Dumbing down
Encyclopedia
Dumbing down is a pejorative
term for a perceived trend to lower the intellectual content of literature
, education
, news
, and other aspects of culture
. According to John Algeo, former editor of American Speech
, the neologism dumb down meaning "revise so as to appeal to those of little education or intelligence" was first recorded in 1933 as movie slang.
Dumbing down can point to a variety of different situations, but the concept always involves a claim about the simplification of culture, education and thought; a decline in creativity and innovation; a degradation of artistic, cultural and intellectual standards, or the undermining of the very idea of a standard; and the trivialization of cultural, artistic and academic creations.
The term is often subjective
since what is labeled as dumbed down often depends upon the values
of individuals of specific groups. Pierre Bourdieu
discusses how the practices of dominant groups in society are legitimized to the disadvantage of subordinate groups. However, there is also evidence that knowledge of areas outside that defined by popular culture
diminished progressively starting in the late twentieth century.
through the construction of the category Mickey Mouse degrees
.
In the UK
, there is now an annual moral panic
every August when GCSE
and A-level results are released. The pass rate by students has consistently risen for past two decades and Grade inflation
is attributed to rising pass rates. Comparisons between examination questions are often produced as evidence of dumbing down (in mathematics
as syllabus has been continuously cut during the past year. For example, an algebra
ic equation would be compared to a recent question about a "real life" problem).
A secondary school physics teacher, Wellington Grey, ran an Internet petition
, stating that "I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be." According to him, "Calculations – the very soul of physics – are absent from the new GCSE." Few examples he listed ranged from "`Q: Why would radio stations broadcast digital signals rather than analogue signals? A: Can be processed by computer / ipod [sic]" to "`Q: Why must we develop renewable energy sources?’"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6244942.stm
In Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (originally published in 1991, with an expanded second edition uttered in 2002), American educator John Taylor Gatto
collects a number of speeches and essays, including "The Psychopathic School" (his acceptance speech upon receiving the 1990 New York City
Teacher of the Year award) and "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" (his acceptance speech when named the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year). Gatto
writes that he began to speculate:
In examining "the seven lessons of schoolteaching," Gatto
comes to the conclusion that:
. Media consolidation has reduced both the breadth and depth of stories covered by mass media. Cost reduction leads to the elimination of foreign bureaus and correspondents in favor of news release
s by political parties or businesses (see Flat Earth News).
New refinements in approval-rating and audience-tracking systems have increased incentives for media producers to write as simply as possible and minimize the complexity of argument involved in a given written piece, often at the expense of factual accuracy, completeness, depth, and/or logical validity. Furthermore, economics of scale create positive incentives for mass-media producers to create for the broadest possible audience, such that popular, "lite
" topics such as celebrity gossip, entertainment marketing, and sensationalism
dominate the marketplace.
Cultural theorists including Richard Hoggart
, Raymond Williams
, Neil Postman
, Henry Giroux
and Pierre Bourdieu
invoke these effects in support of the claim that television
is an especially pervasive and pernicious contributor to the "dumbing-down" process. Some critics such as Stuart Hall
argue that teachers of critical thinking, including both professional teachers in an academic environment and non-professional teachers such as parents
, can improve their teaching both by occasionally using television as an instructional medium and by using the content of specific television programmes as either a positive example or a counterexample
(depending on the programme and the lesson being conveyed)..
was coined, referring to the period starting from September 1993 when 'newbies' were no longer encountered only at the start of the academic year.
Pejorative
Pejoratives , including name slurs, are words or grammatical forms that connote negativity and express contempt or distaste. A term can be regarded as pejorative in some social groups but not in others, e.g., hacker is a term used for computer criminals as well as quick and clever computer experts...
term for a perceived trend to lower the intellectual content of literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
, education
Education
Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...
, news
News
News is the communication of selected information on current events which is presented by print, broadcast, Internet, or word of mouth to a third party or mass audience.- Etymology :...
, and other aspects of culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
. According to John Algeo, former editor of American Speech
American Speech
American Speech is a quarterly academic journal of the American Dialect Society, established in 1925 and published by the Duke University Press...
, the neologism dumb down meaning "revise so as to appeal to those of little education or intelligence" was first recorded in 1933 as movie slang.
Dumbing down can point to a variety of different situations, but the concept always involves a claim about the simplification of culture, education and thought; a decline in creativity and innovation; a degradation of artistic, cultural and intellectual standards, or the undermining of the very idea of a standard; and the trivialization of cultural, artistic and academic creations.
