AFTER MANY YEARS OF STUDYING PEOPLE I HAVE become intrigued, as have many others, by how a species named for its intelligence (Homo sapiens: wise or knowing man) can sometimes be so stupid. Depending on how you look at it, humans are either marvelously intelligent or amazingly stupid.
We build great cities in the desert, cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix. Then we waste and pollute the desert’s already short supply of water. We pour concrete on the ground and spew carbon into the air to make the heat of the desert ever hotter.
We wage vast public health campaigns to save poor people across the world from infectious diseases. Then we kill lots of them in endless wars.
We know how to make some people richer than whole countries, people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and six members of the Wal-Mart Walton family. Then we leave whole countries to starve.
In the United States, many people take the moral high ground on abortion and the sanctity of human life. Then they let a great many children and adults suffer or die in the United States because they have no health care and across the world because they have nothing to eat.
We use our financial genius and newly minted MBAs to create amazingly complex new financial instruments like derivatives and credit default swaps. Then we use them as financial weapons of mass destruction and devastate the global economy. We go on to reward those who brought on this vast destruction with bailouts and bonuses rather than punish them with jail terms.
We spend over two hundred years creating a vibrant two-party system capable of solving problems like going to the moon. Then we mire our politics in ideological and cultural debates just at the time when we face major global economic, environmental, and civilizational problems that could bring on Armageddon, problems that demand pragmatic, not ideological, solutions.
We create military technology that is the envy of the world and capable of great “shock and awe.” Then we manage to wage two massively expensive and not all that successful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and go on to decry our massive federal deficit.
We create marvelous new digital media that bring people more information about and more perspectives on the world than ever. Then people customize their media to the point where they live in filter bubbles and echo chambers where they never need hear anything they don’t already agree with.
We discover the magic of how to turn plants into fuel (biofuel). But then, in a world where lots of people are starving, we actually make fuel out of food like corn, raise the price of food, and starve the poor yet more, which is all a bit like Midas turning food into gold. Perhaps we will be smart enough eventually to make fuel out of fungus rather than corn.
Humans have, of course, always been really smart and they have always been really stupid. Early human groups learned to cut down trees and hunt animals and then they sometimes cut and hunted the trees, animals, and themselves into extinction. After all, if the Native Americans had not killed off all the New World horses, they would not have been easy prey for the Spaniards on their Old World horses.
But the problem of us humans being a dumb smart species today is different: our human intelligence has now created a highly complex, fast-changing, and very risky world. The cost of mistakes in this world is now often way too high for individuals and whole societies to bear. In a fast-changing global world replete with complex interacting systems, human actions can bring on all sorts of disastrous unintended consequences. Viruses take rides on jets along with humans; a new Wall Street financial product wipes out economies throughout the world; jobs float to the lowest cost centers in the world, shuttering whole towns and cities in the United States; economic collapse and global warming send hordes of poor immigrants across the globe.
In a developed country like the United States, where inequality is high and there are a great many poorly paid service jobs, but not all that many highly rewarded “knowledge production” jobs, people face a wealth of high-risk decisions. What is worth knowing? What skills are needed for a fast-changing world? Does real education happen in school or out of it? How much of a child’s fate is already determined by what has happened at home before school? How can one prepare for massive and unpredictable changes in the world? How can we keep the trains of our polarized politics, vast worldwide disparities in health and wealth, massive flows of money crisscrossing the globe as mere numbers in computers, and out-of-control environmental problems from running off the cliff?
As developed countries like the United States and emerging economies like China and India use up and pollute the world’s resources, how will they face the massive flows of immigrants and worldwide wars created by shortages of water, food, and human dignity? How will developing countries ever enter the modern global economy when resources are scarce, corruption is rampant, and the developed world is awash with deficits and ideological conflicts?
Where is new thinking going to come from in a world polarized by ideology, religious conflicts, and vast degrees of inequality? We humans today have the best tools we have ever had—thanks to technology, digital media, and social media—to be smart. But these tools will not make us smarter all by themselves. Indeed, in many ways today, they are making us dumber. We need to change who we are as humans. We need to respect Mother Nature. We need to find the seeking of evidence as sexy as the trading of ideology. We need to innovate before it is too late. We need to make more people count and let more people participate.
