Education

The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby

Sometimes I wonder if liberals live in the same reality I do. I was reading a review of The Age of American Unreason, a book by liberal author Susan Jacoby, that has as its central thesis: "Americans are increasingly knowledge challenged." The culprit, according to Jacoby, is religious fundamentalism:

The majority, however, are clouded by the author's quickly evident and sizable hang-up regarding a well-worn bogeyman: the powerful, united front of intolerant American fundamentalists bent on national control.

For Jacoby, Protestant fundamentalism, particularly in its resistance to the teaching of evolution in public schools, is intellectual enemy number one.

At times, Jacoby's tendency to place fundamentalist fingerprints all over American ignorance seems to blind her from the obvious. The disastrous aftermath of hurricane Katrina, she argues, illustrates "the abysmal state of public education" brought on in part by "religious fundamentalism."

Now, lets look at things logically- reasonably, even:

One could disprove any hypothesis claiming that the increase of X is responsible for the increase of Y- a positive correlation- with evidence that Y decreased even as X increased- a negative correlation, yes?

Well, is it logical to say that since 1950, say, that Americans have become more religious? More fundamentalist? We used to have prayer in school, for Heaven's sake! Church attendance is about the same as it's always been, but our culture is much more secular (If not, the ACLU has been a waste of money.). Look at a textbook from 1960 and one from today: Is the newer one more conservative or more liberal? Are teacher schools today more conservative or liberal? In the worst schools in the country, like those in Louisiana, are the school systems run by conservative Republicans or liberal Democrats? Has the California K-12 learning nosedive been because Southern Baptists control education policy? I'm sure a team of Pat Buchanan clones runs Detroit and Washington D.C. schools, right?

And evolution as the root of all stupidity is itself the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Assuming that kids do learn Creationism, why would that affect reading or math? What do you think has affected the low history knowledge amongst today's students more: multiculturalism or Creationism? Haven't social studies been the subject most affected by liberals over the last 40 years? Are private Christian schools much worse than public school?

If Susan jacoby isn't counter-reality enough, what about Planned Parenthood? Reacting to the news that 1 in 4 of our daughters has an STD, they said:

...education is key to preventing sexual activity or sexually transmitted diseases in teens. "If someone comes in with concerns, we not only want to treat them for their sexually transmitted infection, but we want to educate them so they never have to come back for that issue again," said Hobbins.

Again, do you think more girls had STDs in 1960 or today? Did girls in 1960 have more sex education and access to condoms than today's demure teens? It seems, quite logically to me, that the more schools implicitly encourage girls to have sex, the more they will and the more STDs they'll get. Yet, PP, on a logic diet, won't touch a plate of simple statistics seasoned with a dash of reasoning.

The liberal response to failure: The only reason that our solutions have the opposite intended effect is because we haven't done it enough.

OK. Calm Down. We know it's wrong, but let's think about why:

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During my conference period, my colleague at crowded Huntington Park high school teaches a class in my classroom. Today, during the course of his lesson, he asked one of the students what he did in his off-time, and the student replied that he enjoyed watching television. Some teachers would have reacted to the student's admission with mild horror and a two or three minute lecture-harangue: "How can you waste your time...etc." if not stop class altogether for a mass intervention.

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"Who cares what they read as long as they read" not infrequently leaves the lips of many teacher's lounge loungers. They mean to say, of course, "at this time, it's more important that we encourage students to learn how to read than worry about whether what they're reading is accurate or encourages a healthy attitude." In other words, it's just prioritizing.

Oh my God! He's burning a book!

I understand the sentiment. After all, teaching children how to read is the reason teachers exist in the first place and teachers should be applauded for recognizing their responsibility.

Taken to an extreme, however, a reading uber alles mentality can lead to self-righteousness and zealotry. I've lived mostly in an academic environment and if you did as well, you know that being well-read in that environment is like being fast on a track team or brave in the military- it's what everybody aspires to and the primary criteria for human-worth measurement.

And, as hard as it is for some to admit, reading can sometimes be worse than not reading anything at all to which mothers who have lost their children to some cult or their husbands to the Playboy-Maxim maxim, "get as much as you can" can attest.

The first time I heard reading, in and of itself, criticized was in a quote by H.L. Mencken,

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

At that moment, Mencken earned a place at the adult's table in my mind (and he's sat there ever since, gloomily complaining about the noise coming from Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh in the kitchen). It's absolutely true. Think about it. One goes home and spends a few hours reading about somebody else's life if fiction or, if politics say, reinforcing the same opinions (is the 875th example of how taxes stimulate the ecomomy more enlightening than the 874th?). How does that make one into a better person (yes, you're reading an opinion. I see the irony)?

Wouldn't it be much better for that person to go out and help somebody instead of spending four hours a day reading how the world would be better if people helped each other? Wouldn't a woman be better advised to do something nice for her husband instead of read a romance novel? How about a guy play a game of ball with his son instead of reading Mickey Mantle's life story?

And where do people apply all of the knowledge they gain? Like some kind of knowledge arms race, people mostly expend reading energy to keep up with their enemies in verbal combat, making sure that they remember that the Crusades had a complex beginning to parry attacks on the Church. People also love (I'm projecting a little) to impress. I remember when somebody in the teacher's lounge brought up an interview Gore had given in which he said that he enjoyed the book "The Red and the Black" by Stendhal, and I said that I had read (great and I don't regret it). Oh! what a victory for me that day!

When I mentioned my newfound reading ambivalence to an academically-oriented friend of mine, he said, "How will you learn how to think," or "how will you think?" or something like that.

I thought about it and said, "Thinking doesn't end when you put down the book. For many, it might, just then, start."

Tom Wayne from Kansas City, MO is burning books because:

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

How arrogant! If people don't read in the quantity he thinks appropriate, they're not thinking (dumb). I wonder how many things, besides reading, he's accomplished? I don't think my brother's ever read a book, yet I know few men as decent (and wealthy) as him. It's funny because I know some people started feeling sorry for my brother after having read the beginning of the previous sentence.

Anyways, Wayne needn't worry. Nobody wanted the books because they're reading something else, or they're wealthy enough to avoid a trip to his store and order from Amazon.

Over the last few years, people are buying and publishing more-not less books with only a slight dip last year. And, those figures don't include blogs and other internet reading or people just copying stuff.

And this site reports that

Total book sales dipped 0.3% in 2006, to $24.20 billion, according to estimates released by the Association of American Publishers. Sales in the trade segment were up 2.9% in the year, to $8.28 billion, led by an 8.5% increase in the trade paperback category. Adult hardcover sales rose 4.1%. Sales in the children's segments fell, with hardcover sales off 2.0% and paperback down 0.6%. Sales do not include revenue from the Harry Potter series, which the AAP excluded to give a better sense of the overall trend in the children's market.

The largest gain in the year was recorded by e-books, where sales rose 24.1%, to a still tiny $54.4 million. Audiobook sales were down 11.7%. Other areas where sales fell were religion, off 10.2%; book clubs/mail order, down 3.0%; elhi, down 5.8%; and the "other" segment, off 11.3%. Sales were up 4.6% in the mass market paperback category, rose 2.3% in professional and 2.8% in the higher education segment.

The Red and the Black (Penguin Classics) by Roger Gard