December 25, 2024

Are Americans Getting Dumber?

Philip Kotler

I always believed that Americans are among the most educated people in the world. So I put the question to the internet: What countries have the most college-educated people? To my shock, the U.S. wasn’t included in the top ten most educated nations.

Rank, Country, Percentage of College Educated

1 South Korea 69.29%

2 Canada 66.36%

3 Japan 64.81%

4 Luxembourg 63.12%

5 Ireland 62.88%

6 Russia 62.09%

7 Lithuania 57.48%

8 United Kingdom 57.47%

9 Netherlands 55.60%

10 Norway 55.03%

According to the Global Partnership for Education, “a nation with higher education advances gender equality, mitigates child marriage, promotes peace, and enhances overall well-being. …it endows individuals with enhanced life prospects, encompassing employment opportunities, improved health, and active participation in the political arena.” Clearly, college education plays a pivotal role in advancing a nation’s well-being.

At least I wish that nations could be graded on the percentage of people with “street smarts.” Many educated people lack street smarts. They can’t follow directions, they take unnecessary risks, they spend a lot of time being angry or depressed. A lot of Americans have street markets even if not college educated.

Every nation contains a mix of high brows, middle brows, and low brows. What bothers me is that there are growing signs that some Americans are getting dumber. This may be happening in other nations as well; in which case the world’s people would be dumbing down.

We can identify three signs of a dumbing down of Americans.

1. Decline of reading scores.

2. Rise of anti-wokeness

3. Rise of loyalty and authoritarianism

Decline of reading scores

The first sign is that America’s serious reading time is declining.

· The average time Americans spend reading for pleasure each day has decreased from 23 minutes to 16 minutes between 2004 and 2019.

· In 2021, 23% of American adults reported not reading a book in any form in the last year.

· The share of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day has fallen by more than 30 percent since 2004.

· U.S. reading and math scores have dropped to their lowest level in decades.

Why this decline? One reason is that Covid 19 reduced the number of students and teachers in schools during a two-year period (2020–2022). In addition, the rising use of smartphones and tablets left Americans with less time to spend reading newspapers, magazines, novels, and nonfiction books. Americans did read messages on their social media and prepare for school tests but it rarely involved reading long reasoned or entertaining material. The argument has been advanced that students used to be taught reading using phonetics but this was dropped leaving students to find it harder to understand and sound out words and sentences.

What can be done? There are still many older readers who enjoy reading, belong to book clubs, and look for new books to read. It is the younger generation where the main reading decline is taking place. Publishers are trying to tempt young persons to read more by producing graphic novels, illustrated novels and briefer novels on topics of interest to young people.

Rise of anti-wokeness

Today we have a new political language in classifying people. You are either woke, anti-woke, or neither.

What is “Woke”? The term “woke” first arose with black Americans in their search for places to safely eat or find hospitality. The United States was deeply segregated and black people “had to know their place.” Most restaurants and many hotels were for “whites only.” A black person would be safe if he was “woke”, that he knew where he can’t eat or stay. He is “awakened.”

In today’s usage, woke describes people who want to improve racial equality, women’s rights, gay rights, and other social justice causes. Woke people vary between those who are “woke” mainly in their mindset and those who are actively undertaking woke actions. The latter group are the real woke activists. They wouldn’t let certain statements go unchallenged, such as bad jokes about an ethnic group, an unfair stereotype, an injustice against someone. All said, woke people see themselves as fighters for social justice and energized by progressive ideas.

The word “woke” has become a fighting term in today’s culture wars. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, boasts about being “anti-woke”. DeSantis aims to eliminate “wokeness” in Florida. He sees too many college professors as “woke.” DeSantis has pressed for banning books that talk about racial injustice, abortion rights, gay rights or other social issues. He said “I recognize that the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth, so we will wage a war on the woke… We will fight the woke in education; we will fight the woke in corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of Congress!”

DeSantis signed his “Stop Woke Act,” setting limits on what can be taught about race in schools and workplace training. He has also banned DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives at Florida public colleges, claiming that “DEI is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion, and indoctrination.” Santis exclaimed “Woke” is a form of cultural Marxism. It’s about putting merit and achievement behind identity politics.”

