Just as a reminder, it is worth pointing out that the Stupidification of America is taking place on our college campuses as well as in our grade schools. A guest blogger at Bookworm Room describes a rather dispiriting conversation she had with a fellow parishioner:
Where it goes wrong – by guest blogger Danny Lemieux
I spoke with a fellow parishioner today about our children. This well-meaning, socially aware good fellow (an attorney) was extolling how well his son was progressing in his Ivy League undergraduate education. And, I asked, what was he studying? Environmental sciences. Ah, I said…that’s an interesting and certainly timely field of study: had he been of a technical or scientific bent in high school? Not really. Did he enjoy studying the sciences? Not really. Was he taking any scientific courses, like physics, biology or chemistry? Not really. In fact, he really wasn’t very interested in “hard” sciences at all and did not plan on studying any of them. So…what did he plan to do with an “environmental sciences” degree? Go to law school. He wanted to make policy, you understand. He was going to make the world a better place.
So, in an age where everything involving the environment demands a basic scientific knowledge, whether it be understanding the engineering challenges of alternative energy; the underlying geophysics, chemistry and biology of climate change; or the physics, engineering and biology needed to address the Gulf oil spill disaster, the term “environmental sciences” has now been degraded at the Ivy League level to a hack policy-making discipline where know-nothings can expound their ideologies free from the tyranny of facts. [Emphasis mine- SW] It is, in fact, the divorce of science and reason from sound environmental management. There was a time when “environmental science” was a noble field…an applied science that drew from many hard disciplines. No more, apparently.
If we are left to wonder why the government is so absolutely inept at dealing with real-life disasters, perhaps it is because “policy” has become politics divorced from material reality.
The relation of the "nonsensification" of science to Glenn Reynold's article over the weekend, Higher education's bubble is about to burst, is compelling. The bubble cannot burst soon enough; our future depends on re-acquiring the capacity to deal with the reality that exists rather than the more facile one imagined by our elites.
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