Dumbing Down of American Education, Culture, and Society

An extremely tiny sampling of the extant literature, documenting the exact substance of this article, would easily include:  The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip-Mining of American Culture edited by Katherine Washburn, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Bernard Knox’s The Oldest Dead White European Males; Paul Fussell’s Bad, or The Dumbing of America, Maureen Stout’s The Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing Down of America’s Kids in the Name of Self-Esteem, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s massive tome entitled: The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, and, of course, such revealing volumes as Charles J. Sykes’ Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good about Themselves but Can’t Read, Write, or Add. 

In short, one must be quite a true dullard not to fundamentally accept the blazing truth of what is really happening; moreover, considering the interesting fact that some of these good volumes are about ten or more years old by now, the problem has, moreover, easily gotten much worse and nothing, on the whole, has or will apparently be done to significantly stop the rapidly progressive dumbing down. 

What is going on?   Why can’t anything be done to successfully reverse the well-observed and massively negative trend?  Or, can something be done to reverse the situation?

Questioned Educational Progress

The greatest number of Ph.D.s, MAs, etc., in the history of this country, are now presently in the field of education, as compared to the lack of such a magnitude of educated people, in this particular area of (rather dubious) achievement, as was usually true in past centuries.  

Literally, many more billions upon billions of dollars of (essentially wasted) Federal, state, county, local, corporate, foundation, and other money goes to financing education increasingly year by year, decade by decade; remedial courses and classes, in and out of school buildings, have been crescively made available to millions upon millions of more people, children and adults, every year.   These are, therefore, the plain and impressive facts.

The national and lesser level commitments to the progressive advancement of American education have been, therefore, rather spectacular.  Both substantial and substantive amounts of money, time, effort, thought, studies, manpower, etc. have been enormously expended with little or, sometimes, very little progress to show for the truly massive commitment applied and yearly involved.  [Few people enjoy what now exists, meaning as to the failure observed.]