It’s hard to believe that stupidity could have so many advocates, but it does. The dictionary defines stupidity as “extreme dullness of perception or understanding; insensibility … a poor ability to understand or to profit from experience” (Dictionary.com). Most interesting, however, is that stupidity’s most vocal advocates are not themselves always stupid.
Stupidity is different from ignorance, which simply reflects a lack of knowledge or education. It’s difficult to understand how we could have ignorance in America, given the amount of money that we spend on education. Every child in the country – and increasingly those who sneak in illegally – is provided with a comprehensive education. (You’ll notice I didn’t call it a “free” education, because to the taxpayers it is anything but.)
In spite of our massive educational efforts, USA Today recently reported that only 30 percent of fourth- and eighth-graders nationwide are proficient in reading for their grade level. In math, 31 percent of fourth graders and 27 percent of eighth graders scored proficient (Nov. 14, 2003, 6A, “Tests find reading scores flat, but math improved). As bad as those results are, it gets worse. Eighth-grade blacks read just a few points above fourth-grade whites, and Hispanics are only a point or two above blacks.
If a private company was delivering this kind of result, do you think there is a single state attorney general who would not move to shut that company down as the massive consumer fraud that it is? And yet the administrators, teachers’ unions, school boards and employees are all portrayed as victims of tightfisted taxpayers!
But back to stupidity, which is “a poor ability to understand or profit from experience.” An article posted on the website Islamtoday.net says, “a people are known by the stories they tell; and when comes the time those stories cease to be told, so disappear those unfortunate people” (“Lord of the Rings: Christian Myth at Work,” by Ali Asadullah, Dec. 26, 2001). The reading and math report was dismal enough, but looking through the details, we also find that 11 percent of eighth-grade students get no coverage of American history from 1815 to 1865, 27 percent get no instruction from 1865 to 1945, and 48 percent are never taught about the period from 1945 to present. What kind of stories will they tell about America?
If we don’t teach our children about the past, how will they know where they came from? How will they know the characteristics of a failing society? How will they recognize certain roads as dead ends, because other societies have tried them and vanished? How will they create and maintain a successful society?
If we don’t share our vision of the future, our children will look to competing visions that may be mere reflections of past glory. The America that I know became what it is in large part because of the thrift, energy and intellect of its Puritan founders. Their lives were a direct outgrowth of their Christian faith. They passed the same traits and faith on to their children, and so on down the line. That is why it is commonly said that we are a Christian nation. It has less to do with our church attendance than with the values we bring to the workplace and the public square.
Today, a particularly noisy and loathsome coalition of Americans are busy trying to tear down all vestiges of Christianity from the public square. It is not “separation of church and state” over which they lust, however. It is their pet perversions, the ones that Christianity condemns. They imagine that with God gone from the public square, they will banish their most savage critic. They are wrong, of course, for that critic lives within us – but this they will not learn until the damage has been done. A stupid nation would allow them to proceed with their plans.
How not to think about Syria
Josh Hammer