The Popularity of Anti-intellectualism

I just read in my local paper that Fox just debuted a new TV game show to record numbers, 26.5 million, on Tuesday. This not only makes it the most-watched series debut in Fox history, but the most popular debut of any series since 1998 (according to Nielsen). The show is called, "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" The rapt viewer of this show is evidently treated to the hijinks which ensue when adults are quizzed on the knowledge to be found in elementary school textbooks.

I hope that all of those viewers (a set of which I am not a member) were merely exhibiting a kind of morbid curiosity, wondering (as I do) whether the show's contestants were really up to that kind of challenge.

But I worry that most of those viewers were really wondering whether they themselves were smarter than a fifth grader. And when I think about how maybe some non-trivial fraction of them found themselves deficient, I just imagine them laughing as they tell their sympathetic friends, "I didn't hardly know none of them questions!"

Is this really be the standard to which Americans want to compare themselves?

This is all good, harmless fun, I suppose. Until somebody gets up in front of a school board somewhere, let's say, and wants to make an argument one way or another about something that takes maybe a bit more than a fifth-grade education to really understand. Then I think it's not so much funny as it is dangerous.

We don't merely tolerate ignorance, we embrace it, even encourage it. I think we should all stop acting like a bunch of fifth graders. Ignorance is not funny, or cool; it's just ignorance.