Get your own Free Home PageIn the past thirty years anti-intellectual trends have resulted in an education system that functions in some areas without academic values. The purpose of such schools seems to be merely to create good consumers.
From "Dumbth", and 81 Ways to Make Americans Smarter, by Steve Allen, 1989
Ronald Reagan's cuts in public monies for education - as governor and as president - came at the end of a general collapse and therefore did not cause it, though they led to further damage. (pg 49)
In August 1976, The Los Angeles Times, in a four-month investigation into what it termed "The widespread erosion of academic standards within the American education system" - which had produced "declining achievement and rampant grade inflation among students" - traced the roots of the decline to a shift in social and educational values during the 1960s that led to a massive cut in the number of basic academic classes, less strenuous graduation requirements, and an overall emphasis on less demanding elective courses. (pg 45)
Other factors were:
Collectively these trends served to undermine the rational and intelluctual foundations of education, leading some to question the importance of formalized learning in institutions which themselves were confused about it.(pg 45)
Among the causes of the dimmunition of our intelligence is some forty years of television watching. I have elsewhere described most commercial television as junk-food for the mind. The point is not that watching just thirty minutes of "Charlie's Angel's" reruns will make a little piece of your brain fall out of your left ear. This will not happen, any more than eating one piece of white bread will make a tooth fall out. But, by God, forty years of eating mostly white bread, white sugar, or the equivalent, will cause you physical harm. And forty years of watching telivision of the most mindless sort must have a destructive effect on the intelligence. (pg 37)
Get your own Free Home Page