Commentary: Dumbing Down the Culture - Look-Listen - June 2011 - St. Louis MO

Tuesday, June 28 / 10:25 AM

by Dennis Owsley

Commentary: Dumbing Down the Culture

Photography by Kevin A. Roberts

Dennis Owsley

In the last 20 years or so, our public discourse has become less civil on just about every issue. While there have been many hypotheses as to why this has happened, I believe that we are afraid to discuss a very important component of this incivility: a deep and long standing dislike of education and educated people that has been part of our culture since the country was founded. This post discusses how this dislike of education is reflected in our arts.

Commentators over the years have remarked that a country’s psyche can be understood by observing the popular arts. As one who is heavily involved in the arts (music, photography and writing), I have been observing this very closely. When we look at the characters played out in films, in television and in popular music, we see something that tells us about what we really are. While there are exceptions, we rarely find an educated person in any comedy or drama who is not an object of derision. Scientists, even in the most popular CSI shows on TV are portrayed as people who have few social skills that should really stay in their labs. The “evil genius” is a common archetype in TV and movies. While some teachers are portrayed sympathetically, most are portrayed as being clueless as to what is really going on in their schools.

This nation has had a “frontier mentality” since its founding. I suspect that people in this country believe the Horatio Alger story, which is an outgrowth of the frontier mentality. This story is the basis for a belief that through hard work, perseverance and pluck, people can be successful and rise above their station in life. Education does not seem to be part of this story, except in a peripheral way. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, suggests that success comes from being in the right place at the right time, having good mentors, from thorough preparation including a lot of education when needed and being born at the right time of the year, in addition to the other attributes noted above.

I believe that one of the outgrowths of our frontier mentality and our Puritan roots is a mistrust and dislike of education and educated people. While I can find no studies that substantiate this idea, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence. In jazz, there are a number of myths in line with these ideas. One myth is that the earliest jazz musicians were dirt-poor people who just picked up horns without musical training and played this complex music. The evidence is that the vast majority had a lot of training from books, lessons and mentoring from older musicians. I have actually had people tell me that they think an education gets in the way of a musician’s “natural talent.” In addition, most of the early jazz musicians, black and white, came from a middle class background. These facts are in line with Gladwell's thinking, not the myth.

Our current education woes are blamed on the educators, not on the lack of community and parental support for education that seems to be rampant in this country. While politicians say that education is important, most of them gladly cut funds for education when the financial going gets tough. The salaries of teachers reflects the value we place on them and their work.

An educated person has training in the arts, the humanities and the sciences. We know of the dismal performance of our students in science and math since the 1960s, when the ethos of that time asserted that these subjects were irrelevant. Of more importance is what an education in the arts can do for a student. Studies have shown that students who take arts courses in high school score an average of fifty points higher on the SAT than those who don’t take such courses. Students learn discipline and focus in doing something that is creative and engages them. In many segments of our society, such courses are considered frills. Often, arts courses and arts teachers, certainly not football, are the first to go when budgets get tight. According to St. Louisan Lester Bowie, one of the greatest trumpeters in jazz history, rap music happened because the New York schools cut out instrumental music; the students had no outlet for their creative impulses. Arts classes provide a refuge from the bullying that most intelligent children experience in school.

While there are exceptions to these observations, I believe that anecdotal evidence of the decline in an educated populace since the 1960s is all over the arts. I see a lot of visual art and photography that I believe is deliberately dumbed down to look as if the artists have little or no training. As a people, our rhythmic sense has been dumbed down to where dancing seems to consist of jumping around in one place to tunes that have no melodies and consist of “hooks” that are repeated ad infinitum. To me, most of the rhythms sound like someone chopping wood with an axe. Our most successful films are special-effects films with very rudimentary plots and are sequels to already successful special-effects films. Much of our popular comedy sounds like 14-year old bathroom humor.

In jazz, the arrival of Wynton Marsalis in 1980 was not a coincidence. The country was taking a turn to the right, and Marsalis provided a conservative voice in jazz that the press exploited to the detriment of the music. One of Marsalis’ biggest supporters, Stanley Crouch, has written an essay called “The Jazz Tradition is Not Innovation.” Since 1980, too much of jazz is tributes to past jazz greats and imitations of what has gone before.

An under-educated populace lacks critical thinking skills, among other things. This lack of critical thinking skills has allowed our public discourse to be hijacked by “trials of the century,” political bullies, sex scandals and fear mongerers of all political stripes. As the populace becomes less educated, we need to know the consequences of losing our critical thinking skills as we face the problems of our financial woes as a nation. Deliberate distractions, slogans and political beliefs on both sides that have no basis in fact about taxes, revenue and the cost of our entitlement programs will never solve these problems. Due to the lack of critical thinking skills in this country, our politicians are allowed free rein to do whatever benefits their friends and moneyed supporters. Our press does not ask the right questions. Possibly they do not possess the skills to know the questions to ask.

One consequence of our dislike of education is that we have to import scientists and engineers because there are not enough young people in our own country entering these professions. Many don’t go into these professions because the training is too hard or they are not prepared intellectually for it.

A second consequence is that states with lower education rates have higher rates of rape, spousal abuse, divorce, teenage pregnancy and abortion. These seem to preoccupy the minds of many people in those states, spilling out into the rest of the nation.

A third consequence is that all the well-paying new jobs will be ones that go to wherever there is a better-educated work force. No politician, no government stimulus, no more laws and no political sloganeering can reverse this trend. We are so distracted by all of the peripheral issues that we cannot or we are not allowed to discuss this issue in a rational manner. Manufacturing jobs that were the backbone of this country have left and will not be replaced. If we don’t have an educated workforce, we, as a nation are in deep trouble. I believe that our only hope is to somehow overcome this ingrained dislike of education, a tough job since I believe that most of our politicians would prefer an electorate that cannot think critically.

The arts have reflected on what is going on with the psyche of this country, and it is not pretty. I believe that a lot of our decline in education levels in our nation is parallel to the decline in the quality of our arts. I also believe that much of this decline can be traced to our dislike and mistrust of education. The other night, my fiancée and I were watching the movie Idiocracy, a comedy about a future in which the education level has sunk so low that people believe whatever they see on television and the Internet, spend their time making jokes about bodily functions, drinking, drugging and having lots of children. What was interesting was that as we fast-forwarded through the commercials, we had trouble deciding where the commercials ended and the movie began again. Are we there yet?

Dennis Owsley has broadcast a weekly jazz show for St. Louis Public Radio (KWMU-FM) continuously since April 1983. Professionally, he holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and is a retired Monsanto Senior Science Fellow and college teacher. His current show, “Jazz Unlimited,” is heard every Sunday night from 9 p.m. to midnight. 

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