Dumbing down

Dumbing down is a pejorative term for a perceived trend to lower the intellectual content of literature, education, news, and other aspects of culture. According to John Algeo, former editor of American Speech, the neologism dumb down meaning "revise so as to appeal to those of little education or intelligence" was first recorded in 1933 as movie slang.^[1]

Dumbing down can point to a variety of different situations, but the concept always involves a claim about the simplification of culture, education and thought; a decline in creativity and innovation; a degradation of artistic, cultural and intellectual standards, or the undermining of the very idea of a standard; and the trivialization of cultural, artistic and academic creations.

The term is often subjective since what is labeled as dumbed down often depends upon the values of individuals of specific groups. Pierre Bourdieu discusses how the practices of dominant groups in society are legitimized to the disadvantage of subordinate groups. However, there is also evidence that knowledge of areas outside that defined by popular culture diminished progressively starting in the late twentieth century.

Education

Increased participation in higher education has attracted the maintenance of distinctions through the construction of the category Mickey Mouse degrees.

In the UK, there is now an annual moral panic every August when GCSE and A-level results are released.^{[citation needed]} The pass rate by students has consistently risen for past two decades and Grade inflation is attributed^{[by whom?]} to rising pass rates.^{[citation needed]} Comparisons between examination questions are often produced as evidence of dumbing down^{[by whom?]} (in mathematics as syllabus has been continuously cut during the past year. For example, an algebraic equation would be compared to a recent question about a "real life" problem).^{[citation needed]}

A secondary school physics teacher, Wellington Grey, ran an Internet petition, stating that "I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be." According to him, "Calculations – the very soul of physics – are absent from the new GCSE." Few examples he listed ranged from "`Q: Why would radio stations broadcast digital signals rather than analogue signals? A: Can be processed by computer / ipod [sic]" to "`Q: Why must we develop renewable energy sources?’"[2]

In Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (originally published in 1991, with an expanded second edition uttered in 2002), American educator John Taylor Gatto collects a number of speeches and essays, including "The Psychopathic School" (his acceptance speech upon receiving the 1990 New York City Teacher of the Year award) and "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" (his acceptance speech when named the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year).^[2] Gatto writes that he began to speculate:

"Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think, and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior."^[2]

In examining "the seven lessons of schoolteaching," Gatto comes to the conclusion that:

"...all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius....

"School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know."^[2]

Media

Increased competition and the introduction of econometric methods have radically changed mass media. Media consolidation has reduced both the breadth and depth of stories covered by mass media. Cost reduction leads to the elimination of foreign bureaus and correspondents in favor of news releases by political parties or businesses (see Flat Earth News).

New refinements in approval-rating and audience-tracking systems have increased incentives for media producers to write as simply as possible and minimize the complexity of argument involved in a given written piece, often at the expense of factual accuracy, completeness, depth, and/or logical validity. Furthermore, economics of scale create positive incentives for mass-media producers to create for the broadest possible audience^{[citation needed]}, such that popular, "lite" topics such as celebrity gossip, entertainment marketing, and sensationalism dominate the marketplace.^{[citation needed]}

Cultural theorists including Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Neil Postman, Henry Giroux and Pierre Bourdieu invoke these effects in support of the claim that television is an especially pervasive and pernicious contributor to the "dumbing-down" process. Some critics such as Stuart Hall argue that teachers of critical thinking, including both professional teachers in an academic environment and non-professional teachers such as parents, can improve their teaching both by occasionally using television as an instructional medium and by using the content of specific television programmes as either a positive example or a counterexample (depending on the programme and the lesson being conveyed).^{[citation needed]}.

Computing

As a response to the growing accessibility to the internet, the phrase Eternal September was coined, referring to the period starting from September 1993 when 'newbies' were no longer encountered only at the start of the academic year^[3].

In popular culture

• The 2005 film Idiocracy portrays a society 500 years in the future massively dumbed down by low-IQ people enthusiastically outbreeding the most intelligent parts of society. This idea was earlier put forth by Cyril M. Kornbluth in The Marching Morons, first published in 1951.
• Music groups The Divine Comedy, Ugly Duckling and Lupe Fiasco have songs titled "Dumb it Down". Chumbawamba has a song titled "Dumbing Down"

See also

• Grade inflation
• Newspeak
• Political correctness
• Postmodernism
• Prolefeed
• Psychological manipulation
• Self-esteem
• Sheeple
• Slogan
• Sound bite
• Superficiality
• Thought-terminating cliché

References

1. ^ Algeo, John and Adele Algeo. 1988. "Among the New Words." American Speech 63.4:235-236.
2. ^ ^{a b c} The Odysseus Group Web site of John Taylor Gatto [1], retrieved 23 February 2009
3. ^ Eric Raymond. "September that never ended". The Jargon File (version 4.4.7). http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html. Retrieved 2010-02-01. 

External links

• "Is the internet dumbing us down?" MSNBC review of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen