© AP / Mikhail KlimentyevVladimir Putin attends a meeting in Moscow, Russia, November 27, 2023
"In the West, they are now practicing not only the policy of 'cancel culture', but also the actual abolition of liberal arts education," Putin told a gathering of the World Russian People's Council in Sochi.
"As a result, both [Western] culture and education are becoming primitive," he continued. "Many classical subjects are simply thrown out of Western curricula, replaced by some kind of gender and similar sciences - pseudosciences, of course."
The phenomenon highlighted by Putin has also been extensively condemned by Western conservatives, who have decried attempts by left-wing academics to cancel the study of ancient Greece and Rome over the so-called "whiteness" of these ancient societies, and to insert transgender ideology into the fields of medicine, archaeology, and psychotherapy, among countless other examples.
Explaining that education influences culture, Putin recommended that instead of following these Western trends, Russians should "learn from our ancestors, who both in traditional and avant-garde art, set an example for the whole world."
"I am convinced that the country's sovereignty and the strengthening of its role in the world are impossible without the flourishing of its original culture," he declared.
As "woke" ideology proliferated on American college campuses in recent years, the quality of students being admitted to these institutions has appeared to decline. Last month, the creators of the ACT college admissions test revealed that scores on the ubiquitous entry exam had fallen to a three-decade low. Several months earlier, a study by Northwestern University and the University of Oregon found that, for the first time in nearly 100 years, the average IQ scores of college-aged Americans were declining. The scientists behind the study attributed the dip to "a change of quality or content of education."
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Best of the Web: The cult of ignorance in the United States: Anti-intellectualism and the "dumbing down" of America
There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment,........ and now, we see the consequences of an elite plan that actually began over 100 years ago, as an effort to create compliant, uncritical, unthinking citizens, which, having succeeded brilliantly, then dismissed them contemptuously as "Useless Eaters" to be culled with gene-modification vaccines. Even the polite and soft-spoken Putin feels he has to point out, according to the present article, that people in the West are all functional morons. And our politicians are the stupidest of the lot. Two years ago Putin said:
SOTT Focus:Putin Warns Wokeness is Destroying West: "It Happened in Russia 100 Years Ago, it's Evil, and it Destroys Values"
Russian President Vladimir Putin slammed during a speech on Thursday the far-left woke ideology that he said is causing societal ills throughout the Western world, saying that it is no different...But our Jewish media mentions not a whisper, and stupidity, greed, selfishness, violence, corruption, lawlessness, triviality, fear, anxiety, hedonism, and lack of meaning in our lives, grows like a malignant cancer.
Charlotte Iserbyt, a senior policy advisor in the Dept of Education under Reagan, wrote the book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America which a summary can be found as a pdf here, [Link]
There are interviews with each of them online.
There are the PISA rankings that rank countries in reading, math and science. Here is a link to the 2018 rankings. Note that the USA is 25th in the combined scores, and the USA spends the most on education. Where does the money go? Indoctrination. [Link] Now you understand what "dumbing down" means.
Who is at the top? China and other Asian countries.
What this does is suppress creativity, which is a faculty that demands imagination - the power to imagine a different way of solving a problem, satisfying a need, or detecting when you are being lied to or manipulated. Every understanding, up to and including relativity and quantum mechanics, and every technology that has been invented in the last 250 years, required someone to imagine it first. The American Revolution, which has spread its ideas to every country in the world, required the rebels to imagine the possibility that populations could govern themselves. Now, imagination is dying out all around us . That is the principal danger facing the human race and its future progress. We may refine the technologies we already have, but we will invent nothing radically new.
And that is China's Achilles heel - its social conformity and suppression of dissent and individuality. And if the present trends continue, America too will cease inventing new technologies.
But curiously, many surrounding cultures like Korea and Japan have similiar attitudes and ideas of state vs. individuum. Albeit Korea had been a Chinese vassal state for centuries ...
Now Marvel movies present the shallowest of human being emotions and thinking as if it were meaningful.
The more the Western population grows lately (the last 500 years), the worse and the more gruesome are getting their wars.
I suppose that is the difference between nation state and civilisational states - with China, Russia and Iran as examples for the latter.
Which does not at all mean I'd like to live in China ...