Fighting the War on Stupidity

How dumb is your state?

I guess reality is how you spin it. Why else would the April 29 report that the U.S. high school graduation rate hit the 80% mark excite anyone? Progress is a good thing, but let’s be realistic–one of five students leaves school each year without a high school diploma. That translates to about 820,000 of the roughly 4.1 million students in high school. Each year the number of high school dropouts surpasses the entire population of five U.S. states. There are six states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, and South Carolina) in which the high school graduation rate is under 70% and it’s less than 60% in the Nation’s Capitol. I wish we’d focus on these figures instead.   Lyndon Johnson waged a war on poverty; I want to declare one on stupidity.

A high school diploma alone won’t prepare you much. Let’s get real. This is not the United States of the 1950s; you need a college degree to manage a McDonald’s or a Wal-Mart these days. Those with only a high school degree will end up working in dead end jobs at such establishments and those without a diploma will be lucky to get employment that good. Sure–some people will go into trades, or factory work. An infinitesimal number will defy odds and become very successful, but blue-collar America is analogous to the last passenger pigeon–all we can really do is conduct the postmortem. What future will Gen X have when it has less education than the Baby Boomers? Can you say, “Your pizza will be delivered in 20 minutes?”  

The national problem is obvious–there are simply too many undereducated Americans. Our 80% high school graduation places us far behind the usual suspects–Japan, Germany, South Korea, Israel, the United Kingdom, and all of Scandinavia (including Iceland)–but it also puts us behind Slovenia, Portugal, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. How will Americans compete in the global economy? I suppose the good news is that 68% of those that do get a high school diploma will enter college–roughly 2.2 million per year. The bad news is that just 1.3 million of them will obtain a bachelor’s degree within six years–a college drop out rate of about 40%. To put it in perspective, when graduation occurs this May, America will have half as many heroin users as newly minted college grads.

Each spring bright seniors ask me why demagogues, fear mongers, and sociopaths dominate political discourse, and why so many Americans believe ludicrous things. Among these: nearly a quarter of Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, 18% that he’s the Anti-Christ; 37% deny the reality of global warming, perhaps because 18% think Earth is the center of the universe; 28% still think Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, over a decade’s worth of contrary evidence notwithstanding; one-third of Texans believe that dinosaurs and human coexisted, presumably keeping good company with the 60% of Americans who think evolution is a hoax and the 51% that  thinks Fox News is unbiased. As my grandma used to say, that’s just crazy talk.

So what do I tell wide-eyed soon-to-graduates? That one of the keys to negotiating adult life is to realize that Americans hate it when they’re called “dumb.” They should avoid saying that, but realize that many American really are dumb–or at least woefully undereducated. I tell them that when they walk down the street, odds are that roughly six out of every ten people they see will be less educated than they. I also tell them to flaunt their smartness when job hunting­–in a tight job market there’s no reason for employers to hire the uneducated.

There are fruitful debates to be had about social problems and the root causes of under-education, but liberals simply need to change their yada-yada tune on this. I don’t want to sound heartless, but some stark truth is in order. We need to make high school kids realize there is no future if they drop out. Stay in school and we can talk about how much your life sucks. Stay in school and you’ve got a fighting chance of getting into college, getting out of your rut, and avoiding a life of stupidity.