Arrested Mental and Spiritual Development

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Arrested Mental and Spiritual Development
by blanchedubois at 4/25/2011 12:38:57 AM

At present, only twenty-nine percent of Americans have basic reading and computing skills. One out of every twenty Americans lacks the ability to understand what is going on in the world or to develop an informed opinion for voting.

Arrested Mental and Spiritual Development
By
Otalp Setarcos

SNIP:
Most readers worldwide lack the ability to gain effectual understanding through reading, seeing, or hearing instructional material. They would be situated, in Bloom's taxonomy of understanding, at grade F (failing) level, since they're actually incapable of memorizing facts, let alone comprehending, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, or evaluating facts.

Note that the lowest level of understanding in Bloom's taxonomy constitutes memorization. Our present "culture of infantilism" defines intelligence--what it calls the intelligence quotient (IQ)--in terms of how much a person merely memorizes, not what he understands. This has created the "quiz-Kid" mental pattern: persons who are "smart" but not intelligent. The mental state of a growing number of people worldwide can best be characterized as "arrested development."

The Rejuveniles: Infantilism Is On the Rise:

"From childless fans of kiddie music to the grown-up readers of 'Harry Potter,' inner children are having fun all over. Whether they are buying cars marketed to consumers half their age, dressing in baby-doll fashions or bonding over games like Twister and kickball, a new breed of quasi adult is co-opting the culture of children as never before. Most have busy lives with adult responsibilities, respectable jobs and children of their own. They are not stunted adolescents. 2 They are something else: grown-ups who cultivate juvenile tastes in products and entertainment. Call them rejuveniles.

"Celebrated by market researchers and fretted over by social scientists, rejuveniles come in all ages but are mostly a product of the urban upper classes (free time and disposable income being essential in their lifestyle). Evidence of their presence is widespread. According to Nielsen Media research, more adults 18 to 49 watch the Cartoon Network than watch CNN. More than 35 million people have caught up with long-lost school pals on the Web site Classmates.com. ('There's something about signing on to Classmates.com that makes you feel 16 again,' the '60 Minutes II' correspondent Vicki Mabrey reported.) Fuzzy pajamas with attached feet come in adult sizes at Target, along with Scoobie Doo underpants. The average age of video game players is now 29, up from 18 in 1990, according to the Entertainment Software Association. Hello Kitty's cartoon face graces toasters. Sea Monkeys come in an executive set.

"Researchers at the MacArthur Foundation are studying 'adultolescents,' those 20- and 30-somethings who live at home and still depend on their parents for emotional and financial support.

"Some social scientists, however, see signs of a deeply troubling trend. That so many adults expend so much time and energy pursuing the thrills of youth just proves how significantly 'adulthood has lost its appeal,' said Frank Furendi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury in England. 'Adulthood has got nothing attractive about it anymore. That's actually quite sad.'

"Mr. Furendi began researching what he calls 'the self-conscious cultivation of immaturity' after spotting college students watching 'Teletubbies' in a university bar. The scene stuck in his mind, and he came to think of it as representative of a wave of infantilism sweeping Britain and beyond. What is happening, Mr. Furendi maintained, is a natural if extreme response to a media culture that equates being old with being square and being young with being relevant. 'Today, the way you demonstrate your worth is the extent to which you still go to rock concerts, you're still groovy, you're still a player,' he said."
[Christopher Noxon, "I Don't Want to Grow Up!" NYTimes, August 31, 2003]

This widespread disability in understanding--most accurately characterized as arrested development--derives from:
1. Egomania

A. Excessive love or
admiration of oneself

B. A psychological disorder
characterized by self-
obsession, lack of empathy,
and unconscious deficits
in self-esteem

2. Illiteracy:

A. The condition of being unable to read and write

B. The condition or quality of being ignorant or unknowledgeable in a particular subject or field: cultural illiteracy; scientific illiteracy

C. The inability to understand, even if capable of deciphering communications

D. The inability to draw out the larger, more comprehensive meanings in events and communications

"Cultural backwardness is rife in America, but nowhere so pervasively as in small cities and towns. Left to rot by corporations that have closed down plants and mines and moved on to more profitable pastures; ravaged by budget cuts in social programs and education—which have all but eliminated music and art from public schools—that ensure a stunted intellectual level; neglected and ignored by politicians and abandoned by the unions; as morally and spiritually isolated as some remote village in China; indeed, linked to the outside world principally through the stupidities of television (‘reality shows,’ cop shows, daytime talk shows, etc.) and the filth of right-wing talk radio—these towns offer very little. For many, especially the young people, life is bleak and without a future."
[David Walsh, "Abu Ghraib and the failure of American society," 10 June 2004]

Comments

camperpaul

4/25/2011 1:49:42 AM

Begin soapbox mode...

