darkelf105 | (no subject)

I am reading Morris Berman's "The Twilight Of American Culture" and it is a very scary, very profound book. Berman's argument is that like Rome, America is experiencing the decline of its civilization due to huge economic disparity, which in turn reverberates throughout the rest of the culture (read our "bread and circuses" mentality). He has a point there is something wrong when the land of the "free" is first amongst the world's countries in terms of the income gaps between rich and poor, but 49th in overall literacy. That's crazy as we have mandatory education. Berman also brings up the decline in standards. He writes that he had to learn and memorize Robert Browning in his public high school when he was sixteen (and ashamed as I am to admit it, I had to wiki Browning) and now, students are lucky if they encounter him in GRAD school. He's right. America has sold itself a bill of goods that can't be delivered. We have become so anti-intellectual, so afraid of the bogey man elite, that we have lost all sense of our common past. One cannot make a literary allusion (hell most people don't even know what allusion means) or a referefence to current events without getting a bunch of blank stares. Point in case, in my introduction to Shakespeare class, our professor asked us why "Othello" 's political setting was much like the political setting of today and why Cyprus is so important. He wanted to know why Turkey wasn't allowed to participate in many of the world trade alliances or the EU.....no one but I knew the answer and I only knew a half-baked reason. He asked if anyone had read the newspaper and I, again, was the only one that raised my hand. How as a civilization can we hope to continue on when such mediocrity is accepted as the best and brightest? I score well within the nintieth percentile on all my standardized tests. I scored a 27 on the ACT. I read far, far above college level, but I guarantee that if you took someone who scored in the seventieth percentile and scored an average on the ACT fifty years ago, they would know more than I and be able to score much higher than I on today's tests. We have told ourselves that knowledge is a commodity that can be sold and packaged and used....except that idea almost guarantees that people will know nothing about anything. They can barely even read their tax forms. We are descending into the new Dark Ages and the only difference today is that we have technology to give us the false impression that we aren't. But that's why it's so fallacious, 57% of the country doesn't understand that it takes year, not a day, for the earth to revolve around the sun. 19% aren't sure whether the earth revolves around the sun or if the sun revolves around the earth amd 7% think that the sun revolves around the earth. Those numbers are pretty medieval by anyone's standards. So I come to the quote that disturbed me most in the book, but brought home with some clarity what is going on in America. As

rayechu informed me yesterday that someone in our Bible class was not sure why the B.C.E. dates were going backwards, why the Hebrews didn't build the pyramids, and where King Tut stands in time, I leave you with this thought:

"The college/university situation in the United States has finally wound up in the position of the Church in the late Middle Ages, which sold people indulgences (read diplomas) so that they could get into heaven (read a well-paying job)."

And because I have always had faith in the liberating benefits of a liberal education and the life of the mind, I find this so chilling.