. I should know.

John Gatto wrote those words in his Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling  (2017).  Reports on the dumbing down of America and its educational institutions have become a cottage industry: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=dumbing+down+america&i=stripbooks&crid=1GQJL6TQK4O6P&sprefix=dumbing+down%2Cstripbooks%2C59&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_1_12.  All of this is unfolding in the context of the society described in Richard Hofstadter's classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1966).  

As a college professor for almost half a century,I have had first hand experience with "dumbness." During the last years of my life in the academy, university administrators came to see me as a dangerous person, teaching a dangerous subject matter (sociology) and dangerous topics (religion, economics, sex, politics), in a dangerous classroom atmosphere.  Student complaints about my "communist" ideas were not uncommon.  In the wake of my retirement I wrote the following: 

These developments have not eluded our jesters.   

Bill Maher How Dumb Are We?!!?

https://flip.it/H5Z_SI

One of the saddest features of the old Jay Leno late night show was "Jay Walking."  He would ask people on the street questions like "What once divided East and West Germany?  One answer: "The sea."  

For more frightening examples see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXWTQobaMaQ

These comedic episodic anecdotes are buttressed by a variety of research projects:

https://www.theedadvocate.org/how-dumbed-down-education-is-creating-a-national-security-crisis/

https://www.discovery.org/education/2021/09/10/dumbing-down-k-12-education/

The Trump administration reinforced an emerging post-truth society of "alternative facts." 

It is past the time to start worrying about the uneducated and under-educated voters who are sending numbskulls with guns as credentials rather than intelligence.