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one of the water aerobics instructors at our Y, a refugee from an African country, has perfect command of many of the grammatical distinctions that baffle native speakers. When I taught on the college level, my foreign students, with few exceptions, were a joy to teach. I would have happily accepted a whole classroom full of foreign students who wanted to learn Japanese. (The ESL instructors just loved their students, with the exception of a few spoiled rich kids.)
I don't think Americans are stupid in the sense of "born unable to excel academically." However, I think our culture, especially the culture promoted in the mass media, teaches people to be ignorant. All that's important in the world of the mass media are sports, celebrities, pop music, blockbuster movies, fashion, and reality TV. Reading material should be limited to Sports Illustrated and People.
For years it's been part of my daily ritual to buy newspapers and read them in a coffeeshop. At least once a week, some young man comes up to me and asks to see the sports pages. I offer him the whole paper, since I'm through with it. No, he just wants the sports pages.
There's nothing wrong with sports, but they're being promoted as supremely important, so much so that every child in America must participate in them or face harm to his or her future character and achievement, so much so that 1/3 of every local newscast is devoted to them. The athletes in a school are treated as young gods and goddesses. We are told that sports build character (as they did for O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, and Tonya Harding), teamwork, and responsibility, and the implication is that this is the only way to do so.
Meanwhile, arts instruction is being cut way back all around the country. I don't think this is a coincidence, because artistic activity gets you in touch with the deepest places of your being and is both individualistic and cooperative. Told to paint a picture of the same tree, no two people will paint it exactly the same. No two actors will play Hamlet exactly the same. No two musicians will play a piece or sing a song exactly the same. Practitioners of the arts spend long hours alone, delving into their innermost hearts.
Yet the arts require cooperation. If you're in a play or a musical ensemble, you learn teamwork and responsibility as certainly as any athlete does. If you don't know your part or don't pay attention to your cues or don't practice or aren't where you're supposed to be when it's your turn to stand out, you can ruin the whole performance.
The right wing loves sports, because they're regimented and don't leave much time for thinking, and hates true art, because it's inherently thoughtful, and anyone who's any good is going to break the rules in an intelligent way.
The right wing also doesn't want us to know history or geography or anything else that is not strictly necessary for being a cog in the corporate machine. It is to their advantage when the pop culture makes fun of readers, intellectuals, artists, and musicians.
The right wing also loves it that science is relegated to PBS, because everyone knows that PBS is for geeks, and crazy, ultraliberal pinko geeks at that. (You don't believe me? Ask a random bunch of high school or college students if they watch PBS.)
Where does this dumbing down come from? The right wing didn't originate it, even though it is definitely to their advantage. I believe that it comes from the pioneer ethos, an environment where you needed people who could chop down trees and shoot themselves some dinner, not people who could recite Shakespeare or do higher math. We never had a national system of education, and each community was free to organize its own schools as it saw fit, so that schooling emphasized "practicalities." Being able to read was good; reading "too much" was bad.
We've now had several generations of this, and the result is a nation that is well-schooled for certain jobs, but not educated in the sense of having general knowledge.
And they are suckers for the Republicans, as the GOP presents them with talking points to rattle around in their heads in lieu of logical thoughts.
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