Oh well, the post below was written when I was particularly annoyed, and I got some harsh comments on it.
I deserved it, maybe.
The text won’t be deleted because I don’t like deleting stuff. I’ll leave it there, and I think that although I may be mistaken in the general idea, I still maintain some of the things I wrote before: I’m not sure if intelligent, cultured people are valued in the US.
I think we (in the US, Europe, Brazil…) need more smart role models, people who study, who have an interest in things.
And I definitely don’t think the name of the shooter should have been released.
And now I’m going to sleep, but I will go back to this topic. Someday.
Role models are an extremely important topic.
Old post:
“They identified the NIU gunman, who killed 5 people and then himself. Now the guy has a name and a history. I think the names of these people shouldn’t be published, because it only encourages other crazy guys to do the same and be famous as well. But this is not what pissed me off when reading the news.
The US are not a country famous for encouraging education or valuing intelligence (you can fill this space with a long analysis of high school popular and geek types, and the following bla bla bla). And then everytime some crazy bloke goes out shooting people for no reason everybody who knew him gets together to say how smart and brilliant he was.
Nice. Now kids that are smart and brilliant are a step closer to being treated like potential gunmen. And all this reinforces the old association of intelligence and insanity, making it more and more difficult grow up as anything above the Britney Spears standard of cleverness.
(by the way, Britney Spears is also crazy, but stupid. But her “friends” apparently don’t associate these characteristics.)
And then the science groups complain that few young people show interest in science careers. Who can blame then for not wanting to be labeled intelligent, which is a step towards genius, and then closer to crazy?”
Last updated:
Tuesday, 19 Feb
2008 - 15:00 GMT
“The US are not a country famous for encouraging education or valuing intelligence.” Wow. That’s a little harsh, don’t you think? Having attended school on two continents, Russia and the US, I can assure you that both American and European schools suffer from insufferable “popular” girls and boys. How they affect the quality of education is not clear to me. I think it’s human nature to stratify even mini-societies in such a manner.
Secondly, I am not sure who in the US (or anywhere else in the world) could ever confuse an intelligent graduate student with someone clearly disturbed and likely psychologically and emotionally unwell.
“everytime some crazy bloke goes out shooting people for no reason everybody who knew him gets together to say how smart and brilliant he was.”
Is that true? I don’t remember that happening with the VT shootings, and certainly not as far back as Columbine. When I hear them saying how brilliant he was, I think they are just expressing their shock that someone who (apparently) had things going pretty well would do this. The media typically tries to scapegoat a particular behavior when these shootings occur (a common example is video games), but this time they don’t seem to be jumping to conclusions very quickly… Or maybe they are just exercising some restraint until more information is available.
“Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence.”
— Henrik Tikkanen
Richard – Do acts of massive and random violence fall under the category of great madness? Are they driven by significant intelligence? Or is it cowardice? This could go on.
Mm, indeed. I was being rather tongue-in-cheek (me, officer? surely not).
For what it’s worth Anna, I agree with your (and Jordan’s) assessment of this rather bizarre hypothesis.
Umph, sorry. I was in too much of a huff to note the humor (which upon reassessment is clearly present). My bad.
Well Anna, I don’t live in the US, but I don’t feel like they value cultured people or those who are curious about the world. These people are always stereotyped. Or am I so wrong about that?
I think so, Barbara. It’s fashionable to mock Americans as being uncultured yobbos (God knows, I’m guilty of that), but the two Americans I currently know reasonably well shame me with their ‘culture’, breeding and outlook on life.
But then again, I’m in Australia, where the bar is much, much lower. . .
Barbara, first off, I am not sure what you mean by saying that curious people are stereotyped. Stereotyped how?
Secondly, I don’t see how it is possible to characterize an entire (and gigantic) nation full of people with one sweeping generalization, especially one that inflammatory. Sure, there are places and people in the US that have different value systems, ones that I cannot pretend to apply to my own life. Those places however, are geographically, psychologically, and intellectually very far from me, my life, and the people I spend it with. The country is big and filled with many different kinds of people, giving everyone the opportunity to make their own life exactly what they want. Frankly, I don’t see how you can seriously think that the entire country is full of bumbling fools. That’s just statistically improbable.
Besides, basing your judgment of US society on poor Britney Spears and her blighted life seems short sighted. As far as I can tell, the paparazzi culture in the UK is perhaps even better developed than the one in the US, which suggests to me that the appetites for trashy news are comparable in the two countries.
I was educated in the US. Compared to my British colleagues, I seem to have been exposed to a lot more breadth of study—because of distribution rules at university, about two thirds of my credits, as a science degree student, had to come from the humanities and social sciences. Hence, I had Ancient Greek, ethnomusicology, philology, Spanish, paleontology, psychology, English lit, history and the like. In one of our biology courses, we had a British professor who did not know the origin of the word ‘chimaera’. I think the US education system is excellent, and is widely regarded as such.
But you, Jen, are superhuman. Hardly an archetype.
;)
I put off commenting on this for a while, and now I see I am not the only one that took prompt notice of this post.
I am a student at Virginia Tech, and was one last year during which a person (who was ‘intelligent’) got a hold of a few guns (because of some very short-sighted and fervently protected gun laws), killed 32 people at a university—a place in the U.S. where learning is in fact encouraged and actually, gasp, valued—because he was insane.
Not one person has ever associated that kind of madness with actual intelligence. Not one student has been discouraged from learning (indirectly or not) by the behavior of these two insane people and not one bright student will be considered in the same light as them just for being ‘smart.’ And no one has ever been stereotyped as a killer for being curious about the world.