I take exception to a lot of this...

The Stanford-Binet IQ test is based on pure logic which cannot be memorized or taught; it is the way the brain functions.

I do agree - there is a big problem and that problem is the result of the "No kid left behind" policy of the pseudo-educational system.

End soapbox mode...

Life is the journey, not the destination.

blanchedubois

4/25/2011 3:10:03 AM

Some thirty million adults in the U.S. do not have the skills to perform even the most basic tasks such as adding numbers on a bank slip, identifying a place on a map, or reading directions for taking a medication. Eleven million Americans are totally illiterate in English. It's no accident that America's schools have slowly eroded and that the intelligence of the average American has become so debilitated. American learning has plummeted and public school performance has nose-dived ever since the middle of the twentieth century because it was planned that way. Vested, moneyed interests have constantly sought to demolish the American traditions of democracy, plotting to destroy the enlightening "diffusion of knowledge and the free exercise of reason." Their method of rule is not by "consent of the governed" or rational discourse, but by arbitrary dictate of a tyrant's fascistic tactics. Predictably, the very people who place American presidents, senators, and representatives in power, through the use of their multi-billion dollar fortunes, are the same moneyed interests that have deliberately destroyed American education. The Rockefellers, Fords, Morgans, Browns, Harrimans, Du Ponts, and other ruling families want obedient, efficient workers, not thinkers. As early as 1913, cabal leaders made it clear that they wanted American schools to produce compliant laborers, not "authors," "poets," or "men of letters." "In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply." [Rockefeller Foundation Director of Charity, Frederick Gates, 1913]

blanchedubois

4/25/2011 3:14:38 AM

Clearly, the rulers not only did not want to make "philosophers" of the working class, they wanted them trained so they would not even think for themselves. So they have deliberately devastated the American mind through: Funding universities and scholars that carry out the devastation of the American public education system in particular and American intelligence in general Developing programming (brainwashing) strategies using all media types, but especially television Imposing miseducation and brainwashing to destroy American citizens' ability to think for themselves Subjecting American public education to a series of failed experiments, from "look see" reading to the "new math" Redefining key concepts so that the public school students no longer understand the fundamentals of a democratic society Turning what is called "education" into nothing but training Deluding Americans--especially the young people--into mistaking technological savvy for intelligence

blanchedubois

4/25/2011 3:15:30 AM

"Yes, young Americans are energetic, ambitious, enterprising, and good, but their talents and interests and money thrust them not into books and ideas and history and civics, but into a whole other realm and other consciousness. A different social life and a different mental life have formed among them. Technology has bred it, but the result doesn't tally with the fulsome descriptions of digital empowerment, global awareness, and virtual communities. Instead of opening young American minds to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them. Young people have never been so intensely mindful of and present to one another, so enabled in adolescent contact. Teen images and songs, hot gossip and games, and youth-to-youth communications no longer limited by time or space wrap them up in a generational cocoon reaching all the way into their bedrooms. The autonomy has a cost: the more they attend to themselves, the less they remember the past and envision the future. They have all the advantages of modernity and democracy, but when the gifts of life lead to social joys, not intellectual labor, the minds of the young plateau at 18. The fonts of knowledge are everywhere, but the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, pictures, tunes, texts back and forth, living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are up to now." [Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation, 2007]

bcharming

5/25/2011 10:42:43 AM

I totally agree with you. The powers that be know that educated citizens are a threat. So they carefully control the education system. Using it to produce in effect zombies just smart enough to work for them. Increasing the size of their already huge bank accounts! While keeping the public blind to the truth with technology and the like. And people fall for this ploy so easily

rpm88

8/14/2011 5:07:43 AM

The public school system would be considered a joke if anything about it was actually funny. These days a good portion of the teachers do not know much about the world around them since they themselves were products of public schools. Now they do not teach anymore they only prepare the students for whatever the latest trend in testing is. How about we teach that actual information and when thee tests roll around, no matter what test it is, the information will already be firmly entrenched in the brain and the answer will be forthcoming no matter what. I just don't get the stupidity I am forced to deal with on a daily basis and it is not just people younger than me, there are people my age who think that it is cool to be stupid. Too bad that people are afraid to stand out amongst their family and friends, the world could be a better place, instead of a place that is rapidly circling the drain never to return.