I quote below from an unrecalled source-
"A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science Foundation.
The survey of 2,200 people in the United States was conducted by the NSF in 2012 and released on Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
To the question "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth," 26 percent of those surveyed answered incorrectly.
In the same survey, just 39 percent answered correctly (true) that "The universe began with a huge explosion" and only 48 percent said "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals."
Add to this the number of our fellow citizens that believe that the Loch Ness monster (which does not actually exist) proves that cowboys could have ridden dinosaurs. This makes me sure that my feeling that we are getting stupid as a nation is correct.
I blame this on glowing screens. First came television, which early in its history was touted as a wonderful educational tool. It turned out to be a real stack of crap, a thoughtless void that deadens the mind. Then we got the internet, touted in much the same way. It too turned out to be a mostly useless pile of garbage, the most popular selections being god and pornography, neither of which do much to improve one's thinking.
Thinking is not really hard, but since, for the most part, we don't have to, we don't. Thus we become stupider day by day.
Well, goodness, where to start. Although I acknowledge the rotting effects of screen time, I have found in my research an additional explanation for the march of stupidity:
ReplyDelete"In an obscure oddity entitled "The Monster of Lake Lametrie" by Wardon Allan Curtis, published in 1899, a man's brain is transplanted into the skull of a surviving Elasmosaurus living in a remote mountain lake in Wyoming.
However the human brain lodged in the elasmosaur steadily degenerates. In the conclusion the elasmosaur is killed by U.S. infantrymen who are shocked at the sight of an insanely laughing monster."
This wisdom comes from a source that you must explore if you wish to learn where and when cowboys actually did ride dinosaurs, just as Sarah Palin said:
http://www.dinosaurcentral.com/wild_west_dinosaurs.php