A New York Times book review asks Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge? Susan Jacoby author of The Age of American Unreason argues that our culture has taken a turn for the worse. From the book review:
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But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “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.
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It is hard to know what is cause and what is effect. Over the last couple decades the American public school system has declined. Now we have a high percentage of high school graduates who are illiterate.
The book looks interesting. I've reserved it at my local library.
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Technorati tags: public school, public education, education
1 comment:
I read Ms. Jacoby's op-ed in today's Washington Post . It's interesting, but there was a bit of an anti-Christian undertone to some of the things she wrote in it. She seems to have bought into the whole false dichotomy between Faith & Reason. They aren't set in opposition to each other but rather are complementary ways of knowing about the universe. It all goes back to Aristotle's "final" vs. "efficient" causes. The former explains *WHY* something happens (the realm of theology) and the latter explains *HOW* something happens (the realm of science).
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