Enough dumbing down.
Time to smarten up instead.
Time to clobber little kids with Latin and Greek, French and Mandarin and English and to stop saying that any old grammar and spelling is acceptable. Let’s set demanding tasks and draconian curricula at an early age and let’s encourage excellence instead of rewarding mediocrity.
How about expecting people to make an effort to keep up, instead of talking down to them?
In fact, people like a challenge. We rise to it, it stimulates and requires us use different parts of our brain. We feel good when we’ve mastered something difficult. We’ve proved that we’re better than we thought.
What's the point of condescending and assuming people are dumber than they are? Supposedly, it’s so the slower ones can understand. But it’s been shown often enough that those of whom little or nothing is expected, deliver. Likewise, when a lot is expected of the same people, they also deliver. Like the inner city kids dealing with hard lives who can manage calculus, ballet, opera, chess, violins when that is expected of them.
Dumbing down does nobody any favours.
Lack of expectations is crippling.
Better to assume that people are smart and expect them to understand than to expect little or nothing and so discourage them from improving, exploring and growing. If it were assumed that we're all more intelligent than we think we are, we’d try harder, learn more, get better jobs and our quality of life would improve. A bit utopic but why not aim high?
People want to conform, so why not set a high standard to conform to rather than a lower one? Smarts are not the purview of the rich, neither is stupidity confined to the poor. There are many rich, educated people who aren't intelligent, many poor people with so-called street smarts. Smarts are smarts whether they're street or academic.
Let’s stop calling smart people nerds and dweebs and dorks and geeks and picturing them as insecure weaklings in glasses.
Smart people are confident and strong and sexy.
Have you noticed that stupid people consider others stupider than themselves?
And intelligent people consider others at least as smart as they are, if not smarter?
Stupid people are dangerous.
Stupid people dumb down.
Fight stupidity by smartening up.
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