This was the first time I picked up a copy of Cherwell after coming to Oxford from the US and was surprised to read, ‘How did Britain get so thick?’ [published 07/05/10]; surprised, because of the exact parallel with the US. Quite frankly, I had not expected it. In the US much has been written and discussed about ‘the dumbing down of America,’ but things have not improved over the years. In fact, it is the other way round. Incidentally, I am not talking about the top students who are the backbone of American academia and continue to dominate, especially in sciences, garnering Nobel prizes. No. The truth of the matter is: here we are – the great superpower of the world – and yet our 15-year olds are coming nearly at the bottom of the list in international competitions in science and maths among 30 nations.
How about this quote: “The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself?” That was by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the US essayist and philosopher, way back in 1837; how true even after all these years. Susan Jacoby of the Washington Post, who started with this Emerson quote, went on to say, “Americans are in serious intellectual trouble, in danger of losing our hard-won appeal to a virulent mix of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.” Replace ‘Americans’ with ‘British’ and, judging by what Cherwell has to say, you seem to have the same situation.
What is the utmost priority now in the US is the colour green:it is money. In one generation, the number of undergraduates reading English at universities has gone down from 30% to less than 16%, whereas the percentage of students majoring in business has gone up from 14 to 22%. On top of this, instead of making the syllabus more rigorous, it is being diluted.
Granted, new courses are being introduced with fancy names, but this masks the reality of their lack of scholarship, really giving a bad name to a true ‘liberal education’. Even Ivy league professors are nervous if they have to give poor grades to students because by doing so they fear they will not have many students taking such courses in the next semester. Among the culprit universities: Princeton, Harvard, Cornell, U. Penn. No Ivy League is exempt.
It is also laughable that while Princeton is now giving fewer ‘A’s, the other Ivys have not followed Princeton’s example. Having said that, I also know from personal experience that in some top universities getting an ‘A’ means the student deserves it.
When I was a student in Britain, where I lived for many years, I saw professors going after the graduates who got a First or even a 2:1 to join their research group. So I got a rude awakening when, out of sheer curiosity, I googled, ‘The Dumbing Down of Britain’. Sure enough, there were many articles. One, by Peter Strudwick, said: “The traditional attributes and educational customs, incorporating so many undeniably valuable qualities, are loathed by modernists, who regard them as relics of the old world with no place in the new educational agenda. The modernist perception is that the acquisition of knowledge is not an absolute value in itself at all, but something which is inherently useful only when placed in a social context.”
This was after an Encyclopaedia Britannica survey which found that 7 million Britons are “functionally illiterate”.
I know many will protest what I am writing but, honestly, I am just sad at the state of affairs here, in Britain, and could never imagine this was the present situation. My hope is that the new British Government will take all this into account and implement policies which will turn the situation around.
Until then, the truth remains that we are all becoming Americans; taking their ‘bad’ and leaving out their ‘good’.
