Dari: agung hertanto <agungeka@yahoo.
Teman teman,
Ini ada salah satu bukti bagaimana rakyat Amerika
'ignorant' tentang budaya lain dan geografi.
Mungkin ini sebabnya mereka sangat patriotik buta
dan arogan.
Kalau malas baca, saya ambil saya beberapa yang konyol
dari artikel tercantum.
1)
Question: "Budapest is the capital of what European
country?"
Answer: "I thought Europe was a country".
Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered
by one of the genuine fifth graders:
Hungary. "Hungry?" she said, eyes widening in
disbelief. "That's a country? I've heard of Turkey.
But Hungry? I've never heard of it."
2) ...a 2006 National Geographic poll that found
nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don't think it is
necessary or important to know where countries in the
news are located. So more than three years into the
Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college
could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a
map.
3) comparing Pearl Harbour and Sept 11.
"This is just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said.
The other asked, "What is Pearl Harbor?"
"That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a
harbor, and it started the Vietnam War," the first man
replied.
salam
************
NYT - February 14, 2008
Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?
By PATRICIA COHEN
A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the
adorable platinum blonde from "American Idol,"
appearing on the Fox game show "Are You Smarter Than a
5th Grader?" during celebrity week. Selected from a
third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question
asked: "Budapest is the capital of what European
country?"
Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the
large blackboard perplexed. "I thought Europe was a
country," she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy
the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth
graders: Hungary. "Hungry?" she said, eyes widening in
disbelief. "That's a country? I've heard of Turkey.
But Hungry? I've never heard of it."
Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of
thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of "The Age of
American Unreason," up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a
number of writers with new books that bemoan the state
of American culture.
Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric
G. Wilson, whose "Against Happiness" warns that the
"American obsession with happiness" could "well lead
to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that
could result in an extermination as horrible as those
foreshadowed by global warming and environmental
crisis and nuclear proliferation."
Then there is Lee Siegel's "Against the Machine: Being
Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob," which
inveighs against the Internet for encouraging
solipsism, debased discourse and arrant
commercialization. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was
suspended by The New Republic for using a fake online
persona in order to trash critics of his blog ("you
couldn't tie Siegel's shoelaces") and to praise
himself ("brave, brilliant").
Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn't
zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but
rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to
knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a
crank. "I expect to get bashed," said Ms. Jacoby, 62,
either as an older person who upbraids the young for
plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist
whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to
disparage religion.
Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her
indictment is not limited by age or ideology. Yes, she
knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs,
pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have been
mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And
liberal and conservative writers, from Richard
Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the
phenomenon and offered advice.
T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits
the quarterly review Raritan, said, "The tendency to
this sort of lamentation is perennial in American
history," adding that in periods "when political
problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is
a turn toward cultural issues."
But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is
happening: anti-intellectualis
"too much learning can be a dangerous thing") and
anti-rationalism ("the idea that there is no such
things as evidence or fact, just opinion") have fused
in a particularly insidious way.
Not only are citizens ignorant about essential
scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said,
but they also don't think it matters.
She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that
found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don't think
it is necessary or important to know where countries
in the news are located. So more than three years into
the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some
college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and
Israel on a map.
Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with
lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that
temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library's
majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The
author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the
library when she first got the idea for this book back
in 2001, on 9/11.
Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she
said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar.
As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to
two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she
thought they were going to compare that day's
horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that
blew America into World War II:
"This is just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said.
The other asked, "What is Pearl Harbor?"
"That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a
harbor, and it started the Vietnam War," the first man
replied.
At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, "I decided to write
this book."
Ms. Jacoby doesn't expect to revolutionize the
nation's educational system or cause millions of
Americans to switch off "American Idol" and pick up
Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a
conversation about why the United States seems
particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of
anti-intellectualis
infotainment doesn't stop at the American border," she
said, yet students in many other countries
consistently outperform American students in science,
math and reading on comparative tests.
In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational
system. "Although people are going to school more and
more years, there's no evidence that they know more,"
she said.
Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism'
antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys
that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want
creationism to be taught along with evolution.
Ms. Jacoby doesn't leave liberals out of her analysis,
mentioning the New Left's attacks on universities in
the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American
and women's studies to an "academic ghetto" instead of
integrating them into the core curriculum, ponderous
musings on rock music and pop culture courses on
everything from sitcoms to fat that trivialize
college-level learning.
Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this
particular argument, she prefers to call herself a
"cultural conservationist."
For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby
said she recognized just how hard it is to tune out
the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she
participated in the annual campaign to turn off the
television for a week. "I was stunned at how difficult
it was for me," she said.
The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and
visual media made her realize just how pervasive the
culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone
is — even curmudgeons.
************
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