Goolture, or The Twilight of Culture

Twenty years ago, a woman complained to me about her eleven year old daughter's teacher:

"Imagine, she was upset with T. [the woman's daughter] because she had never heard about Michelangelo... I mean... Did you know about Michelangelo when you were eleven years old?"

(I don't remember what I told her - probably the truth, for the truth never really hurts - but I can tell you: When I was eleven years old, I was able to name and visually recognise at least two of Michelangelo's sculptural works.)

Ten years ago, a young woman (barely three years younger than myself) - supposedly a film fan, mind you - replied: "Oh, I know nothing about that, that was waaaay before my time...!" when asked whether she liked Greta Garbo.

A few months ago, I saw a news item purporting that some high school students (in the USA, I believe) thought Adolf Hitler was a football coach.
(I hope they got the national team right, if nothing else.)

And today, as I visited one of my favourite websites I saw this entry:

In 1793, two years after publishing his translation of Homer, William Cowper received this letter from 12-year-old Thomas Hayley, pointing out its defects:

Read the rest of it here.


Of course, the likes of young Master Thomas Hayley were exceptional even in those times.
But there is little doubt that general education has fallen to appallingly low levels in the past few decades, while functional illiteracy seems to be rampant.
(About functional illiteracy being a social construct, read here. Some, in fact, speak of three forms of illiteracy: functional, cultural and moral.)

And what's even more mind-boggling, it has done so in an age when there is an unprecedented variety and accessibility of learning resources.

A paradox?

No, not really.
There is in the human being a certain tendency towards "economy" that makes us prefer the path of least resistance. And when the paths are smoothed out and made widely available, as they are now, you get a highway to social, cultural, yes, even moral entropy.

In fact, it could be argued that the very resources that were supposed to facilitate learning and make it accessible as never before (such as Wikipedia and, most notably, Google) in fact contribute to the long-term downfall of education and culture - or, as the vox populi likes to say, to the "dumbing down" of the world.

You see, culture (as a catalyst for progress) cannot thrive on mediocrity - and we live in the empire of mediocrity, fuelled by the likes of Wikipedia (as noble-minded as its original purpose was), not to mention the ever-proliferating forums on all sorts of subjects where everyone is afforded a say.
(Everyone having a say is not the problem, of course: the problem is that such forums tend to level out the contributions of each of the participants, regardless of their age or level of education. "Popular" contributors are no longer those who really know the most about any given subject, but those whose discourse - I have to call it by some name - sounds the most appealing to most of the other forum participants.
Even formerly high-brow news outlets, such as major newspapers (not tabloids), are fuelling this phenomenon, by having succumbed to the recent frenzy of "empowerment" of the disgruntled and the semi-literate by means of rating other people's comments; now, even their readers can rate other people's written thoughts, and can do so disregarding their objective quality or the lack thereof.)

And so, we have arrived to a culture where trivial and error-ridden books on all sorts of "codes" can become best-sellers, and grammar is considered an obsolete hindrance to "expression".

Is this what the Thomas Hayleys of yesteryear went to school for and struggled through their Latin, English, mathematics, ancient Greek, solfeggio, physics, French lessons for?

Is this what Giordano Bruno was burnt for? 

Is this what women - not only Elena Cornaro but many other, less lucky women - and later people of "undesirable" skin colour or social condition had to endure public shame and threats for, when they wanted to access higher learning?

Oh right. Who cares. That was before our time.