If your opinion is that us dumb ol’ Americans will get dumber to avoid being stereotyped as intelligent, to further avoid being associated with madmen, you are entitled to that, but I happen to very strongly disagree. There is indeed plenty to say about Americans, but you should give us a little credit. The only reason people in the news mention how bright these students were is because they are so shocked that anyone could do something like that, let alone someone they know. It is their modest attempt towards coming to grips with the frightening reality that they were not able to detect the insanity in their friend/colleague/sibling/neighbor. Trust me, it is not an easy pill to swallow. But these were students, and had to be at least moderately bright to get into these schools. Last time I checked, the U.S. still has fairly decent universities.
So you don’t want to publish their names? That’s fine, but I think it’s impossible given the media’s tenacity for breaking the big story (the media, by the way, are like that all over the world, not just in the dumb ol’ U.S. of A.). But my feeling is that in order to change, we need to learn from our mistakes. Sometimes that means confronting the fact that these students/killers were indeed real people. If we can’t at least do that, what else is there?
As usual, generalizations are very easy to make when experiencing a snap-reaction to something (as you seemingly did to the NIU shooter story), but are often challenging to support.
You shouldn’t apologize for your gut reaction to the story, and I commend you for admitting where you perhaps went wrong, but still maintained your views on your biggest concern. I think that your edited post above really gets at the crux of your concern, which is that by releasing the name of the shooter, the media (and the public) thus gave him a bit of celebrity. By providing a personal view of the shooter, it provides other individuals (perhaps similarly-troubled?) someone with which to identify. Unfortunately, these stories of tragedy are the ones that sell in the media, not those discussing the scholarship offered to the local student who won the state science fair.
Therefore, the heinous act, although omnipresent, is temporarily veiled by the coverage of the shooter’s identity and history, perhaps even romanticizing his tragic story. In the right (wrong) state of mind, that could be very influential on the right (wrong) person.
In that sense, I agree with your point that the name of the shooter should not have been released.
I agree that intelligence (and science) might be devalued in the U.S. There are many, many examples of this outside of the particular one that prompted you to write this post (the foremost examples in my head right now are the political influences on science funding). It’s no different than the elementary schooler who’s seen as a ‘nerd’ or a ‘geek’ for doing well on tests (tho being sci-savy might be becoming more ‘cool’ as long as it’s linked to economic prosperity… see for example, this post about geek chic ).
Just a quick comment on the whole ‘geek’ thing:
If we are going to base the entire U.S. moral conscience on what some 14-year old kids think, we are in a bit more trouble than we realize. I agree that there are some very serious things wrong with the U.S. educational system, but to me, the caste system set forth by teenagers, however real it may be (it’s not all like the movies over here), is not supported by teachers, administrators, parents, or community members. If we define our society by what these kids think, we’d all still be living in our parents basements playing video games and prank calling radio stations. I, and many others, would probably agree that Americans on average are getting more and more lazy and arrogant in their ignorance, but let’s think of more constructive examples of how/why we are that way.
fyi, there was a recent series of articles in the Washington Post on both The Dumbing of America and how America is Smarter than You Think .
”the caste system set forth by teenagers, however real it may be (it’s not all like the movies over here), is not supported by teachers, administrators, parents, or community members.”
Actually, there’s some pretty decent research suggesting that that caste system is indeed supported by teachers, administrators, parents, and community members. See Milner’s Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids and Why We Harass Nerds and Freaks (PDF link) by Bishop et al. (2004) for a variety of examples and evidence.
I wholeheartedly agree that we should not base our moral conscience on the seemingly arbitrary system of values that exists in the insular environment of public schools. I think that we should be mindful, however, that adults are at the helm of this system, and the attitudes that students develop in our schools do get carried into their adult lives.
Also, to make sure that this ties back into the original topic at hand: The idea that intelligent loners might see vilification after school shootings is not unprecedented; see Jon Katz’s Voices from the Hellmouth (chronicling geeks’, gamers’, and goths’ experiences following the Columbine tragedy).
Jason, thanks for the links. And I thought about it some more… consider the ‘geek’ vs. ‘cool guy’ in the Mac vs. PC ads airing in the US I guess it’s more evident among adults than I first realized. I doubt this is only an American phenomenon, but I could be wrong about that too.
But in regards to your comments on the original topic, I think the vilification happened as a result of social behavior (e.g. the whole ‘Trenchcoat mafia’ thing), not necessarily intelligence. The point the original post was trying to make argued that kids will be scared into learning for fear of being labeled a potential killer. While I don’t agree with that statement, I certainly would agree that there are numerous knee-jerk responses directed at social groups that these insane people are loosely clumped into. For example, after the VT shootings, Korean Americans were very afraid that was going to be a backlash against them. Is it appropriate? Absolutely not.
I have lived and taught in both the UK and the US and my general impression is that the people in the US have the potential to experience higher highs and lower lows than people elsewhere. The people whom I’ve met who’ve been simultaneously the most knowledgeable and cultured while being genuinely likeable and lacking even a shred of arrogance have been educators in US universities. That these people come from the same country where large segments of the population have a touching faith in the unadulterated scribblings of people who once lived down the hall from my bronze-age avoteinu v’imoteinu (and if you really want to know, Ani H’Av, so there) and who are also allowed by law to carry guns – is one of life’s abiding mysteries, along with the business of the grassy knowll and whoever it was who put the benzedrine in Mrs Murphy’s Ovaltine. Funny… I’ve just had an idea for a song.