28
PARTISAN REV IEW
Fred Ciporen:
We still do.
Morris Dickstein:
I
think it's beca use they're gettin g information
through the In ternet and television and so on, that they get a lot more of
certain kinds of information thall we ever did, especiall y visual informa–
tion. Other kinds of information, historical information or geographical
information, they're hardly getting at al l. That is a very dramatic change
but it is not so clear that it's in decline across the board.
William Phillips:
Not all information is equal.
Fred Siegel:
Morris and Fred both have the same misconceptioll. If you
look at the society, of course mallY more kids are in school now and you
can't prepare them all. If you look at the educated upper middle class, at
the people who come out of the elite schoo ls, kids graduate from
Columbia, your alma mater, not knowing whell the Civi l War took place.
You can graduate fi'om l3rown University alld know nothing of
American history. That has consequellces, political cOllsequences certain–
ly, but the more illlportant consequence is the loss of the ab il ity to reason
coherentl y and make an extended argu ll1 ent. T hat's true across the board
no matter whom I've talked to. Now it's not all up and down hill. As a
matter of fact, between the end of McCarthyism alld the rise of poli tical
correctness, there was a go lden age of American education . I remember
in the late sixties, I was in Pittsburgh and we had a learning machine, new
computers, and we were going to have super kids coming out of the
computers. l3ut what came out was super dreck. We had kids who knew
how to play games but nothing else. What's il11portant for democracy is
people being able to reason about political issues, to debate them, not just
vote on them, and that's being lost. If you want to argue for the dumb–
ing down of the culture, watc h the 6:30 Ilews, whi ch has turned
information into li ttle passion plays. It's a kind of soap opera. Part of the
reason why some people don't fee l there's a crisis is that they're so rich.
The country's awash in money. Shou ld there be a recession peop le might
take this a littl e more seriously.
Marjorie Iseman:
I want to suggest that the process of dumbing down
began before television. I went to a "progressive" school and it was the
avant ga rde. Fortunately, my father took us out because he cou ldn 't stand
us getting credi t for gr indin g stolle alld blowing glass. The whole idea
was that yo u didn't need
to
lIlemorize, that learning things by rote was
useless, that you learned by doing. If you were studying Egypt, you
cooked Egyptian food. It was ridiculous, but Illuch of that curricu lum
