I ran across my old high school history book today. It is nearly 40 years old.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

25. When I was in fifth and sixth grade, we read Junior Scholastic every week

It contained simplified (but not real simplified) summaries of the week's news and a feature on a different country every week. One article that I remember was about the formation of the Common Market (the predecessor of the EU). It explained what it was, who the members were, and why it was formed. I suppose I remember because I had heard the words "Common Market" on adult news casts and was glad to find out what it meant.

Fast forward to the late 1990s. I am volunteering in a G.E.D. tutoring program for street kids. I arrive a bit early, so I start poking around in the classroom and find a stack of Junior Scholastic magazines. I start paging through it and discover that it's all about good grooming, how to get along with people, and tiny bits of obvious news with obvious and trivial "study questions." The print is larger than that in Junior Scholastic in the 1960s.

My theory about this dumbing down is that the business interests who control the American economy and the publishing industry and the academic testing industry don't want smart, thinking people. They want people who will be unthinking cogs in the corporate machinery, so helping young people understand the world is not a priority. In fact, employees who understand the world are an obstacle to a single-minded focus on the bottom line.