Is The DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA Real????

Question

Do you think people are getting dumber or is it just me.....I know I am not the smartest person in the world....but it sure seems like more and more people are at a very shallow level of thought.

Answer 1

That is precisely what is happening. Media, education, are geard for that. There is a growing movement for standardized testing that has some schools ONLY teaching what will be on those tests and little else. There is also, in some areas, a push for a simple pass/fail grading system. This removes the motivation for doing well as if you only have to pass you will just do the minimum for that. The old competitive system was better. It had its flaws...but the benefits outweighed them.

The whole idea of dumbing down america is to make the population easier to manage, control and manipulate by the people in charge...if you don't think and question you will accept anything you are told without incident.

Answer 2

actually, our IQ scores have been going up consistantly over the last half century. Of course this only half the story. It's better to say that the way we assimilate, process and use information is changing.

In a way, despite faster human processing speed for some tasks that are related to IQ tests, I think that on a deeper level we are missing something that came with a time when reading books and newspapers was common occupation of most people. I don't think the deeper logical connections that come with patience and sitting down and digesting something fully is happening as often. My opinion is that people have cast a wider net and now know a little bit about everything, but usually don't have a deeper understanding of any subject.

Of course that's all my subjective opinion at this point, I don't really have the evidence to prove this, but I still stand by that the information revolution has changed the way we think, both for good and for bad. I suspect a similar transformation happened when we went to preliterate to a literate society. If you look at any society where literacy doesn't exist, you have people who can memorize enormous amounts of information. Yet nobody has the ability to do so anymore. There will definitely be a loss of some skills when we have the internet to make connections for us the way that books memorize things for us.

Answer 3

Not entirely. It's not that our education system is so poor that our people are disposed to suffer ignorance, no, but that our culture disposes people to be specialised, now, there's nothing wrong with that in high education fields, that's simply what happens when new technologies arise, new sciences come to exist in order to advance and develop human society, and for that America has done well, it has and still continues today to make many contributions to the advancement of human society but when fields become that advanced, the specialisation becomes so time consuming that the people have no reason to be anything else and as well, no time. However, this seems to carry over to the lower education workers as well, because of a degrading state of our educational system due to the socialist manner in which it was constructed. So it is mostly a question of specialisation, and with the advancements in technology and information available, and with more specialisations needed, it's simply that those who are well educated and informed are in fact even moreso than they would have been without the technology, but those who only have so much education as is given to them by the socialist public school system, become less educated than previous generations due to its degrading state. However, to those who indeed wish to be better educated, there is no lack of resources available to them, for example, I am only 16 years old.

Answer 4

I am afraid you are right. All you have to do is look at the level of questions here. Many of them are full of misspellings, in spite of spell check being available, and horrible grammatical mistakes. (I do realize that some of the people speak English as their second language, but not all!) The main topic of conversation seems to focus on entertainment. Where I work we have CNN on all day. I am stunned by what passes as news. I don't think people are actually dumber. I think they are just complacent.

Answer 5

It is for real. Critical thinking is discouraged and the sheep mentality encouraged. Don't poke your head up and ask a serious question because you'll get hammered down. Down achieve more than the other person because you'll make them feel bad and we'll take it away from you anyway.

CONFORM! Be Mediocre!! You'll get along so much better. Ain't our brave new world wonderful? Let's all cheer for the world wide liberal/socialist movement.

Answer 6

Well, very few of the younger people have much grasp of history, but that I blame on the text book publishers, who bias their texts. Also, very few seem to read much at all anymore...all in all, I would say yes, with the full complicity of the public education system.

The textbook comment refers to my viewing my nephews history book...one and a half pages for all of WW II and an entire chapter covering the civil rights movement...talk about a warped sense of importance...yeesh!

Answer 7

There are to many convinces available in life now, children are not taught to use a dictionary or encyclopedias to retrieve information.
Just my opinion.

Answer 8

See that amazes me ...I just bet you watch Jerry Springer..

America is like any other place of course we have our off the wall Crap.. But most of us try to just get by because we don't live for your entertainment or your standards of liveing ..

Of course we don't let our children watch porn like yours proabably does and the Christian Cult in America is very strong ..

But we just live ,learn , and Play Better is all

Answer 9

I think there have always been people at shallow thought levels and that it is encouraged in the U.S., it is necessary to survival for many due to our country's ideologies and beliefs.

Answer 10

Not really dumbing down. Splitting.

The ambitious and (expensively), well educated are getting smarter.

(Unless they are assured a prominent place by "birth" or a certain infamous fraternal membership.)