Susan Jacoby on Americans’ ‘Hostility to Knowledge’

Kellie Pickler may be the obvious mascot, but Susan Jacoby says American “hostility to knowledge” is not just confined to adorable blondes who think Europe is a country and “Hung[a]ry” is not. In her new book, The Age of American Unreason, she argues that a poor educational system and religious fundamentalism’s hatred of reason have helped turn many of us into isolationist dummies.

Does she have a point? We’ve been lamented the rotting of our intellect as long as I can remember, and I, too, sometimes feel like we are doomed to irrelevance when a random young American has never heard of Greece or asks if “Thigh-land is part of China.” It sure makes for snarky cocktail conversation! Like Jacoby’s anecdote about overhearing two well-dressed men in suits at a bar the day of the September 11 attacks. One of the men compared 9/11 to Pearl Harbor.

Jacoby told the New York Times:

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.”

Fair enough. But I’m hoping this young American might prove her wrong:

 

 

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