Technology and Know Nothing-ism Conspire To Make America Dumber. That Is Not A Good Thing.

For my entire lifetime the "controversy" surrounding Darwin's theories on the evolution of a species being driven by biological adaptation of a species to constantly changing environments has bewildered me.  As far as I comprehend that certain sub-cultures, particularly those of conservative religious fundamentalists, reject evolution from what I can only discern as a perceived threat to religious dogma, I don't understand how those attitudes persist, even though it seems to me that understanding the mechanism of an evolutionary process in no way disproves a guiding hand if that's what they are worried about.  I, for one, can not diffinitively discern the hand of God from random chance.  What is alarming me now is how this rejection of knowledge is metastasizing into the wider culture.  Throughout my childhood and early adulthood, you just didn't see major figures on credible news and opinion media endorsing the rejection of knowledge and science as Glenn Beck did the other day.  The impact of Beck's endorsement of Know Nothing rejection of evolution is not just in undermining the undermining of future generations ability to compete in the scientific advancements required to keep the United States competitive in the information technology world, (DNA is simply molecularly encoded information.)  it undermines our future ability to compete on all scientific fronts.  The goal of this growing power in our society aims not educational excellence, but rather requiring educational adherence to sub-cultural dogma.  What was the proclaimed basis for Beck's rejection of science?  The fact that he has never seen a half-man half-ape.  That's right folks.

"I think that's ridiculous. I haven't seen a half-monkey, half-person yet. Did evolution just stop? There's no other species that is developing into half-human?"

Blogger Steve Bennen at the Washington Monthly looked back today at past comments of President Obama regarding how the rest of the world looks at the importance of education.

This got me thinking about a story President Obama told about a year ago, after he returned from a trip to Asia. He shared an anecdote about a luncheon he attended with the president of South Korea.

"I was interested in education policy -- they've grown enormously over the last 40 years," Obama said. "And I asked him, 'What are the biggest challenges in your education policy?' He said, 'The biggest challenge that I have is that my parents are too demanding.' He said, 'Even if somebody is dirt poor, they are insisting that their kids are getting the best education.' He said, 'I've had to import thousands of foreign teachers because they're all insisting that Korean children have to learn English in elementary school.' That was the biggest education challenge that he had, was an insistence, a demand from parents for excellence in the schools.

"And the same thing was true when I went to China. I was talking to the mayor of Shanghai, and I asked him about how he was doing recruiting teachers, given that they've got 25 million people in this one city. He said, 'We don't have problems recruiting teachers because teaching is so revered and the pay scales for teachers are actually comparable to doctors and other professions. '

"That gives you a sense of what's happening around the world. There is a hunger for knowledge, an insistence on excellence, a reverence for science and math and technology and learning. That used to be what we were about."

Which brings me to speculate on whether or not there is some mathematical curve the collective intelligence of a society moves on which might correlate with that societies rise and fall on other measures.  Would it be a leading indicator or a trailing one?  Is it driven by a Poverty of Affluence, or is the growing energy of the Know Nothing crowd driven by other factors, such as a growing unease with the rapid pace of technology?  The differences are stark when you consider that China has more english speaking engineers and scientists graduating from their universities than we have graduating in the United States, especially when you factor in the large percentage of foreign born students we have graduating at post graduate levels from American Universities.  What ever the variables at work it seems as if much of the world is on the upward slope of the curve while we seem to be on the downward slope.

Speaking of the rapid pace of technology, a recent article from MIT's Technology Review, The Ultimate Persuasion Device, speculated on the negative impact on our collective intelligence by the evolution of smart phones into a super iPhone social networking and social information device will have on the near future.

TR: In your book, America is a post-literate society and we lost the ability to interact directly with one another. Did technology lead us to this point? 

GS: In the book there are many culprits. I think technology can be construed as one culprit but I think the main culprit is the fact that we are getting dumber. Whether technology enables this or not is an open question. But compared, relative to other countries in the world, we are constantly on the way down in terms of our scores in a wide variety of things.

This may not be so evident obviously at MIT because the whole world comes to the Institute to get educated, but in terms of primary education, things are really bad.

What's interesting is one study that the Times recently published about-- children's vocabularies are shrinking because their parents are constantly texting and typing away and they don't have enough time to just communicate to the child.

So that's something that really intrigued me and felt like it was already part of this world.

Maybe just as technology creates a problem, it may also create a solution.  Perhaps the solution will be dolls running artificial intelligence programs and faces with the capacity for expressing emotion which take over the role of teaching children to communicate and read.  Whatever the solution, be it cultural or be it technological, we need it now, not later.