Our society is getting dumber — with “dumb” defined here as “to simplify or reduce the intellectual content of something so as to make it accessible to a larger number of people.” And this is not a good thing.

In the good old days (don’t ask me when, but it used to be this way, I promise!), America valued education as one of our primary societal goals and values. Parents wanted to give their children the best possible education, so they could succeed in life. Everyone knew these two things were highly correlated (education and success), and acted accordingly. This was not just an article of faith for us as a country, but it was extremely well founded. And after World War II, many other countries looked to us and our education system as one of the keys to development and prosperity. Educate your people, and they will prosper.

Beyond prosperity though, in the past we understood as a nation that education was essential to our other values, equality and democracy key among them. This morning a column by Leonard Pitts reminded me of that, and as I was reading it two of my favorite quotes about education came to mind:

  • “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.” (Horace Mann)
  • “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” (Thomas Jefferson)

Mann and TJ both understood that education is not just important for individuals, but for the success and survival of our democracy, our society, and of the American Dream.

Pitts lays out the basic stats in his article. There is an education gap in this country, and it is strongly correlated to party affiliation. That’s interesting and worth addressing. This goes a long way to help us understand our current political situation, where in many cases lack of higher education, and the understanding that goes with that, have led to our current political situation.

It comes down to a problem of rationality. In order to be fully rational — to be able to act in your own best interests as you define them — you need as much good information as possible (let’s call this “facts”), and the intellectual ability to act effectively on that information. And both of these things are improved with education. Can you be very bright, analytical and very well informed without education? Absolutely. But it is MUCH more likely that education is the place where you will improve these qualities.

My other problem here is political. Everything above doesn’t cover the “why” of the question. WHY are we dumbing down? Do our people not want to have a better democracy and society? Or is something else going on here.

Consider this as one option: one political party, and more importantly the people who support that party, has benefited more than the other from the dumbing down of America. When our people lack the information and mental acuity that comes from education, they can be led by simplified arguments to come to bad conclusions and make bad decisions. They can be led to behave in ways that, if they had better information and analytic ability, might not be in their best interests.

And this is fed by the fact that our political and spending priorities on a national and local level do not push education. They push for the military. They push for smaller government (whatever that means, I haven’t seen it yet). They push against funding social programs. They highlight (and often create) disputes in social issues to keep us occupied. And they very quietly, out of the public eye, often when we’re not looking in that direction, push for more entitlements for the richest among us in the form of tax and regulation policies. There are people benefiting here, and as their bank accounts grow, their ability to control information grows too, and they both take advantage of and feed our overall dearth of education.

As our country gets less educated, some of our politicians dumb things down more. And as this happens, we have also seen a tendency to push away from education as a value, which leads to more dumbing down. It’s a cycle, and we are now seeing the results. Breaking out of it might be hard, but if we don’t, I’m afraid Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann may have been teaching us an unfortunate lesson about our future.