Because I Said So

If you want, watch a little of this:



The point, supposedly, is that American kids are dumb. However, the journalism on this piece is incredibly bad, and facts are rarely backed up. Watching this video makes me think of the kid who takes a video camera to school and video tapes all the people he knows are morons and then says, "See, Mom and Dad? My grades are bad because everyone here dumb."

The problem here isn't the problem of the documentary and whether or not it's true.

Rather, it's the media assumption. Why are American kids dumb? Well, I don't know - the news and Jay Leno say so. Oh, then it must be true. How do we know foreign students are smarter? Because polls on the news tell us so. We don't question from whom or where the facts come from because we are raised to assume that the media has our best intentions in mind.

But, the problem is this: the American news media is extremely black and white. We're either winning or we're losing. It's hard to paint a sexy story where American kids are, eh, doing alright.

If we were ranked number one, we could have a great story with ticker tape and banners and big graphics saying, "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! We're the smartest! Suck it, Luxemberg!"

But how do you do a story about America being ranked fifth? Or ninth? You can't, really. Because that's just a bare fact.

So what you do is you take the fact that we're behind someone, and you make it a race.

Then it becomes, hysterical: "Oh Jesus Lord of All 6000 Years of Earth History! It's all over! We're not first anymore! We're last! Not first means last! American kids are dumb! Just visit a special ed class and you'll see that teachers can't keep their students under control!"

And then ever politician goes, "Well, Jesus. Since Katie Couric says kids are dumb, that must mean kids are dumb. How could she possibly benefit by sensationalizing a relatively mundane story?"

That's when teachers begin to be forced to test their students to make sure that they're testing at the right level of testing. Meanwhile, practical skills - the reason you learn math in high school - is thrown out the door so you can know what time a train leaves Chicago.

This fosters boredom in the students and rather than being conceptually dumber because they don't know all the capitals of all the states, they become pragmatically dumber because they can't figure out how to pay their taxes correctly or write a cover letter for a job.

But fuck it, hey, whatever. A story's a story.