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Susan Jacoby on The Age of American Unreason

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Liberal view Avatar
Liberal view
Posts: 1
Posted: 06.13.08, 02:29 PM
Interesting speech. America is in trouble, no doubt and with right wing talking heads dumbing down even more the average American, the future is indeed hard.
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bapyou Avatar
bapyou
Posts: 76
Posted: 07.28.08, 01:32 AM
Excellent presentation. Jacoby makes many valuable points.

I live without a television. I read constantly in order to fill my head with useless information with which I torture my students. Got that students?
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pgepps Avatar
pgepps
Posts: 2
Posted: 08.11.08, 12:58 AM
Jacoby's thinly veiled restatement of Hofstadter continues his tradition of identifying "intellectual" with "progressive" and thus conflating anti-intellectualism of all kinds with conservatism of all kinds. In this talk, she fails to distinguish concerns about modes of discourse (for example, text versus hypertext) from mere nostalgia (for handwritten letters) from programmatic liberalism (for example, calls for nationalized education). On this last point, especially, she is risibly inconsistent.

Her appeals to fears of immigrants outnumbering native Americans among New York valedictorians belie her concerns for a more coherent discourse. She ignores, for example, the well-studied differences in immigrants and second-language learners (for example, evidence that studying multiple languages has benefits for education across all fields). The idea that the education system in, say, Japan, is better than education available in the States (let's not say "the school system," as this would be an unfair comparison) is not going to hold up to an experience teaching in them; the idea that such a claim could be validated by a head-count is ridiculous.
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