But in this book I am not primarily interested in the fate of society and the world. That fate is too big to think about all at once. I am primarily interested in my fate and the fate of my children. I am primarily interested in your fate and the fate of your children. This is not a book about policy and statistics. It is a book about us, about you and me. It is a book about why it might be important for us to save ourselves from our own stupidity. It is a book about what sorts of creatures we humans are and how we can become better ones.
There are a lot of books today about how the human mind—designed, as it was, in our long human history for small bands of hunters and gatherers—is not well suited for the modern world. We are prone to all sorts of mental errors that can do us great harm in our modern lives.
There are lots of books today about the rising inequality in terms of wealth and health in the United States and across the globe. There is now solid evidence that too much inequality in society makes everyone—not just poor people—sicker in mind and body than they need to be.
There are lots of books today about the many crises that confront our schools and institutions of higher learning. Education at every level is expensive and it is grade inflated and dumbed down. Too often the status of a school or college counts more than what is being learned. Our colleges and universities today are entrepreneurial centers rather than institutions of higher learning.
There are lots of books today about how ideology trumps evidence in the United States and in countries across the globe where fundamentalisms of various sorts are rampant. Americans, by and large, do not seek careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), but plenty of Chinese and Indians do.
There are lots of books today about how technology is changing the nature of work and institutions. Technology has made it easy to off-shore many high-level and low-level jobs. Service work has become rampant in developed countries. Unions are disappearing, along with good wages and benefits. At the same time, thanks to the Internet and other digital media, amateurs are competing with experts to produce knowledge, science, media, ads, and entertainment. Institutions and even rulers are being challenged by emergent forms of organization made possible by digital and social media.
There are lots of books today about the decline of civic participation and the ignorance of young people regarding politics and political institutions. At the same time, there are lots of books about the great increase in participation in interest-driven or cause-driven groups made possible by the Internet and social media.
This book is about all these problems and issues. But it is more about what they all have to do with each other than it is about any one of them alone.
This book is about what it means to be smart and to be a fully awake participant in our high-risk global world in the twenty-first century. It is about what parents ought to do to forestall their children becoming victims in that high-risk world. The book is about how to think about the future before we humans don’t have one. We need to save our children and ourselves from the sorts of human stupidity to which we are all prone, but that are now way too dangerous to indulge in. To have a future we need to start exercising our smart side more, a side that today’s schools, colleges, and media have too often put to sleep.
Video gamers have a term—“spoiler”—for something in a game review that will spoil a surprise that players could have discovered for themselves. The following is a spoiler: this is a stealth book about education.
I have spent my now long career doing two different things. One is linguistics and the other is education. Sometimes these interests have come together and sometimes they haven’t. In education I have been part of our vast country-wide debates on school reform and on how we can close the equity gaps in literacy and school knowledge between richer and poorer children. These debates have taken some new turns with the proliferation of new digital technologies, but have nonetheless now gone on for a long time without much manifest improvement in schools or equity.
In fact, many of our schools have now become skill-and-drill test-prep academies, and many of our colleges have become social camps for credentials, beer, and warm bodies, not knowledge. And yet, the key place where all the problems I mentioned above—about which there are lots of books but not many solutions—intersect is in the question of what constitutes a real education for twenty-first-century citizens.
This is not a question about small class sizes and small schools, school budgets, best practices, accountability, technology in the classroom, or schools and universities as job preparation. It is a question about what would constitute a proper education for a person who wants to be a producer and not just a consumer, a participant and not just a spectator, an agent and not a victim in a world full of ideology, risk, fear, and uncertainty. What sort of education could—what would it mean for an education to—make us humans smart enough to solve our problems and save ourselves from our own stupidity?
Why a stealth book about education? Why stealth here? Because I am now convinced that we cannot improve our society by more talk about schools and school reform, but only by talk about what it means to be smart in the twenty-first century. I am convinced that we cannot improve our schools and colleges by more talk about practices and policies, but only by talk about what it means to be smart in the twenty-first century and what schools and colleges have to do with this question. While I will certainly demonstrate in the course of this book a good many ways in which we humans can be stupid, in the end I will argue that when we make people count and let them participate, they can be very smart indeed.
