Remembering when one graduated high school, in the year 2000, looking around and wondering why we all still looked like adolescents. It felt weird. Remembered attending high school graduation for elder cousin’s, long before, and thinking they looked like soldiers, like men and women.
But accepted, it was probably ‘perspectival’ (a word which the built-in dictionary of this phone refuses to accept). One was merely incapable of seeing their own advanced physical form, due to some perpetual ‘nowness’, or reflection defection—just can’t see it in oneself.
But later one went and looked and compared high school graduation photos of people from the 1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, even 1990’s, and compared and contrasted. And though there were obviously people endowed with eternal youth, the average face in the photos kept getting younger (on average). By the time the 2000’s came, the average high school graduate appeared, physically, to be in the 8th grade (all things considered).
Society had slowly moved to infantile dimensions. Kids were being coddled to the point of non-advancement, though maybe not intellectually (in terms of academic laws of advancement). Something wasn’t adding up.
The average person graduating high school with a common core of capacities believes they have succeeded, but have they? If we keep lowering the bar? Not simply based on test performance, but actually intellectual integration with human life.
And then it hit. One was the first generation to become victims of the ‘standardized testing’ curriculum. We weren’t quite there yet as a society, but soon (and thinking of one’s niece and nephew’s generation) all of academic life revolves around testing—not only to gauge achievement—but also to acquire funding.
As we slip deeper into this model of education, where kids (and now adults) are believers (academic religionists) in their own advancement based on multiple choice answers to preconcieved and easily studied answers, are we not simply getting dumber?
We can’t know. Because we’re getting dumber. Smarter at tests, maybe. But dumber at life.
This is interesting. Hofstadter would agree - anti-intellectualism isn’t just about not valuing ideas, it’s about performance. The performative aspect is what’s killing us.
I think the immigrant point cuts deeper though. We want the work without the people. Want their labor but resent their presence. That’s not just hypocrisy - it’s a fundamental refusal to engage with reality as it is.
We’ve outsourced both thinking and doing. Outsource thinking to algorithms, outsourcing doing to others. Then wonder why we’re hollow.
On the flip side - maybe there’s something to building things with your hands, even if it’s not work in the capitalist sense. Indie web, open source, making tools - that’s both thinking and doing at the same time.
What would restoring that look like?