I recently read an excerpt of Jane M. Healy’s Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think and What We Can Do About It. It reminded me of this viral quote from an American:
We look so stupid to the rest of the world [right] now. If it [weren’t] for all the shootings, they’d [probably] think we have no schools here.
This article is inspired by Healy’s work.
American culture, education, and capitalism
I don’t believe it should be controversial to say that Americans, generally speaking, are quite stupid; I find it an apt description. Obviously, this does not apply to all Americans, but to a caricaturized, stereotypical one.
Western capitalism has pushed the idea of individualism in its constant division of the proletariat to ensure that class consciousness cannot be achieved. I believe that the environment in the West inherently breeds less intelligent humans, as individualism is pushed, but only within a certain limit—one can be smart but cannot step out of line.1
Due to this culture, and combined with poor training and structural disadvantages in schooling, Americans typically have disproportionately high views of themselves and are extremely prideful.
Additionally, since capitalism requires a proletariat that cannot achieve class consciousness, the decline in reading, attention, and analytic reasoning can be described not as a side effect but as a functional core feature.
Rather ironically for a socioeconomic system that prizes “hard work,” Westerners often have their lives handed to them on a silver platter; Healy notes that “[many] have trouble with the mental organization and sustained effort demanded by reading.”
Healy discusses multiple instances of teachers and professors having to “dumb down” or pick easier material, and given that this occurs throughout the entire academic cycle, the education is of a lower standard overall, as there is less room to struggle.
The West’s declining literacy, attention span, and academic standards
Healy, on several occasions, mentions a changing social culture in America. An English teacher is quoted saying:
[The students] don’t use language above the colloquial expressions because the mainstream culture is dangerously indifferent to the importance of precise language. I don’t have much hope of producing readers in the classroom until we can produce readers in the larger social context.
Healy also notes the failures of parents, caregivers, and schools to stimulate thought; this is tied to growing class sizes, which actively worsens the “[neglect] of verbal interaction during the apex of the brain’s sensitive period for language acquisition.”
Social media, short-form content, and the reliance on AI
In addition, I found this notion to mirror modern social media as well as the dependence on artificial intelligence (AI) use, continuations of the “sloth” cultures of the era in which Healy’s book was written. This is an inevitable “next step down” in my view.
This can also be tied to the idea of high and low cultures; a hierarchy can be easily formed based on who is more “literate,” which, in many cases, are upper-class white students.
The act of “doomscrolling” has become the norm—hours of lying in bed, watching so-called “brainrot” short-form video content on Western social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels.
This seems to align with Healy’s discoveries regarding content used in the classroom: “[lectures] can’t exceed fifteen minutes,” and “professors must water down both reading and writing assignments as well as expectations for analytic reasoning.”
References to children watching TV for both news and entertainment have evolved; now, young Westerners get both news and entertainment from short-form videos and use AI to summarize written news articles.
Despite news channels themselves having relatively short segments, covering numerous articles within 30-60 minutes, many networks have turned to short-form video to cater to modern viewership trends.
Further, despite the widespread proliferation of AI occurring only a few years ago (e.g., ChatGPT was released in 2022), students have voiced their reliance on these tools, finding it difficult to perform tasks without it.
This aligns with Healy’s note that “the majority [of young people] have difficulty understanding text above elementary school level, drawing inferences beyond simple facts, following an author’s point or the sequence of an argument, or using facts to support an argument of their own.”
I personally know of countless students who have performed research and even wrote whole papers with AI, despite constant inaccuracies.
Now, essentially every “large” news site, email provider, etc. has some sort of “Summarize with AI” feature, marketed as a “tool” to make things “more efficient.”
Interestingly, Healy asserts that summarizing a given text is one of the most difficult things to do for modern students; by using AI, this “most difficult” task is done for them (though I find it ironic that, sometimes, wording a specific AI prompt to achieve the desired result takes more “work” than it would to do it yourself).
Decline in meaningful verbal interactions
As well, Healy notes that language exposure has diminished in both quality and quantity. This, too, can be partially attributed to social media and AI.
Aristotle said that humans are “by nature a social animal,” and this sociality has diminished with the rise of texting, as you can take as long as needed to respond to a certain message, or even not at all, compared to a live conversation in which a response must be near-immediate, and AI, as shown in its frequent use in writing emails and even dating profiles.
Healy mentions passive listening as an issue:
Passive ‘listening’ does not build either language or effective listening skills. Our children today spend a great deal of time ‘listening’ … but they need to listen better, not just more.
It seems social media and AI use is even worse than TV, as it often removes the listening aspect entirely. Of course, you can send voice messages through text and have “live conversations” with AI chatbots, but it still differs rather greatly from a physical two- (or more-) sided conversation.
Cultural transmission through language
I do wonder whether there are differences between a young Westerner raised in an Anglophone-centric household versus one in an immigrant, non-English-speaking household.2
In many Eastern European, Southwest Asian, and East Asian cultures, for example, there is much more of an emphasis on family and familial dynamics, which may directly lead to more conversational interactions and in turn more exposure to and practice of meaningful verbal speech.
It seems that in most Western cultures, only the basics of speech are used—Westerners seem to love so-called “small talk,” while, for instance, Slavic “small talk” is philosophical and deep, going far beyond simple topics like the weather.
This is an extension of Healy’s words:
The ideas, values, and priorities of a culture are borne along on the stream of language that flows between generations. … Verbal interactions in the home are where it all starts. … The quality of the conversation adults have with children is extremely important … parents who take the time to discuss topics thoughtfully, who talk about events and ideas, are helping their children become much better thinkers than those who focus more on the food or the situation at hand.
This is without bringing in demographic- and identity-based issues such as ethnic discrimination and racialization, gender norms, etc.
Healy does briefly discuss students in England and France, but these are still Western cultures.
I don't see Americans as any more stupid than any other society. Stupid implies inability to learn and IMHO they may not have a high quality educational system and are fed lies to build their inoculation to the perils of living within a capitalist society, but they are no more or less intelligent than any other society. Sure the American culture has the pitfalls you mention...AI, social media, etc. but those are distractions and tools used to build conformity and don't reflect intellectual capability. Americans may have a crappy educational system, but that doesn't mean they can't learn, more that they aren't provided with the resources to learn relative to what other societies are presented with.
The conformity and dumbing-down are intentional design by the oligarchic ruling class. Without it, how can they put down the“tyranny of the people”?