The term is often subjective
Subject (philosophy)
In philosophy, a subject is a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness or a relationship with another entity . A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed...
since what is labeled as dumbed down often depends upon the values
Taste (sociology)
Taste as an aesthetic, sociological, economic and anthropological concept refers to a cultural patterns of choice and preference. While taste is often understood as a biological concept, it can also be reasonably studied as a social or cultural phenomenon. Taste is about drawing distinctions...
of individuals of specific groups. Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...
discusses how the practices of dominant groups in society are legitimized to the disadvantage of subordinate groups. However, there is also evidence that knowledge of areas outside that defined by popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
diminished progressively starting in the late twentieth century.
Education
Increased participation in higher education has attracted the maintenance of distinctionsLa Distinction
La Distinction is a book by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu , based on Bourdieu's empirical research on French culture. Taken from studies conducted by Bourdieu in 1963 and concluded in 1967-68, the book was originally published in France in 1979...
through the construction of the category Mickey Mouse degrees
Mickey Mouse degrees
Mickey Mouse degrees is the dysphemism built from the common usage of the term "Mickey Mouse" as a pejorative. It came to prominence in the UK after use by the national tabloids of the United Kingdom to label certain university degree courses worthless or irrelevant.- Origins :The term was used by...
.
In the UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, there is now an annual moral panic
Moral panic
A moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order. According to Stanley Cohen, author of Folk Devils and Moral Panics and credited creator of the term, a moral panic occurs when "[a] condition, episode, person or group of...
every August when GCSE
General Certificate of Secondary Education
The General Certificate of Secondary Education is an academic qualification awarded in a specified subject, generally taken in a number of subjects by students aged 14–16 in secondary education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and is equivalent to a Level 2 and Level 1 in Key Skills...
and A-level results are released. The pass rate by students has consistently risen for past two decades and Grade inflation
Grade inflation
Grade inflation is the tendency of academic grades for work of comparable quality to increase over time.It is frequently discussed in relation to U.S. education, and to GCSEs and A levels in England and Wales...
is attributed to rising pass rates. Comparisons between examination questions are often produced as evidence of dumbing down (in mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
as syllabus has been continuously cut during the past year. For example, an algebra
Algebra
Algebra is the branch of mathematics concerning the study of the rules of operations and relations, and the constructions and concepts arising from them, including terms, polynomials, equations and algebraic structures...
ic equation would be compared to a recent question about a "real life" problem).
A secondary school physics teacher, Wellington Grey, ran an Internet petition
Internet petition
An Internet petition is a form of petition posted on a website. Visitors to the website in question can add their email addresses or names, and after enough "signatures" have been collected, the resulting letter may be delivered to the subject of the petition, usually via e-mail.-Pros and cons:The...
, stating that "I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be." According to him, "Calculations – the very soul of physics – are absent from the new GCSE." Few examples he listed ranged from "`Q: Why would radio stations broadcast digital signals rather than analogue signals? A: Can be processed by computer / ipod [sic]" to "`Q: Why must we develop renewable energy sources?’"http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6244942.stm
In Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (originally published in 1991, with an expanded second edition uttered in 2002), American educator John Taylor Gatto
John Taylor Gatto
John Taylor Gatto is a retired American school teacher with nearly 30 years experience in the classroom, and author of several books on education...
collects a number of speeches and essays, including "The Psychopathic School" (his acceptance speech upon receiving the 1990 New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
Teacher of the Year award) and "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" (his acceptance speech when named the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year). Gatto
John Taylor Gatto
John Taylor Gatto is a retired American school teacher with nearly 30 years experience in the classroom, and author of several books on education...
writes that he began to speculate:
- "Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think, and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior."
In examining "the seven lessons of schoolteaching," Gatto
John Taylor Gatto
John Taylor Gatto is a retired American school teacher with nearly 30 years experience in the classroom, and author of several books on education...
comes to the conclusion that:
- "...all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius....
- "School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know."
Media
Increased competition and the introduction of econometric methods have radically changed mass mediaMass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
. Media consolidation has reduced both the breadth and depth of stories covered by mass media. Cost reduction leads to the elimination of foreign bureaus and correspondents in favor of news release
News release
A press release, news release, media release, press statement or video release is a written or recorded communication directed at members of the news media for the purpose of announcing something ostensibly newsworthy...
s by political parties or businesses (see Flat Earth News).
