Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, book by Charles Pierce

[chervilant]

34. Why am I not surprised by your response?

I have routinely encouraged my students to understand that being told we have 'average' or 'below average' intellects is a grim psychic wound to our species. We all have fully functioning brains (with rare exceptions). In actuality, we learn in different ways, and at different paces, but we learn nevertheless. Sadly, telling a child s/he has an 'average' intellect is all too often a self-fulfilling prophecy, given the pedantic nature of our contemporary system of public education.

Since I haven't yet read the book that is the alleged "purpsoe of this thread," I chose instead a meta-analysis approach in my response. The two sources with which I'm most familiar are Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" and Susan Jacoby's "The Age of American Unreason." Both authors offer essential discussions of the history of anti-intellectualism in the United States--a history which seems to be a key underpinning of Mr. Pierce's book.

Hierarchy as a social construct--stultifying and damaging in myriad ways--is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Well...okay, not necessarily. Suffice it to say, I find hierarchy as distasteful as denigrating an individual's intellect.

BTW, if you're genuinely interested in flexing your 'critical thinking' muscle, try some calculus. Math is the oldest game we humans have created. Until we humans learned to set type, math was a predominantly cerebral game. In fact, some of our earliest mathematicians lost their lives or their livelihoods because they were suspected of worshiping numbers before God. Some things haven't really changed, have they?