Intelligent thoughts on dumbing down

spiked-essays | Essay | Dumbing down? Don't blame the media:
"Blaming the media for dumbing down confuses one symptom of the problem with its cause. The problem today is not the growth of stupefying television but the lack of cultural and institutional support for the promotion of artistic and intellectual standards.It is easy to react against the inane spectacle of reality TV. But banal entertainment is the least of our problems. We should be far more concerned with the powerful trends that work towards the dumbing down of education, academia, the arts and politics. The pressure to devalue content exercises a destructive impact on contemporary culture. That is why we need to overcome our estrangement from cultural standards, and affirm the fact that content really counts."

So concludes Frank Furedi in an excellent essay on the decline of standards which underlies the dumbing down of contemporary culture. Well worth reading.