Don T Be Dumb Summary

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Recommended: The importance of Education

There is no doubt of how important education is in a free society. Articles like “America Skips School” by Benjamin R. Barber and “The Dumbest Generation? Don’t Be Dumb” by Sharon Begley and Jeneen Interlandi, discuss the education that younger generations are receiving, and its effectiveness. In a free society every individual should be able to combine their creativity with their resources to strengthen knowledge, which is where the importance of education comes in. Education is one of the many services that the market is able to offer. In our culture today, there is a greater importance on education, especially higher education. However, the question of what it means to have a higher education have arisen. Barber, Begley, and Interlandi, …show more content…

Both articles agree that it is all a consequence of the school systems, which are run by grown-ups. And yet, we keep on comparing grown-ups to teenagers. For example, “from evidence such as a decline in adult literacy (40 percent of high-school grads had it in 1992; only 31 percent did in 2003) and a rise in geographic cluelessness (47 percent of the grads in 1950 could name the largest lake in North America, compared with a 38 percent in 2002)” (Begley and Interlandi 1). So how is it that there is a concern with the kids education when they are being educated by experts and with people who they are being compared to in the different statistics? Only once in the article “The Dumbest Generation? Don’t Be Dumb” it is mentioned that kids are developing other strengths; “first, IQ scores in every country that measures them, including the United States, have been rising since the 1930s. Since the test measure not knowledge but pure thinking capacity-what cognitive scientists call fluid intelligence in that it can be applied to problems in any domain-” (2). Both articles do not hesitate to find someone or something that is at fault and fail to recognize that all the education systems are formed by grown-ups who are supposed to have a greater knowledge. The article written by Sharon Begley and Jeneen Interlandi, introduces a different approach about the matter but lacks research and enough information to construct a

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