Dumbing downis the deliberateoversimplificationofintellectualcontent ineducation,literature,cinema,news,video games,andculture.Originating in 1933, the term "dumbing down" was movie-business slang, used by screenplay writers, meaning: "[to] revise so as to appeal to those of little education or intelligence".[1]Dumbing-down varies according to subject matter, and usually involves the diminishment ofcritical thoughtby underminingstandard languageandlearning standards,thus trivializing academic standards, culture, and meaningful information, as in the case ofpopular culture.
Education
editIn the late 20th century, the proportion of young people attending university in the UK increased sharply, including many who previously would not have been considered to possess the appropriate scholastic aptitude. In 2003, the UK Minister for Universities,Margaret Hodge,criticisedMickey Mouse degreesas a negative consequence of universities dumbing down their courses to meet "the needs of the market": these degrees are conferred for studies in a field of endeavour "where the content is perhaps not as [intellectually] rigorous as one would expect, and where the degree, itself, may not have huge relevance in the labour market": thus, a university degree of slight intellectual substance, which the student earned by "simply stacking up numbers on Mickey Mouse courses, is not acceptable".[2][3]
InDumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling(1991, 2002),John Taylor Gattopresented speeches and essays, including "The Psychopathic School", his acceptance speech for the 1990 New York City Teacher of the Year award, and "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher", his acceptance speech upon being named as the New York State Teacher of the Year for 1991.[4]Gatto writes that while he was hired to teach English and literature, he came to believe he was employed as part of asocial engineeringproject. The "seven lessons" at the foundation of schooling were never explicitly stated, Gatto writes, but included teaching students that their self-worth depended on outside evaluation; that they were constantly ranked and supervised; and that they had no opportunities for privacy or solitude. Gatto speculated:
Was it possible, I had been hired, not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy, on the face of it, but slowly, I began to realize that the bells and confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the nationalcurriculumof schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think, and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.[4]
In examining the seven lessons of teaching, Gatto concluded that "all of these lessons are prime training for permanentunderclasses,people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius ". That" 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. "[4]
Mass communications media
editIn France,Michel Houellebecqhas written (not excluding himself) of "the shocking dumbing-down of French culture and intellect as was recently pointed out, [2008] sternly but fairly, byTimemagazine ".[5]
In popular culture
editThe science fiction filmIdiocracy(2006) portrays the U.S. as a greatly dumbed-down society 500 years in the future, in whichlow cultureandphilistinismwere unintentionally achieved by eroding language and education coupled withdysgenics,where people of lowerintelligencereproduced faster than the people of higher intelligence. Similar concepts appeared in earlier works, notably thescience fictionshort story "The Marching Morons"(1951), byCyril M. Kornbluthwhich also features a modern-day protagonist in a future dominated by low-intelligence persons. Moreover, the novelBrave New World(1931), byAldous Huxley,discussed the ways autopiansociety was deliberately dumbed down in order to maintainpolitical stabilityandsocial orderby eliminating complex concepts unnecessary for society to function (e.g., the Savage tries reading Shakespeare to the masses and is not understood). More malevolent uses of dumbing down to preserve the social order are also portrayed inThe Matrix,Nineteen Eighty-Fourand many dystopian movies.
The social criticPaul Fusselltouched on these themes ( "prole drift" ) in his non-fiction bookClass: A Guide Through the American Status System(1983)[6]and focused on them specifically inBAD: or, The Dumbing of America(1991).
See also
edit- Anti-intellectualism– Hostility to and mistrust of education, philosophy, art, literature, and science
- Censorship– Suppression of speech or other information
- Dumbing Us Down– Non-fiction book by John Taylor Gatto
- Grade inflation– Awarding higher grades than deserved
- Lie-to-children– Teaching a complex subject via simpler models
- Low culture– Term for forms of popular culture with mass appeal
- Low information voter
- Manufacturing Consent– 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
- Obscurantism– Practice of obscuring information
- Post-factual politics– Political culture where facts are considered irrelevant
- Prolefeed– Fictional language in the novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
- Herd behavior– Behavior of individuals acting in a group
- Sound bite– Short audio clip extracted from a recording
- Stupidity– Lack of intelligence
- Superficiality
- Universal education– Ability of all people to have equal opportunity in education
- Easiness effect– Epistemic overconfidence instilled by pop-sci oversimplifications
- Way Station– 1963 science fiction novel by Clifford D. Simak
Further reading
editA compilation of essays by philosophers, politicians, artists and thinkers titledDumbing Downwas published by Imprint Academic in 2000, edited byIvo Mosleyand included essays byJaron Lanier,Claire Fox,Ravi Shankar,Robert Brustein,Michael Oakshott,Roger DeakinandPeter Randall-Pageamong others.[7]
- Mosley, Ivo, ed. (2000).Dumbing Down: Culture, Politics, and the Mass Media.Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic.ISBN978-0-907845-65-2.OCLC43340314.(collection of essays)
References
edit- ^Algeo, John; Algeo, Adele (1988). "Among the New Words".American Speech.63(4): 235–236.doi:10.1215/00031283-78-3-331.S2CID201771186.
- ^"'Irresponsible' Hodge under fire ".BBC News: World Edition.14 January 2003.Retrieved24 June2006.
- ^MacLeod, Donald (14 July 2005)."50% higher education target doomed, says thinktank".The Guardian.Retrieved24 June2006.
- ^abcBlumenfeld, Samuel L. (May 1993)."The Blumenfeld Education Letter- May 1993:Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory SchoolingBy John Taylor Gatto ".The Odysseus Group.John Taylor Gatto.Archived fromthe originalon 11 July 2009.Retrieved23 February2009.
- ^Lévy, Bernard-Henri;Houellebecq, Michel(2011).Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World.Translated by Frendo, Miriam; Wynne, Frank. New York: Random House. pp. 3–4.ISBN978-0-8129-8078-3.OCLC326529237.
- ^Fussell, Paul(1983).Class: A Guide Through the American Status System(1st ed.). New York: Summit Books.ISBN978-0-671-44991-9.OCLC9685644.
- ^McCrum, Robert (12 March 2000)."Raised highbrows".The Guardian.
External links
edit- "Is the internet dumbing us down?"MSNBCreview ofThe Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture,by Andrew Keen