When I say this book is about education, I do not mean schools and colleges as they are. Education of the sort most people get in school and college can just as easily make people dumber as smarter. For a great many Americans, gaining more knowledge about science tends to make them even more dismissive of evidence than less well-educated people, especially if the evidence goes against their politics, ideology, or financial interests. While many educational dollars have been spent on getting American kids to learn more “STEM”—so that we can compete with the Chinese and the Indians in a global economy, it is said—it does not appear that such learning, in and of itself, leads to any respect for evidence or arguments founded on evidence.
No, by education I mean what a twenty-first-century human being ought to learn and know and be able to do in order to make a better life, a better society, and a better world before it is too late. A good deal of this education will not go on in schools and colleges in any case, and even less if schools and colleges do not radically change their paradigms.
I will talk a lot about what makes humans stupid before I get to what can make them smart. When I get to being smart rather than stupid, I will discuss digital tools. But right at the start, I want to warn that digital tools are no salvation. They can make things worse just as easily as they can make things better. They are great tools with which to become dumber just as they are great tools with which to become smarter. It all depends on how they are used. And key to their good use is that they be subordinated to ways of connecting humans for rich learning and that they serve as tools human learners own and operate and do not simply serve. Video games and social media will not make us smarter by themselves any more than books have.
This book will deal with people and institutions getting smarter and more humane in the context of growing inequality in the United States and across the world. We have always had gaps in literacy and other forms of learning between poorer and richer kids and between some minorities and the majority population. Today the gap between different classes—between richer and poorer kids—is actually larger than the well-studied black-white gap. Class is taking front stage in the United States, something that makes many Americans uncomfortable. Digital media are not making these gaps close; if anything, they are widening the gaps, especially in regard to so-called twenty-first-century skills (like innovation, system thinking, design, technical learning, and using technology for production). Inequality is at an all-time high. The evidence is replete that such high levels of inequality are bad for everyone in a society, rich or poor, in many different ways, including their health, levels of anxiety, and overall well-being.
We live in an era of anti-education. We focus on skill-and-drill, tests and accountability, and higher education as a marker of status (elite colleges) or mere job training (lesser colleges). We have forgotten education as a force for equality in the sense of making everyone count and enabling everyone to fully participate in our society. We have forgotten education as a force for drawing out of each of us our best selves in the service of an intellectually and morally good life and good society.
In the spirit of full disclosure, let me say something about my politics before we move any further. I discuss in Chapter 16 what constitutes, for me, a true conservative and liberal. True conservatives want to be cautious and incremental in the face of complex problems for fear that large changes may have bad unintended consequences. They are humble about how much better we can make an imperfect world through large-scale social engineering. True liberals see change as redesigning systems and practices that have become dangerously outdated or unfair. They do not want to “tinker” while people suffer. They are more optimistic than conservatives that we can improve our imperfect world in large ways.
Neither side is “right.” These two poles are the crucial foundation for political debate and civil society. We need to save ourselves from both the unintended consequences of the arrogance of optimism and the missed opportunities of the humility of pessimism. We do this by reasoned debate, honest assessment of how good or bad, fair or unfair, things are, and intelligent voting. Many of us, in these terms, are conservatives on some issues and liberals on others. I certainly am.
Some of my examples of stupidity will strike readers as critical of conservatives. They are no such thing. Denying realities—like the reality of global warming, the possibility of rape leading to pregnancy, or that Christ did not champion wealth—is not conservative. It is just stupid. Debating what to do about global warming—how incremental or large-scale our response ought to be—is intelligent political debate.
I have lived my life in the academy. I am well aware that some so-called academic liberals believe stupid things like all reality is “discourse,” truth is relative, and science is an elitist conspiracy. Such views are not liberal, they are just stupid. However, I admit that I use examples in this book that I think are impactful today on our current society and politics. Some of these are things people who claim to be conservatives say, but such people are not, in my terms, true conservatives. By and large the sort of academic “liberal” stupidity I have just mentioned has little real impact on the wider world outside the academy.
NOTE: References for claims made in this and the rest of the chapters appear at the end of the book, grouped by chapter, so as not to clutter the text with citations that tend to break up fluid reading.