Susan Jacoby, an author and director of the New York branch of the Center for Inquiry, has recently published a book called The Age of American Unreason, which criticizes American anti-intellectualism. She decided to write the book on 9/11, when she heard this converation in a bar:
” ‘This is just like Pearl Harbor,’
’What is Pearl Harbor?’
‘That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,’ the first man replied.
At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, ‘I decided to write this book.’ “
So 20% of Americans don’t know where the U.S. is located on a map. So Americans are obsessed with reality T.V., or movies featuring Will Ferrell or Adam Sandler. I agree. I’m a sympathizer. I find it sad and almost terrifying how anti-intellectual the States can seem to be. But the NYT article posted makes it seem like her argument is more emphatic polemic than something more empirically based— something that the sympathizers can really use or study academically. Not to say that people won’t still seize upon it— just look at Harold Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind— it just makes it a cultural artifact instead of a more rigorously factual stance.
But my biggest problem with Jacoby as presented in the article is her opposition to “ponderous musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat that trivialize college-level learning.” I don’t think that colleges should solve the problem by further distinguishing their curriculum from ‘everyday life’ and the realities of our culture. Instead, our education should provide us with the tools and information for understanding and interpreting this culture. Pop culture should perform as both the entrance and exit point for college study and discourse. At the starting point it will engage and provide a motivation for more study (for me, this was my Short Stories expos class, which featured contemporary American short fiction and films based on those stories), and at the end point, the result will be students who can speak more intelligently and “raise the level of conversation,” which social critics including John Dewey and Jacoby see as the ultimate goal of American education.
Doesn’t this make sense? The goal is not simply to teach us, or to teach us about our culture. It is to teach us about the history of our culture, so we can better know the world and ourselves. That motivation is the only reason why anyone would want to raise the level of conversation in the first place- because there are so many things to learn and do- why would we spend our time on so many banalities instead of whatever else life can really offer?
