More Smutty Than You: TSR's Hall of Shame

[Pescado]

Anti-intellectualism is a firmly engrained prejudice hammered into American youth from an early age, and has been for a long time. Just consider the typical media image: The hero is typically some manner of athletic muscleman, who defeats his enemies, typically evil scientists or other more cerebral types, by bashing things with brute force. "The Incredible Hulk" is, essentially, the iconic example: The titular hero defeats his enemies, often the same intellectual crowd, not through the use of his brainpower, but through transforming into a mindless monster capable only of smashing things by brute force.

Society simply does not want people to think too much. It's bad for business.

[Immortelle]

You could argue that we are all in a more elaborate form of a second Middle Ages.  A few intelligent members of society at the top, ruling the roost as it were, controlling  the rest of the population via entertainment and other such media.    Keep the rest  of the populus dumb, bereft of thought, only letting them think that the situation was otherwise.  After all, not everyone can be a member of the wealthy elite now can they.  *dons tin foil hat*

[SoggyFox]

Read a research article on this subject about 10 years ago.  The american disdain for the smart and talented, as well as the deliberate retention of most of us in immaturity is on purpose.  In the 1800s, late period, about the time of the robber barons [or was that really early 1900s?  I suck at 'modern' history.] the business types, most of whom were also in government of paying off government types, sat down to decide how best to keep money flowing, and to get a good workforce.

So, unless you are from a wealthy family and can afford the best schools, you are taught that being strong and dumb is good, smart people are to be disdained and ridiculed to the point where they can't get a mate, to keep brains from being bred into the lower class population, and basically, americans are taught to listen to what they are told to do and to buybuybuy.  Unfortunately, it backfired in one way - keeping everyone immature meant that the american work ethic sort of faded.

It does explain why our education system is crap, why teachers are paid so little for how important a job they in theory have, and why a country where 12 year olds were capable of taking over and captaining a war vessel, now has 40 and 50 year olds who can't even stop buying stuff long enough to start putting money away for retirement, or who still can't act older than 12.

And when I say a 12 year old, I mean someone who'd been 6 the year before, using Pes' rule of 6.

[eternal_darkness]

In the college I'm at now, people actually get called "nerds" for getting good grades. I was gobsmacked for a week when I heard that; I hadn't heard someone get teased for being smart since ninth grade or so. Also, it is very common for people to talk and play with their cell phones during class. Oh, and they bitch and moan if they have to read one whole book. Basically, schools in the south in the U.S. don't prepare kids for college one whit, and this is what happens.

Don't even get me started on the texting issue, it drives me crazy. Actually, most of the US public high schools don't prepare kids for college. I went to Catholic school and SAT prep was a required class. They walked us through filling out apps, choosing a school, etc. We also had a block schedule, with 4 classes for 80 minutes each day. That is REALLY useful, as I now have classes that are 4hours long. My little sister is in high school and they still push the 8 classes a day thing which leads to a ridiculous amount of homework. SAT/ATC prep is on students an their parents, as well as picking a school. So yeah, most students are just pushed through the system to get them out of high school.

*steps off soap box*

[SoggyFox]

Heck, my rural public high school did that.  Of course, this was during the 80s, but still.

The more i hear about how much schools have changed in 20 some years, the more determined I am, that if I ever -do- have a kid, I'm going the home school route.  I'm sure I can find other ways for my kid to learn to socialize, without them being scarred by the mess we have in this country.

[Skoria_Bay]

Agreed Soggy. I wouldn't send my kid to the mess they call public schools now days. And I majored in Early Childhood Education. Where I live all they are concerned about teaching the kids is how to pass the SOL's (Standards of Learning). That isn't teaching that's memorizing crap. I call them the Shit out of Luck. Poor children don't know what the world is really like.

[paperbeth]

Graduating high school ('88) was one of easiest things I've ever done. Of course, the Tennessee educational system is the second worst in the country ( second to Mississippi). How hard could it be?
But, 20 years ago, I didn't have to worry about texting, or guns, or the internet. We didn't even have a computer in my school of over 2000 students.
There's so much more drama these days. Too much pressure being put on kids to act like young adults, makes them lose their innocense way too early.
I have an 18 month old, and I plan to home school her for all of these reasons.

[SoggyFox]

Well, that's a mixed thing - we take away their innocence, but we don't really want them growing -up- either.  We want to keep them locked firmly into the silliest time of their life, to steal a quote from C.S.Lewis.  He's right too.  Innocent children might clamour for things, but only because they see it on tv and are hammered that they need it.  But, if they aren't surrounded by it, or if they have parents with the time to spend on raising them [ which is hard in itself too], then they are more sensible than 'young adults' who have to have better stuff than their neighbor; cooler cars, cooler clothes, cooler gadgets.

Me?  I'm quite happy for the most part with what I have.  I like my computer, I like my stuff.  I might want a better microphone, or better graphics stuff - but its more just for quality and less about what others have.  I just don't care, and never really did care.

