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Dumbing down describes the deliberate diminishment of the intellectual level of the content of literature, film, schooling and education, news, and other aspects of culture. The idea originated (c. 1933) as slang, used by motion picture screenplay writers, to mean “revise so as to appeal to those of little education or intelligence”. The occurrences of dumbing down vary in nature, but usually involve the oversimplification of critical thought to the degree of undermining the concept of intellectual standards – of language and learning – whereby are justified the trivialization of cultural, artistic, and academic standards of cultural works, as in popular culture. Nonetheless, the term “dumbing down” is subjective, because what someone considers as “dumbed down” usually depends upon the taste (value judgement) of the reader, the listener, and the viewer. Sociologically, Pierre Bourdieu proposes that, in a society, the cultural practices of dominant social classes are made legitimate culture to the social disadvantage of subordinate social classes and cultural groups.

Education

Increased participation in higher education has attracted the maintenance of distinctions through the construction of the category Mickey Mouse degrees. The high school physics instructor, Wellington Grey, published an Internet petition, wherein he said, "I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be"; and complained that “ calculations — the very soul of physics — are absent from the new GCSE.” Among the examples of dumbing down that he listed were “Question: Why would radio stations broadcast digital signals rather than analogue signals? Answer: Can be processed by computer / ipod” to “Question: Why must we develop renewable energy sources?” (The latter question is also an example of political correctness in that the focus of the course is hijacked into one of agitation for political solutions to asserted problems.)

In Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1991, 2002), John Taylor Gatto presented speeches and essays, including “The Psychopathic School”, his acceptance speech for the 1990 New York City Teacher of the Year award, and “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher”, his acceptance speech for the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year. Gatto speculated:

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 teaching, Gatto concludes that: “. . . all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. . . .” That “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.”

Mass communications media

Increased business competition, and the introduction of econometric methods have changed the business practices of the mass communications media. The business monopoly practice of media consolidation has reduced the breadth and the depth of the journalism practiced and provided. The reduction of operating costs (overhead expenses) eliminated foreign news bureaus and reporters, in favour of publishing the public relations publications (news releases) of a government, a business, and a political party as fact.

Refinements in the tracking systems that measure approval-ratings and audience-size increased the cultural incentive for producers to write as simply and as simplistically possible by diminishing the intellectual complexity of the argument presented in the programme, usually at the expense of factual accuracy, logic, and complexity. Cultural theorists including Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Neil Postman, Henry Giroux, and Pierre Bourdieu invoke these effects as evidence that commercial television is an especially pernicious contributor to the dumbing-down of communications. Nonetheless, the critic Stuart Hall said that teachers of critical thinking – parents and academic instructors – can improve the quality (breadth and depth) of their instruction by occasionally including television programmes. .

Computing

As a response to the growing accessibility to the internet, the phrase Eternal September was coined, referring to the period starting from September 1993 when 'newbies' were no longer encountered only at the start of the academic year.

France

Michel Houellebecq has written (not excluding himself) of "the shocking dumbing-down of French culture and intellect as was recently pointed out, sternly but fairly, by Time magazine".

In popular culture

• The science fiction film Idiocracy (2005) portrays the U.S. as a greatly dumbed-down society 500 years from now. This cultural condition was achieved by dysgenics, the rate of over-reproduction, by people of low intelligence being greater than the rate of reproduction of the more intelligent people of the society, i.e. the educated. The concept of Idiocracy derives from the science fiction short story The Marching Morons (1951), by Cyril M. Kornbluth. The novel Brave New World (1931), by Aldous Huxley discussed several ways their society was effectively dumbed down to maintain stability and social order.

• Music groups The Divine Comedy, Ugly Duckling and Lupe Fiasco have songs titled "Dumb it Down". Chumbawamba has a song titled "Dumbing Down".

See also

References

1. Algeo, John; Algeo, Adele (1988). "Among the New Words". American Speech. 63 (4): 235–236. doi:10.1215/00031283-78-3-331.
2. "Physicists protest at GCSE change". BBC News. 28 June 2007.
3. ^ The Odysseus Group Web site of John Taylor Gatto , retrieved 23 February 2009
4. Eric Raymond. "September that never ended". The Jargon File (version 4.4.7). Retrieved 2010-02-01.
5. Michel Houellebecq/Bernard-Henri Lévy, Public Enemies (2011) p. 3-4

External links

• "Is the internet dumbing us down?" MSNBC review of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen

• English phrases
• Media issues
• Philosophy of education
• Education issues
• Criticism of journalism
• Student assessment and evaluation
• Political correctness