January 4, 2006
Is America Getting Dumber? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:10 PM EST Here’s another thought about why Americans seem less well-educated than they used to. I don’t disagree with the points my fellow bloggers have made, but I think there may be one more element involved. Maybe it’s partly because we expect so many more of them to be educated. In 1900, 500,000 Americans made it to high school. High school enrollment increased tenfold over the next half century, and by 1980, three quarters of all students finished high school. Nowadays half of all high school graduates go on to college. There has been a vast democratization of education in America over the past century. The farther back you look, the more you see education as an exclusive privilege of a small elite group. Maybe we can’t educate all of many tens of millions quite as well as we once educated a few hundred thousand, and maybe when we look back on a more educated time, we’re also looking back at fewer people during that time. Look at it that way, and if you add up all the knowledge out there, there’s got to be a lot more today. It’s just that our expectations have exceeded our national accomplishment in education.
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