America is not just increasingly anti-intellectual, it's often just dumb. The rise of populism is, in part, an unwillingness to engage in the complexity of the society that we've created and mistrust of those attempting to do so. It is a rejection of science, a prideful naïveté, and a jingoistic belief in America's divine election. America has always had a populist streak and it fits remarkably well with an entrepreneurial streak and a Calvinist work ethic. Populism allowed America to be sloppy with resources, chauvinist with people, and capitalist Monday to Friday and fundamentalists on Sunday. Television didn't help. It asked little of us and made us sedentary physically and intellectually. T.V. probably cost America a few dozen IQ points over the last two generations.
Will the Internet prove to be more of the same? Some critics think the Internet is making us dumb. The Internet fundamentally changes the opportunity set. All the world's knowledge and all the world's garbage are both just one search away. The Internet appears to exacerbate innate tendencies -- the smart get smarter while others will simply find new ways to waste time or inflict harm. Good parents find or create new ways to help their kids learn, others have no idea what their kids are up to online. Will the Internet make us smarter? It's up to us.
America has a culture of weak or at least inconsistent academic press compared to India and China where, bottom to the top of the pyramid, an extended group of adults makes education the family priority. About five percent of U.S. students are driven, supported transcript builders aiming at top selective colleges; a quarter do what it takes to make it to the state university; a third do enough to graduate and assume they'll figure something out after high school. Almost a third drop out -- and that includes half of the kids of color and half of the kids that grow up in poverty. About one third of U.S. kids grow up with a single parent which can obviously be great, but it just reduces the odds that the student will have at least one person at home that gives a damn if they go to school, do their homework, graduate, and go to college.
Reversing the dumbing of America is a monumental cultural shift but it must happen for the country to remain economically relevant as the geopolitical center of the universe shifts from west to east. Perhaps the first generation of American young people that are worse off than their parents will be the beginning of a wake up call. The great recession should have been the alarm bell but there is little sign that it registered new collective insights. Government stimulus did just enough to protect bloated and ineffective education bureaucracies that, while conversations about productivity surfaced among the edu-intelligentsia, there was little fundamental reform. Arguments centered on economic competitiveness (e.g., did you know that there are 500 million kids in India and China working twice as hard and planning to kick your economic ass) don't seem to register or drive behavior change. Maybe we can just make school suck less bad.
Efforts to make education more engaging and personal are, at least in part, an effort to substitute for a strong cultural press. It is pretty clear that we can build engaging media that builds persistence. We can build assessments that quickly diagnose learning levels and difficulties. We can introduce social media and mobile communications technology so that learning is a bit more like life. With smart student profiles, we can build personalized digital learning environments. We can expand access to the best teachers and the most effective learning experiences. With a little more effort, we can build schools that cultivate curiosity. All of these will happen to varying extents during the decade to come and it will result in improved academic results measured in traditional and new ways.
But can we use the Internet to make our culture smarter? Chicago-based Sam Pitroda played a significant role in India's telecom revolution and continues to advise the Prime Minister. He is bright and intensely focused on wiring the 250,000 panchayat, local village centers. The introduction of e-government, e-commerce, and e-health has clearly made the first few hundred remote Indian villages more productive, healthier, and more civically engaged. An online database provides these villages better public health records than US cities. These examples of new connectivity are clearly making these village cultures smarter. Nearly all U.S. communities are connected and have access to the even more information, more opportunities to learn, and more avenues of participation, but most of us don't take advantage.
Perhaps we can Facebook our way to caring; a smart culture will include organized and informed parents in online communities. Perhaps we can rap our way to caring; a smart culture will use culturally relevant signaling. Perhaps we can play our way into caring; a smart culture will widely adopt engaging learning games and iTunes U learning playlists. Almost certainly, we'll need to make it easy for parents to monitor and guide computer and mobile use for productive ends.
Dinner table conversation still matter. Parents won't influence the online world if they're not a visible active part of a student's physical world.