This would be a shock to those authors but the real cause of the "dumbing" of America is the loss of good examples who obviously have good educations. Many of my students do not read (they CAN, but they choose not to because it is 'too hard'). Consequently they are not exposed to any ideas that do not come from the mass culture they slavishly admire.

Also, because they choose not to read they lose the ability to read smoothly. Reading becomes that much harder. The other day one of my students asked me what the word "frequented" meant. She is a junior (11th grade). I have heard many other questions like that.

When I make the kids read aloud from the textbook many of them cringe. They stumble through the reading, pausing at unfamiliar but easy words, losing the sentence when they get to the end of the line, and not retaining the meaning of what they just read. The act of reading took too much concentration for them to retain the meaning.

One of the math teachers uses my room. Generally I work at my desk in the back while he teaches. He continually battles the poor arithmetic of the students. They understand the concepts but cannot make the problems work out because they cannot add, subtract, multiply, or divide.

Foreign languages are a problem for them because they never figured out grammar. When Wakana explains the structure of a sentence in Japanese and how it differs from the structure of an English sentence she encounters blank stares and whispers because they didn't know which is the verb and which is the noun.

English is a problem for them because they do not have a large enough vocabulary to make their sentences interesting. They usually have one or two adjectives and that is good enough for them. If you try to get them to describe something they are generally unable to do without a lot of prompting.
"It IS a pretty tree. What color are the flowers? How tall is it? Where is it growing? Does it stand out from the other growth around it? Why?"

I could go on but I this is Saturday night and I am reawakening my frustrations. They are out there tonight, filling their empty minds with drugs and alcohol and working their way into an early pregnancy because they didn't pay attention in the anatomy class on where babies come from.

Now, having said all this I don't want to leave you with the impression that there is no hope. I have brilliant students. I work with minds that can parse a sentence and see the hidden meaning within. The are thirsty for knowledge and want to go further with our topic. But as they wind up to ask their questions I can see and hear the others groaning at the idea of continuing down that rabbit hole.

I am left with the idea that the vast majority of humanity just doesn't want to deal with the ideas and knowledge that are available to them. All we can do for them is make the knowledge available and hope we can spark some interest and fan that spark until it burst free of the mass of people around them that threaten to suffocate the flame.

And I am all right with this. Sure, it is frustrating and difficult to understand but it is the way it is. There will always be a vast majority of humans who stay ignorant. And there will always be a minority of humans who want to scale the walls and climb to the top of the tower of academia.

Nothing will change without a major shift in the way mass culture looks at education. And then that shift will take a long time.