A review by rdebner
The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby

4.0

Jacoby does a fine job of tracing U.S. intellectual history as a means to explaining where we are now. The "dumbing down" of American culture and education is not news, but I think that Jacoby's framing of that end result is. This is not to say that I always agree with her. As much as I feel the pull to "culture conservation" (which does raise the question "Whose culture?"), it did gall me somewhat that Jacoby dismisses multiculturalism and the gains to be had from reading from a broader canon. She dismisses many fields of area or cultural studies (women's studies, African-American studies, etc.) as being somewhat unworthy of being disciplines of study. However, it serves her argument -- that people know so little of the basics (U.S. history, the fundamentals of science and math, how our government functions) because education has gone off in so many different directions and been hindered by teaching to the test, which is necessitated by the current culture of performance-based education.

She also does a fine job in outlining how conservatives have essentially outmaneuvered liberals in the culture wars and how "intellectual" has once again become a dirty word. I found myself nodding along at times, and I learned a lot. This book would be a fine companion, I think, to George Lakoff's work.