New refinements in approval-rating and audience-tracking systems have increased incentives for media producers to write as simply as possible and minimize the complexity of argument involved in a given written piece, often at the expense of factual accuracy, completeness, depth, and/or logical validity. Furthermore, economics of scale create positive incentives for mass-media producers to create for the broadest possible audience, such that popular, "lite
Lite
Lite is a variant spelling of "light", a concept of weight, and may refer to:*Diet food or diet beverages:**Diet soda, a diet version of soda pop**Low-alcohol beer or low-calorie beer ***Miller Lite, a brand of light beer...
" topics such as celebrity gossip, entertainment marketing, and sensationalism
Sensationalism
Sensationalism is a type of editorial bias in mass media in which events and topics in news stories and pieces are over-hyped to increase viewership or readership numbers...
dominate the marketplace.
Cultural theorists including Richard Hoggart
Richard Hoggart
Herbert Richard Hoggart is a British academic and public figure, whose career has covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with a special concern for British popular culture.-Career:...
, Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
, Neil Postman
Neil Postman
Neil Postman was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University...
, Henry Giroux
Henry Giroux
Henry Giroux, born September 18, 1943, in Providence, Rhode Island, is an American cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies,...
and Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...
invoke these effects in support of the claim that television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
is an especially pervasive and pernicious contributor to the "dumbing-down" process. Some critics such as Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)
Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of...
argue that teachers of critical thinking, including both professional teachers in an academic environment and non-professional teachers such as parents
Parenting
Parenting is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood...
, can improve their teaching both by occasionally using television as an instructional medium and by using the content of specific television programmes as either a positive example or a counterexample
Counterexample
In logic, and especially in its applications to mathematics and philosophy, a counterexample is an exception to a proposed general rule. For example, consider the proposition "all students are lazy"....
(depending on the programme and the lesson being conveyed)..
Computing
As a response to the growing accessibility to the internet, the phrase Eternal SeptemberEternal September
Eternal September is a Usenet slang expression, coined by Dave Fischer, for the period beginning September 1993...
was coined, referring to the period starting from September 1993 when 'newbies' were no longer encountered only at the start of the academic year.
In popular culture
- The 2005 film IdiocracyIdiocracyIdiocracy is a 2006 American film, a satirical science fiction comedy, directed by Mike Judge and starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, and Terry Crews....
portrays a society 500 years in the future massively dumbed down by low-IQ people enthusiastically outbreeding the most intelligent parts of societyDysgenicsDysgenics is the study of factors producing the accumulation and perpetuation of defective or disadvantageous genes and traits in offspring of a particular population or species. Dysgenic mutations have been studied in animals such as the mouse and the fruit fly...
. This idea was earlier put forth by Cyril M. KornbluthCyril M. KornbluthCyril M. Kornbluth was an American science fiction author and a notable member of the Futurians. He used a variety of pen-names, including Cecil Corwin, S. D. Gottesman, Edward J. Bellin, Kenneth Falconer, Walter C. Davies, Simon Eisner and Jordan Park...
in The Marching MoronsThe Marching Morons"The Marching Morons" is a science fiction story written by Cyril M. Kornbluth, originally published in Galaxy in April 1951. It was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two after being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965....
, first published in 1951. - Music groups The Divine ComedyThe Divine Comedy (band)The Divine Comedy are a chamber pop band from Ireland, fronted by Neil Hannon. Formed in 1989, Hannon has been the only constant member of the group, playing, in some instances, all of the non-orchestral instrumentation bar drums. To date, ten studio albums have been released under the Divine...
, Ugly DucklingUgly Duckling (hip hop group)Ugly Duckling is an American hip hop group that formed around 1993 in Long Beach, California. Ugly Duckling's members include Dizzy Dustin , Young Einstein and Andy Cat . They took the name Ugly Duckling because they felt like outcasts on the Southern California hip hop scene of the mid-1990s...
and Lupe FiascoLupe FiascoWasalu Muhammad Jaco , better known by his stage name Lupe Fiasco , is an American rapper, record producer, and entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, Lupe is the CEO of 1st and 15th Entertainment. He rose to fame in 2006 following the success of his critically acclaimed debut album, Lupe Fiasco's Food...
have songs titled "Dumb it Down". ChumbawambaChumbawambaChumbawamba is a British musical group who have, over a career spanning nearly three decades, played punk rock, pop-influenced music, world music, and folk music...
has a song titled "Dumbing Down"WYSIWYG (album)WYSIWYG is a 2000 album by anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba. Released after the massive success of their previous effort, Tubthumper, it commented on various aspects of the pop culture the band had inadvertently become a part of...
See also
External links
- "Is the internet dumbing us down?" MSNBCMSNBCMSNBC is a cable news channel based in the United States available in the US, Germany , South Africa, the Middle East and Canada...
review of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen