Artificial Stupidity

[Guest]

Artificial Stupidity

By Thomas Sowell

A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears.

She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide — a fancy chemical name for water. A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times.

This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov's dog when we hear a certain sound — in this case, the sound of some politically correct crusade.

People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.

Educational institutions created to pass on to the next generation the knowledge, experience and culture of the generations that went before them have instead been turned into indoctrination centers to promote whatever notions, fashions or ideologies happen to be in vogue among today's intelligentsia.

Many conservatives have protested against the specifics of the things with which students are being indoctrinated. But that is not where the most lasting harm is done. Many, if not most, of the leading conservatives of our times were on the left in their youth. These have included Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and the whole neoconservative movement.

The experiences of life can help people outgrow whatever they were indoctrinated with. What may persist, however, is the lazy habit of hearing one side of an issue and being galvanized into action without hearing the other side — and, more fundamentally, not having developed any mental skills that would enable you to systematically test one set of beliefs against another.

It was once the proud declaration of many educators that "We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think." But far too many of our teachers and professors today are teaching their students what to think, about everything from global warming to the new trinity of "race, class and gender."

Even if all the conclusions with which they indoctrinate their students were 100 percent correct, that would still not be equipping students with the mental skills to weigh opposing views for themselves, in order to be prepared for new and unforeseeable issues that will arise over their lifetimes, after they leave the schools and colleges.

Many of today's "educators" not only supply students with conclusions, they promote the idea that students should spring into action because of these prepackaged conclusions — in other words, vent their feelings and go galloping off on crusades, without either a knowledge of what is said by those on the other side or the intellectual discipline to know how to analyze opposing arguments.

When we see children in elementary schools out carrying signs in demonstrations, we are seeing the kind of mindless groupthink that causes adults to sign petitions they don't understand or — worse yet — follow leaders they don't understand, whether to the White House, the Kremlin or Jonestown.

A philosopher once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of one's own ignorance. That is the knowledge that too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach our young people.

It takes a certain amount of knowledge just to understand the extent of one's own ignorance. But our "educators" have given assignments to children who are not yet a decade old to write letters to members of Congress, or to Presidents, spouting off on issues ranging from nuclear weapons to medical care.

Will Rogers once said that it was not ignorance that was so bad but "all the things we know that ain't so." But our classroom indoctrinators are getting students to think that they know after hearing only one side of an issue. It is artificial stupidity.

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[karl]

"In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators."

That's because the longer you remain in the educational system the "lefter" you get. And no wonder - nobody in public education is affected by free market principles. The teachers and students are all essentially on the dole.

[Guest]

Once again karl, you have spoken wisely.

[Tom Wetmore]

I am not so sure you helped your point. You seem to be saying that education, i.e. the more we learn and know about the world around us, essentially persuades people of the validity of the left. The converse seems to reinforce the perception that those on the right are a bunch of ignornant uneducated rubes.

Progressives/Liberals are smart, educated, well informed. Conservatives are not.

Is that what you really want people to aspire to?

[karl]

I am not so sure you helped your point. You seem to be saying that education, i.e. the more we learn and know about the world around us, essentially persuades people of the validity of the left. The converse seems to reinforce the perception that those on the right are a bunch of ignornant uneducated rubes.

I'm sure your statement above is what people in the field of education would like us to think, but it makes one wonder how useful the leftist education people get really is. The facts are that the more real life experience people get, the more conservative they become.

[Tom Wetmore]

I don't think you can really make those kinds of broad generalizations. It is a fair assumption to say that people accumulate more "real life experience" as they age, which would suggest that the older one gets the more conservative one gets. And it would also suggest that younger less experienced people would be much more liberal.

While it is true, that many older people are conservative and many young people are liberal, it is certainly not true across the board. I know of many young people, very short on that "real life experience" that are very conservative and many old very experienced liberals. And I know of many well educated people that are also very conservative. And I also know many people well educated in only the school of hard knocks that are very liberal. And many people do in fact get more liberal as they get older and accumulate more experience.

[karl]

Gallup polls are consistent that people become more conservative as they age. Certainly there will be exceptions to these data trends, but the data are solid and consistent over the years.

Whereas middle-aged and older Americans lean conservative (vs. liberal) in their politics by at least 2 to 1, adults aged 18 to 29 are just as likely to say their political views are liberal (31%) as to say they are conservative (30%).

Check it out here: http://www.gallup.com/poll/120857/conservatives-single-largest-ideological-group.aspx

[SivartM]

So, basically, people tend to grow more conservative as they grow older because they get demoralized by real life? Wow, that sounds fun.

Sometimes education doesn't correlate with political ideology. But, I'm homeschooled and learned to think for myself. I think it's scary how indoctrinated people are, both in public schools and in churches, private schools, the media, the internet...

I'm surprised that people ever change "sides" at all. You lose all your friends. Unless you don't talk about politics with them.

[John317]

I think what happens is that when people are very young, they are idealistic, and not as practical as they will be later on in life. At an early age they tend to just want to make changes in the world and they lack the understanding of life that comes with longer experience.

As they grow older and gain life-experienes, they see things they didn't know before. Sometimes they come to see that life is much more complex than they ever imagined when they were in their teens and early twenties or even in their thirties.

For instance, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was about as Left as you can get. My heroes were Fidel Castro, Lenin, Marx, George Jackson, Trostsky, and Che Guevara. I would happily have gone to Bolivia and joined Che or worked for free to help Cuba's sugar harvest. I was willing to kill for the Fourth International.

Since then, I've been around the world, served in the US Army, graduated from two universities, lived in Mexico, traveled all over the US by thumb, lived with hobos, been married, worked for 25 years with the insane and with gang members, and brought up four children. That's besides studying a lot of history and thinking a lot about what I've read and experienced. I hadn't done any of that when I was a teen-ager and in my early twenties.

Is anyone surprised that life-experiences and insights into human nature result in changes of world-view? I would be surprised if it didn't.

Why should anyone be expected to like the same book at 50 that he did at age 20? Similarly, why would anyone think a man (or woman) would think the same about politics or life when 55 as when he was 20 or 25? If someone did, would it be a mark of maturity or an evidence of failure to grow up or perhaps even an inability to grasp what he's seen and experienced all his life?

[John317]

Quote:

SivartM:

I'm surprised that people ever change "sides" at all. You lose all your friends. Unless you don't talk about politics with them.

So? I lost all my gay and non-Christian friends when I became a Seventh-day Adventist and stopped practicing gay sex and going out partying and bar-hopping and instead settled down to family life and being faithful to my wife.

As for politics, I seldom talk about it with other SDAs, because for me the most important thing is unity in the church, and I find that politics results in too much division. I still refuse to think of fellow SDAs as conservative or progressive, and it never occurred to me to think in those terms until I came on this Forum. I try to leave politics alone with other SDAs because I see too often how it just causes people to get angry at one another. Some do it over disagreements about the Bible, and that's bad enough, but it is necessary to talk about the Bible. It isn't necessary to talk politics, so I seldom do it. I would only do it if people could do it without changing their feelings towards people they disagree with.

[Guest]

Good thinking