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THE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA
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by Michael Terry
March 11 - 17, 2010 |
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"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
– Paolo Friere
On March 4th, students in almost 40 states protested widespread cuts in America's education system. As federal and state governments deal with monumental deficits and even bankruptcy, government-funded higher education has become one of the primary whipping boys. In order to make up the difference, tuition increases at state schools have become the norm, sometimes by as much as thirty percent. It appears that these governments have made a potentially critical error; they may have woken up the sleeping giant of student protest.
As the country came off the rails in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the students of America were conspicuously quiet. Conformity was in, and as long as students continued to be coddled by the system, who were they to bite the feeding hand? Stolen elections, wars of choice, torture, decay of the healthcare system, increased imprisonment of minorities, were all met with mostly scattered, mostly unsubstantial protests. Many people, like Paolo Friere, claimed that we were seeing a “dumbing down” of the young that curtailed any prospect of a pushback from the next generation. When the young came out en masse to vote for Barack Obama in 2008, it seemed that the quietism would continue for years to come. It was said that the young American was too narcissistic to care about the other, too worried by his own delusions of grandure to worry about petty concerns like society and politics. This analysis still holds weight and the recent protests actually only go to show its accuracy. The students who finally mobilized last week were motivated largely by their own narcissistic tendencies. Led by a sweeping sense of entitlement, the notion that they might not be able to afford the higher education that they have come to see as their right to attain, they may have been pushed too far. After years of the education system being used to integrate the youth into the system at large, to encourage conformity, the money is running out. The denial of an education is serving as a far greater lesson than anything taught in these classrooms; it is giving these students the opportunity to deal “critically and creatively with reality”.
With the winds of narcissism and entitlement at their backs, many of these students are starting to make connections that for so long seemed to evade them. Their lives at home are directly affected by the massive spending on foreign occupations. Their freedoms in society are decreased when spending on prisons is maintained, while money for productive social services is taken away. They are actually part of a society, not simply hyper-individuals that make up a fractured Millenial Generation. The attack on their personal situations may lead to a cohesion and unity not seen from the American Youth in decades.
While the statement last week was important, the question now is whether a student protest movement can have any staying power when the people who formed it are products of an age where the attention span has been attacked, where attaining things and goals has been easier than it should be. Are these young people willing to stick it out, or will the obstructions of the government, the phony arguments and contradicting language be enough to put them down? After all, this is a group of people who complain when they have to restart their modems. Is a real political fight in their blood? Or has the dumbing down of the young worked?
It remains to be seen whether this burst of enthusiasm can be sustained. But, if ever this group was going to be stung into action, the governments of the land chose precisely the thing to get them going; they attacked their own personal interests. Those in power would have been far better off to somehow find a way to keep the young comfortable, to give them what they seem to think they're entitled to. After all, they have shown an ability over the last decade to carry on in their own world, while so much around them crumbles. Waking them up to the new American Reality, the Post-American Century, was a gamble and it appears to have backfired. The question now, is how to put these students back on auto-pilot, how to send them once fagain into the peaceful slumber of their American Dreams. If that fails, it may be awhile before the quiet is restored. An era of unrest is upon us, from the left, from the right, from the old, from the young, everyone's got something to complain about. The King's horses, the King's men, have an unenviable, perhaps unachievable task ahead of them.
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