The year I graduated from high school, 1965, was also the year in which average SAT scores peaked. From then on, they declined. Not coincidentally, I believe, it was also when the “dumbing down” craze was inaugurated among educators and academics, in order to make a college education more “accessible” to minorities, women, and other groups considered disadvantaged. By lowering the bar, it was argued, more deserving people could get in, could enter the hallowed Halls of Ivy, and move up socially and economically in US society—thereby ending decades of deliberate discrimination that kept especially generations of African Americans locked into poverty and low-paying, dead-end jobs. This was also a time when automation was eliminating many low-skill factory jobs, thereby creating new technological unemployment. Last, the seemingly triumphant final success of the Civil Rights Movement in breaking down the legal barriers of segregation and discrimination, along with the rise of the New Left, meant that there was fertile social ground, especially among the young white and well-educated, to at last seriously address the “race problem” in American life. Militant demonstrations occurred on college campuses demanding Open Admissions for anyone who wanted to attend, a demanded echoed by black nationalist groups on campus from newly admitted African American students. Academic standards were seen as barriers to social and racial justice, not as necessary linchpins and gates to ensure a quality education.
Looking back sixty years later, we
see that what was also inaugurated was a horrible naïveté along with white
masochistic guilt, particularly among newly radicalized students and academics. This meant that, far from opening up academia,
“dumbing down” only debased the quality of education colleges offered, and
brought in large numbers of students not at all prepared for college academic
expectations. This, coupled with a
supposedly “hard-headed” businesslike “transactional” approach to education,
where education was valued not as an end in itself, but only as a means for
being credentialed to get a good-paying job, made it join naïvely with this “transactional”
approach, both of which in tandem played key roles in debasing the quality of
education, made education as an end in itself seem “worthless,” and fueled a
deeper anti-intellectualism and distrust of “educated elites” that debased the
whole of American society, especially when Trump came into prominence, or ever
since at least 2015. A debasement that
haunts us horribly today. Further, while
I don’t relish at all quoting or acknowledging conservative commentators, I
admit that sometimes they get it right more than does the left—a case of even a
blind squirrel finding an acorn sometimes!
(As a former co-worker of mine once put it.) So, I do have to acknowledge far right
commentator Joseph Starobin when he pointedly noted that US society had
degenerated from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial
English in college today. The same point
was made very recently (as I write, late July 2025) by Boston Globe’s
conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby in his column “Arguable,” where he noted
that a Massachusetts high school graduate in 1895 was expected to know more,
and did, in fact, know more, than a Massachusetts high school graduate
today. He pointedly notes that back then
an education was considered both a right (hence, public schools) and a valuable
end in itself, against both the onslaughts of the business-transactional right
and the anti-discriminatory left against such a supposed mere “nostrum.”
And yet—educational equality seems
further away today than it did sixty years ago, with many critics, and even rival
racial and ethnic minorities, claiming that “affirmative action” and “DEI” only
brought a bunch of unqualified African Americans onto college campuses, to the
detriment of both more “meritorious” racial and ethnic groups (notably Asians),
and even merit itself. This has even
fueled overt racism, such as Trump supporter Charlie Kirk’s comment that if he were
on an airplane, the only way he could ensure the pilot was competent was if he
was a (presumably straight) white male! Thus,
were “he” gay, transgender, female, African American, Latino, other dark-skinned
racial minority, “he” might be “unqualified” to pilot an aircraft, owing “his”
piloting to “his” being a DEI hire instead!
Thus has “dumbing down”
backfired. Rather than creating a more
racially inclusive society, it’s created a more racially divided society, as even
the whole concept of African American “merit” is under question.
As my old academic advisor Scott
Gordon, late Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Indiana
University-Bloomington, pointed out in his 1980 book, Welfare, Justice, and Freedom,
there’s an unavoidable contradiction between equality of opportunity and
equality as such, or as we and many African American militants put it, equal
results. For equality of opportunity
means there are winners and losers, winners and also-rans, some who make it to
the top and some who don’t. It’s like
the Super Bowl: no matter how evenly
matched the two teams are, at the end of the game there is only one winner, and
the other team is the loser. While
equality of opportunity is a prerequisite for equal results, equality of
opportunity does not mean equal results, certainly not in the short one—and no
amount of “revolutionary impatience” can change that. Certainly I, who wishes to eventually see
equal results, must concede, in terms of reality, they are still quite a ways
away, and that the ability of African Americans to attend college does not
ensure their success when they do.
Social, cultural, educational, economic, and other obstacles are still
in the way. (Which does not in any way
justify Trump’s open attack on the very notion of even trying to achieve racial
equality or even rough parity.) Further,
we are living in a society today that has grown tired of even trying to achieve
racial justice, to address even minimally the vast injustices done to black
Americans all the way back into slavery.
While I do not know what the solution is, I do know that the naïve left’s
“dumbing down” agenda it’s eagerly promoted sixty years ago and since only
created another problem, not any kind of solution whatsoever.
