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FOXNews.com - Dvorak: The Internet Is Making Us Dumber - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News
"Meanwhile, the public continues to read about what they already know. And they hang out only with like-minded people. There are huge cadres of people who are practically duplicates of each other. They all think alike, dress alike, and go to the same group-approved places."
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With the slow death of newspapers, this beehive-like behavior is only going to get worse. And schools are not helping; they tend to have a political agenda and seem to limit, not enhance, world perspective.
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I blame these three factors: the Internet; newspapers, for not acting responsibly and instead cheapening their product; and educational institutions. Schools do not teach kids how to use the Net responsibly. Kids need to be shown how to make it a useful resource rather than a source of disinformation and gossip.
What will the end result be of a nation of narrow thinkers? I do not know. We'll find out soon enough, and I suspect it won't be a good.
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
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Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual
By MARK BAUERLEIN -
That doesn't mean establishing affirmative action for conservative scholars
or encouraging greater market forces in education -- which violate conservative
values as much as they do liberal values. Rather, it calls for academics to
recognize that a one-party campus is bad for the intellectual health of
everyone. Groupthink is an anti-intellectual condition, ironically seductive in
that the more one feels at ease with compatriots, the more one's mind narrows.
The great liberal John Stuart Mill identified its insulating effect as a
failure of imagination: "They have never thrown themselves into the mental
condition of those who think differently from them." With adversaries so
few and opposing ideas so disposable, a reverse advantage sets in. The majority
expands its power throughout the institution, but its thinking grows routine
and parochial. The minority is excluded, but its thinking is tested and
toughened. Being the lone dissenter in a colloquy, one learns to acquire sure
facts, crisp arguments, and a thick skin.
But we can't open the university to conservative ideas and persons by
outside command. That would poison the atmosphere and jeopardize the ideals of
free inquiry. Leftist bias evolved within the protocols of academic practice
(though not without intimidation), and conservative challenges should evolve in
the same way. There are no administrative or professional reasons to bring
conservatism into academe, to be sure, but there are good intellectual and
social reasons for doing so. - 1 more annotations...
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