In his 2014 article “Anti-Intellectualism and the ‘Dumbing Down’ of America”, Ray Williams expresses his viewpoint that there “is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture” and that dumbness “has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces [which] include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism”. He then claims that “a whole generation of youth is being dumbed down by their aversion to reading anything of substance and their addiction to digital ‘crap’ via social media”. He backs up these claims with polls and studies; however, a closer examination of those facts and figures reveals that he is off-base on exactly who is to blame for America’s “dumbing down”. The evidence Williams uses is either misleading, does not tell the whole story, or just downright false, which undermines his stance that it is, in fact, the millennials who are the ones at fault. He cites a World Economic Forum ranking that put the U.S’s university science and math instruction at 52nd out of 139 nations. While this is true, he leaves out the fact that the 13 of the top…show more content… In fact, this is the reason why, as he points out, nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners: they come here to get educated because our universities are the best
