Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Not dumb,just ignorant

In the '90s, journalist/author Bill Bryson returned to the 
United States after living in Britain for 20 years. A savvy 
editor at the English Mail on Sunday newspaper promptly 
tapped him to do a weekly column for the paper's Night & Day 
magazine on aspects of life in the US of interest to people 
in the British Isles.

These highly varied and often amusing pieces were collected in 
book form as Notes From A Big Country. At least a third of 
them also appeared in his book I'm A Stranger Here Myself, 
the result I assume of that strange dichotomy that affects to 
completely separate US and British publishing (you have all seen 
those notations on paperback books "For copyright reasons this 
edition not for sale in the USA").

Anyway, all this is just so I can refer to one of his short 
articles for Night & Day, published in November 1996, 
entitled Dumb and Dumber. This piece dealt with "the 
phenomenon now widely known as the Dumbing Down of America".

Bryson began his article with the results of a survey conducted a 
few years earlier by the National Endowment for the Humanities, 
which tested 8000 senior students at US high schools and found, 
as Bryson puts it, "that a very large number of them didn't know, 
well, anything".

"Two thirds had no idea when the US Civil War took place or which 
president penned the Gettysburg Address. Roughly the same 
proportion could not identify Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill or 
Charles de Gaulle.

"A third thought that Franklin Roosevelt was president during the 
Vietnam War and that Columbus sailed to America after 1750. 
Forty-two percent ['this is my favourite' notes Bryson] couldn't 
name a single country in Asia."

Bryson, who avers that he "does not for a moment think that 
Americans are inherently more stupid or brain-dead than anyone 
else", blames this appalling test result on the fact that 
Americans "are routinely provided with conditions that spare them 
the need to think, and so they have got out of the habit".

There is certainly something in that, but I have no doubt this 
situation is also not as accidental or benign as Bill Bryson 
seems to think. With the sophisticated mass media that we have 
now, it would be perfectly possible to raise the cultural and 
educational level of the community — substantially — within the 
space of a single decade.

Unfortunately, of course, the relatively small number of 
capitalists who control the mass media — directly through 
ownership or indirectly through domination of government — have 
a vested interest in not improving the cultural and educational 
level of the populace.

Obviously, the kind of message espoused by Bush and Howard, or 
the line that is pushed by the Murdoch press on almost anything, 
has more chance of success with people whose grasp of current 
events is rudimentary at best, whose critical faculties have been 
dulled through disuse.

The stories of weapons of mass destruction being developed in 
Iraq or of imminent interest rate rises in the event of a Labor 
victory would not have been nearly so effective if placed before 
a well-informed electorate.

As we have said before in these pages, capitalism prefers to 
function in a world of ignorance and works hard to see that, in 
fact, it does. The erosion of democratic rights — or even their 
outright destruction — is a lot easier when people are kept in 
ignorance and fear.

However, although the dumbing down of the population has become 
more obvious in recent decades, especially on television, it is 
not all that recent really. And it is certainly not confined to 
the United States.

In the 1950s, I was a pupil at Sydney High. At the time the US 
was trying to provoke China into a war over the occupation of 
islands and the passage of ships in the straits between Taiwan 
and the mainland.

The newspapers were full of daily reports of shelling and other 
indicators of imminent war over what they still persisted in 
calling "Formosa" (as named by the Portuguese in the 16th 
century).

I vividly recall how stunned I was when Mr Allsop, our History 
teacher (who, with his colleague Hunt, had written the textbook 
we were using), asked the members of the History Honours class 
where Formosa was and I was the only one who knew! I mean, there 
were little maps showing its location in almost every day's 
newspaper.

It was the height of the Cold War but none of the other members 
of that same Honours Class could say what the letters USSR stood 
for (although one lad who confidently asserted it meant "United 
States of Soviet Russia" deserved an A for ingenuity, I thought).

American — and Australian — high school students are not 
inherently stupid (still less "brain-dead"). They are however, 
the victims of a ruling class strategy to keep them ignorant.

And that needs to be vigorously opposed.