The Core Knowledge Blog

A headline in the the New York Times today asks “Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?”

The piece that follows jumps off of Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Unreason, which notes a “generalized hostility to knowledge.” Complaining about how uneducated we are is a hardy perennial, but according to Jacoby “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.”

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she tells the Times, but they also don’t think it matters.

The Times illustrates this phenomenon with a reference to this cringe-inducing YouTube video that shows Kellie Pickler of American Idol fame on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” struggling with the question “Budapest is the capital of what European country?” She gets the correct answer from her 5th grade partner (the Republic is saved!), but not before saying on national TV before millions, “I thought Europe was a country.”