Yet In a USA Today survey (March 2023), 56% of Americans, including most Independents and a third of Republicans, believe the term means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” Furthermore, 56% of workers support DEI and 60% of Americans won’t work for a company that doesn’t speak out against racial injustice.

Nevertheless, the War on Woke has stripped LGBTQ Americans of their hard-won human rights. The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) has tracked nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ bills across the country that restrict gender-affirming medical care, ban instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary schools.

Elon Musk is also “anti-woke.” He said that he doesn’t like people who take it as their mission to change other people’s attitudes and behavior. The Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society are busy raising money to fight “woke mindedness”, believing that “woke” thinking is bad for business, religion, and for government. Anti-woke groups argue that woke actions infringe on free speech, put a focus on merit and excellence in hiring, and expose school age children to inappropriate materials.

The best insight came from the Guardian newspaper that described “Anti-woke is a way to rebrand bigotry.” It attempts to make bigotry look respectable. Anti-woke can be seen as an attack on affirmative action, multiculturalism and diversity, equity and inclusion. Those in power want to maintain their control over historically excluded groups.

Woke companies need to be careful. Anti-woke groups have attacked companies that espouse racial equity and gayness. These groups could call for boycotting woke companies or at least not buying their brands. Recently Target, Bud Light and some other companies were targeted for being woke and their sales fell. In response, these targeted companies slowly reduced mentioning these social issues.

Yet some companies stay “woke” for two reasons. First, the company perceives that its customers and prospects are people who favor wokeness. Second, the company wants to hire millennials (born between the 1981–1996) and Gen y (born between 1996 and 2012) employees who want to work for companies that have “good values.” It is no longer enough for a company to make excellent products and services while ignoring social problems. Nike in 2018 showed its concern for social justice by sponsoring the Black American athlete Colin Kaepernick who had been expelled from professional football for showing his solidarity with the #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) movement. Companies are keenly aware of the growing public interest in social justice. Here are some findings:

• Approximately 80% of Americans favor laws that would protect LGBTQ+ people against discrimination in jobs and housing.
• Over 90 percent of Americans believe that either major or minor police reform is needed.
• Sixty-two percent of Americans believe safe abortions should be legal.

Rise of loyalty and authoritarianism

Today’s two American political parties differ greatly. Democrats are seen as modern, liberal, secular, and progressive. Trump Republicans (leaving out the old Republicans), have, according to the Canadian philosopher Benjamin Cain, became neo-medievalists. They advocate for a wholesale return to monarchy, theocracy, patriarchy, xenophobia, and mass ignorance in the twenty-first century. Since the 1960s, a number of Republicans pressed for a return to religion, faith and family.

Donald Trump, the current Republican leader, has all the traits of an authoritarian:

1. He demands absolute loyalty from his followers. His followers must not publicly disagree with him. They should not speak their own views on an issue. In other words, their private views are dumbed down.

2. He says he believes in Christian values and he has published and distributed his own version of the Bible. He wants his followers to follow the Ten Commandments even if he doesn’t.

3. He supports banning certain books.

4. He has publicly declared that he wants to be a dictator, at least on day one.

5. He has publicly declared that he will jail some of his enemies (journalists, some Democrats, those who led the June 6 investigation to indict Trump).

6. He will release all the persons jailed for attacking the Capitol on June 6 in spite of their proven guilt.

Conclusion

America has been viewed as having one of the world’s best college-educated people. The great universities of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, M.I.T, and Stanford are admired around the world. Americans have been outstanding in the number of awarded Nobel Prizes, in the development of modern industry, in the advancing of computers and high tech, and in the invention of new medicines. At the same time, the younger generation shows signs of dumbing down. Fewer young people are found doing sustained reading other than reading their social media. An anti-woke movement has emerged to attack competence and meritocracy which amounts to a dumbing down. The Donald Trump wing of the Republican Party will require loyalty from all followers, will censor free thinking, ban books, and lead to a further dumbing down of American society.