The Gravity of Stupidity

I have a secret signal that I give my wife (a schoolteacher) whenever she tells me stories of parents intent on securing their offspring's future unemployment, or whenever we observe a child immersed in a mind-numbing video game: It is the motion of a hand flipping burgers with an invisible spatula--a harbinger of that child's future prospects in the global economy.

Among the parenting challenges I underestimated before having kids is the constant counterpressure necessary to keep children engaged with the real world--thinking for themselves, reading, learning, communicating effectively. My solution? No cable TV, time limits on the computer and enforced reading before bedtime. However, it seems that the combined energy of contemporary culture is pushing in the opposite direction, as this article in the Washington Post suggests.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

As Susan Jacoby points out in this piece, the consequences of a functionally illiterate society are felt in political discourse, a glaring lack of global awareness (According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made.), and "the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place."

As Thomas L. Friedman points out in The World Is Flat, the results of this antirationalism will be most vivid when well-educated and disciplined children in non-Western nations such as India, China and even parts of Africa begin competing en mass for jobs America's kids may no longer be able to perform.