In Search of the American Mind

I saw an ad last week for Susan Jacoby's new book, The Age of American Unreason (as I was skimming my new issue of the New York Review of Books).

I was hanging out at Borders with my oldest son, where I was also reading the Atlantic Monthly - a store copy, as I'm not a subscriber (the edition had the best piece on public education I've seen in a long time, Sandra Tsing Loh's, "Tales Out of School," which is a must read).

I walked around the store see if they had a copy of the Jacoby volume, but no luck.

My son wanted to shop for a new hip sweatshirt jacket for school over at Tilly's, so I gathered up the books I did find, and headed to the checkout. Russell Kirk's, The Conservative Mind, Jim Mann's, The Rise of the Vulcans, and John McCain's Faith of My Fathers, put me back about 50 bucks.

I'm about a quarter of the way through McCain's book, which I thought I'd better read sooner rather than later, as I've pretty much been the Arizona Senator's biggest neocon blogging buddy on the web!

In any case, back to Jacoby's book. The New York Times has a review of it, and you're going to love this:

There are few subjects more timely than the one tackled by Susan Jacoby in her new book, “The Age of American Unreason,” in which she asserts that “America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism.”

For more than a decade there have been growing symptoms of this affliction, from fundamentalist assaults on the teaching of evolution to the Bush administration’s willful disavowal of expert opinion on global warming and strategies for prosecuting the war in Iraq. Conservatives have turned the term “intellectual,” like the term “ liberal,” into a dirty word in politics (even though neo-conservative intellectuals played a formative role in making the case for war against Iraq); policy positions tend to get less attention than personality and tactics in the current presidential campaign; and the democratizing influence of the Internet is working to banish expertise altogether, making everyone an authority on everything. Traditional policy channels involving careful analysis and debate have been circumvented by the Bush White House in favor of bold, gut-level calls, and reasoned public discussions have increasingly given way to noisy partisan warfare among politicians, commentators and bloggers alike.

Noisy partisan warfare? I'll say!

Not only that, when everyone's an authority, nobody is. There goes that Ph.D. in political science!

Seriously, the reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, argues that Jacoby's book is excellent, even if it treads less-than-originally over familiar educational-literary ground. Here's more:

As Ms. Jacoby sees it, there are several key reasons for “the resurgent American anti-intellectualism of the past 20 years.” To begin with, television, video games and the Internet have created a “culture of distraction” that has shortened attention spans and left people with “less time and desire” for “two human activities critical to a fruitful and demanding intellectual life: reading and conversation.”

The eclipse of print culture by video culture began in the 1960s, Ms. Jacoby argues, adding that the ascendance of youth culture in that decade also promoted an attitude denigrating the importance of tradition, history and knowledge.

By the ’80s, she goes on, self-education was giving way to self-improvement, core curriculums were giving way to classes intended to boost self-esteem, and old-fashioned striving after achievement was giving way to a rabid pursuit of celebrity and fame. The old middlebrow culture, which prized information and aspiration — and which manifested itself, during the post-World War II years, in a growing number of museums and symphony orchestras, and a Book-of-the-Month club avidity for reading — was replaced by a mass culture that revolved around television and blockbuster movies and rock music.

Reminds me a little here of Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind, which I bought right when it came out in 1987, but didn't read until I started my current position as a professor of political science.

Jacoby's topic, anti-intellectualism, is a big one for me, as I sometimes just can't get a handle on the intense oppostion to books, learning, and anything having to do with a life of the mind among many students today.

Of course, I'm at community college, so I've got kids often with so many disadvantages that it's little wonder that many haven't been acculturated in a home environment of books and ideas. But as the passages here illustrate, it's more than that, from TV and electronic entertainment, to the entitlement culture the denigrates the hard work that is the essence of academic excellence.

Will things get better?

I'm not optimistic. I was a young punk skateboarder in my teens, but I loved to read at the same time. Robert Ludlum was my favorite, but I'd read a classic here and there. In college I couldn't get enough, and often took classes - like French History Since 1789 and Shakespeare - that were not necessary for my personal graduation curriculum. I just loved school.

And I think that's what it's going to take, some kind of home-based, personal avocation toward learning. We have no national standards, outside of NCLB, which is watered down and violates federalism for many conservatives anyway. So the burden of acculturation has to reside at the level of the family. Parents must engage in a home environment of "concerted cultivation," even if such a program is not exactly deliberate or explicit.

What does this mean? Well, there's got to be a rich language environment of kids at home, with ample opportunity and resources to engage in intellectual pursuits crucial for early human development. Everyone seems to know this, with all the talk in recent years of childhood brain development and the need for intellectual stimulation of infants.

But it's more than that: It seems that home environments need to have a sense of simple rigor, as well as the granting of individual autonomy of growth to the child. How are parenting styles situated in the context of the need to cultivate children's development and independence of thought? Reading is key, certainly, but it's the effort to pull all things together, art, politics, sports into a whole of daily life that creates the concerted family stimulation necessary for building accumulated advantages of learning and mobility.

Governments can't do this, so while I've yet to read Jacoby or other recent pedagogical tracts, educational policies that seek to turn this around have got to change the culture of the home.

Whether that's by setting tougher standards at school or by creating greater incentives for parents and kids to experience the benefits of learning and growth, such an agenda must be a large part of social and educational policy moving forward. Unfortunately, I doubt the emphasis on greater family and personal responsibility will go over all that well with progressive educators. But until it does, expect more ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism.

I've got to hang it up here for the night.

My youngest son picked out a book at Ralphs, Thimbletack's Mission, and we need to get a bit of it finished before my we brush teeth and hit the sack.

It's a special occasion tonight as well, for my oldest boy's away this week at his school's "science camp" in San Bernardino Mountains - which in a way, is another element of the concerted cultivation that my oldest's been lucky enough to have.

I feel blessed sometimes with the opportunities I've had to learn, and it's natural to pass along the love of ideas and achievement to my offspring. Can we pass along these ethics to our people and our nation as a whole?