I am stupid... knowingly

I graduated at the top of my high school class. Number one. But that didn’t make me feel particularly smart.

The people I’d learned about, whose work I’d read, were clearly better educated. They knew Latin, Greek and, usually, a modern language other than their own. They had to study far more than students were expected to in my day, and they went on to colleges where collegiality was just as important as learning.

Going down?
In the 1980s, the U.S. began to dumb down. Education was important in theory but, in practice, it was being under-funded. The bar for accomplishment was lowered, and the K-12 curriculum became more of a painful obligation in most politicians’ minds than a mandatory requisite for national growth and prosperity.

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