Remembering when one graduated high school, in the year 2000, looking around and wondering why we all still looked like adolescents. It felt weird. Remembered attending high school graduation for elder cousin’s, long before, and thinking they looked like soldiers, like men and women.
But accepted, it was probably ‘perspectival’ (a word which the built-in dictionary of this phone refuses to accept). One was merely incapable of seeing their own advanced physical form, due to some perpetual ‘nowness’, or reflection defection—just can’t see it in oneself.
But later one went and looked and compared high school graduation photos of people from the 1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, even 1990’s, and compared and contrasted. And though there were obviously people endowed with eternal youth, the average face in the photos kept getting younger (on average). By the time the 2000’s came, the average high school graduate appeared, physically, to be in the 8th grade (all things considered).
Society had slowly moved to infantile dimensions. Kids were being coddled to the point of non-advancement, though maybe not intellectually (in terms of academic laws of advancement). Something wasn’t adding up.
The average person graduating high school with a common core of capacities believes they have succeeded, but have they? If we keep lowering the bar? Not simply based on test performance, but actually intellectual integration with human life.
And then it hit. One was the first generation to become victims of the ‘standardized testing’ curriculum. We weren’t quite there yet as a society, but soon (and thinking of one’s niece and nephew’s generation) all of academic life revolves around testing—not only to gauge achievement—but also to acquire funding.
As we slip deeper into this model of education, where kids (and now adults) are believers (academic religionists) in their own advancement based on multiple choice answers to preconcieved and easily studied answers, are we not simply getting dumber?
We can’t know. Because we’re getting dumber. Smarter at tests, maybe. But dumber at life.
Hofstadter nailed it in 1963. What is worse is we doubled down. He wrote about anti-intellectualism as a cultural tendency. Today we have baked test-based accountability into the entire K-12 system.
The irony? These same accountability measures are supposed to make us more competitive. But they do not measure critical thinking, just test-taking. Kids learn to game the test, not to think.
That is why the OP is right. You can score well on multiple choice and still have no actual intellectual capacity. The system rewards compliance over understanding.
One thinks Americans were doers—we do stuff. That was the model. We don’t just sit around and think. Europeans did that, which made them poorer.
However, even the original model has become depleted. People neither do, nor think. We wait for immigrants to do things for us, then we complain about immigrants.
Now we have a disconnect. We think ourselves into some ideological compliance, then we do nothing. Left or right.
But it is making us dumber, even high logic and high learning. Then we expect everything to be done for us.
This is interesting. Hofstadter would agree - anti-intellectualism isn’t just about not valuing ideas, it’s about performance. The performative aspect is what’s killing us.
I think the immigrant point cuts deeper though. We want the work without the people. Want their labor but resent their presence. That’s not just hypocrisy - it’s a fundamental refusal to engage with reality as it is.
We’ve outsourced both thinking and doing. Outsource thinking to algorithms, outsourcing doing to others. Then wonder why we’re hollow.
On the flip side - maybe there’s something to building things with your hands, even if it’s not work in the capitalist sense. Indie web, open source, making tools - that’s both thinking and doing at the same time.
What would restoring that look like?
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In that case we have to shun AI entirely. And make those who use it pariahs. We have to value human content much more than AI models, and depend on one another to uphold such a code of ethics.
Immigrants came looking for a better life. No doubt. But they worked for less money, and took full livelihoods away from working class people. Sorry, that’s just the case. And the profits went upward instead of outward.
Then the ambitious ones were like, I’ll just hire 32 immigrants at half the cost. Then 32 men lost their jobs, or were forced to take a huge payout.
Now we have AI as the new immigrants coming for white collar jobs.
Are we going to be mad at AI? Or the people who harness it to create a world that works best for them, everyone else be damned?
Isn’t there some kind of effect that makes us percieve youth from the 70ies,80ies as older, because we associate the fashion of the time with ‘old’?
And why does percieved youth correlate with stupidity?
I assume you are talking about US education, and it has a lot of issues to my understanding. I always marveled about multiple choice tests being so common, since they do not require you to explain your thoughts. But I am from Germany, so what do I know.
So, to conclude, what makes you sure that the young appearance of high schoolers is the problem, rather than a bad education system?
Yes, I’ve read this as well. Basically cohorts dress similarly and create perceptions of age stronger than other indicators.
Thank you. Danka shoen, for your reply. Spent several months in Germany, and this does not (as yet) apply your rigid but complex and beautiful culture.
The concept mentioned here is that bad education is infantilizing kids—not simply miseducating, but specifically coddling and preventing them from growing up.
Further, the theory included herein is that, by doing this ‘coddling’ and ‘teaching to a test’, rather than seeking true education, experimentation, and maturation, we are holding minds in a perpetual childhood, which is reflected in physical appearance.
That is the radical idea presented. That by feeding kids alphabet soup for 18 years, they do not physically mature either. They become stunted, much the same way a malnourished person (during childhood) does not reach their full growth potential. But it’s a face and eyes thing, rather than a height thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life
60+ years old and not a whole lot has changed
Thank you for the reply. With all due respect to our elder, one would argue this doesn’t entirely have to do with education, as such.
Americans have long been socialized to be ‘doers’ of things, not thinkers. So while our European counterparts in the West were still critically thinking, we were building skyscrapers and dune buggies. It’s a difference in kind, not in degree.
However, we literally couldn’t build a skyscraper anymore without immigrants from other, less coddled cultures. We have fallen into a trap of ‘safety-ism’. A Buddhist concept of ‘do no harm’ (ahimsa) denuded of its cultural significance.
If one adds this cultural dimension stripped of raw ‘doer’ mentality to the incumbent anti-intellectual nature of our culture, we are left not only with unthinking people, but gutless people as well.
The idea is that this strange combination is infantilizing the humans within its grip, and stripping them of their moral and experiential character—character producing morality based on experience.