[neriana]

Read a research article on this subject about 10 years ago.  The american disdain for the smart and talented, as well as the deliberate retention of most of us in immaturity is on purpose.  In the 1800s, late period, about the time of the robber barons [or was that really early 1900s?  I suck at 'modern' history.] the business types, most of whom were also in government of paying off government types, sat down to decide how best to keep money flowing, and to get a good workforce.

Mid to late 1800s, yeah. But I'd like to see that article because I have a feeling it wasn't very well researched. (In other words, it sounds like a load of bunk.) There wasn't a vast conspiracy to keep Americans dumb. They thought they were educating the working class to its best abilities by emphasizing physical over intellectual pursuits, because they thought everything was based on heredity. If you were poor, it was heredity; crime, heredity; drunk, heredity, unless you were a rich drunk, in which case it was circumstances. Further, they cared very much about educating Americans to their civic duties, like voting, taking care of the community, etc. The robber barons wanted a smart, healthy, literate, strong workforce; they weren't like antebellum Southern plantation owners. There was a "conspiracy" to get workers to drink coffee instead of alcohol, but since it was completely out in the open it wasn't exactly shady and vicious.

Also, American anti-intellectualism is 1) overemphasized as purely American (the Brits have a very strong strain of it too) and 2) much worse now than it used to be. Its roots also go way further back than robber barons, at least to settlers fighting off land-grabs from rich people back east, who would send people like George Washington out to survey land people were living on (that they'd taken from Indians usually, but anyway) and then lay claim to it.

No ideology can be imposed wholesale from above. You can't force people to be immature or stupid. We have what's called "agency" -- people make their own lives with the circumstances they're given. Only a tiny minority of us is so privileged as to be kept in a hermetic box into which only select ideas are siphoned. If certain adults are stupid and ignorant, that's their own look-out, they have chosen to be stupid and ignorant.

[VaVe]

Also, American anti-intellectualism is 1) overemphasized as purely American (the Brits have a very strong strain of it too)

That sure is true. I remember even going into private education didn't help to escape it. There were a few more of us but I still distinctly remember being told by my maths teacher to stop asking for more work because the others hadn't finished yet. Also, even if I finished an exam I was told to keep checking through the work until the end and not watch the clock so that the other people didn't think that they were falling behind.

[pinkyfriend]

I had a co-worker last year -thank god she moved on...maybe...as now she is a nanny & god knows...anyway- who actually drove our facilities huge wheelchair-access van full of residents (i.e. elderly people) while texting another co-worker. I reported her...I don't think she even got a warning! I give up!

[eternal_darkness]

Agreed Soggy. I wouldn't send my kid to the mess they call public schools now days. And I majored in Early Childhood Education. Where I live all they are concerned about teaching the kids is how to pass the SOL's (Standards of Learning). That isn't teaching that's memorizing crap. I call them the Shit out of Luck. Poor children don't know what the world is really like.

Yes, that is a HUGE problem. It was budding when I was in elementary school, but now it's an epidemic! Kids are basically being taught to do well on standardized tests, and nothing more. I encourage any parent to either send their kid to private school ( if they can afford it) or have them home-schooled. Public schools HAVE TO give these standardized tests to make sure that the school is on par with the "standards" that have been set by the state. If your school comes back with lower overall reading and math scores, there's going some probing, and some people may lose their jobs. So, instead of having kids LEARN, they "teach for the test", which is creating a generation of good test takers, who can't do anything else. There's a 6th grade teacher's blog (need to find the link), in which he writes about an experiment he did. He gave his class an earth science test. When grading them, he recorded that most of the class received B's or above. The following week, he gave a pop quiz, which was on the exact same material they had taken on the prior test, only with different questions. All but 2 of the 30 kids in the class FAILED. The 2 students that did pass were B/C students, whereas all of the honor roll students failed with everyone else. So, what does that tell you about our current education system ?

[paperbeth]

It's nothing more than information regurgitation.  *cram*   *take test*    *forget everything*

[ChaosInAMinor]

I graduated in 2006 and I definitely know what you guys mean. Luckily, I had a mother who encouraged me to seek information outside of school. She supplemented my learning. I spent a lot of time in the library.

My dad works in the public school system in Texas and he was telling me how my step brother is being taught this "new math". It's got nothing to do with logic and right and wrong, which is what math IS. My dad has a business degree and worked the 20 years before his job as a private auditor in the school system as an accountant. So he teaches my kid brother math. And with my dad teaching him, he learns more.

[Immortelle]

I had a subject at my first year of university whose entire goal was to encourage thought and independant learning.  (BTW in Australia we have kindergarten, followed by primary school (grades 1-6 in Victoria.)  Followed by secondary school or High School (7 - 12.  Year 11 and 12 are the HSC years.  Called VCE in Victoria, SACE in South Australia.  Don't know about the other states).  You can then go on to tertiary education which is either TAFE college or University.  Any subjects higher than a degree must be studied at University, however.  TAFE from what I've noticed, does not encourage much in the way of independant thought.  You learn the subject matter, and how to answer the questions, and that is all there is to it.  It is believed that that way you are best prepared for the work place.