Sunday, May 10, 2015

Harvard Youth Poll Results Out - Brace Yourselves

Twice a year the Harvard Public Opinion Project surveys America's youth on everything ranging from climate change to foreign wars.  The latest numbers show American young people turning anti-science, becoming indifferent or distrustful of climate change, and supporting American military interventionism abroad.

Growing distrust of science, here.

Losing interest in fighting climate change, here.

Increasing support for more U.S. military interventionism, here.

If the Harvard numbers are right, American youth seem to be turning very rightwing.
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7 comments:

  1. Unknown3:48 PM, May 10, 2015

    Sounds like they are becoming more ant-intellectual. This is not new though. It's been happening for sometime. Maybe because they don't believe in climate change and/or science their anti-intellectualism appears more obvious. As for the belief in the US militarily intervening as okay, they should put there money where there mouth is and sign up.

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  2. Toby4:10 PM, May 10, 2015

    Allan Bloom predicted this in his The Closing of the American Mind.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind

    I'm just disappointed that he was so right.

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  3. Lorne4:24 PM, May 10, 2015

    Disturbing, but perhaps not that surprising, Mound, given that so many attending universiy see the value of a post-secondary education primarily in terms of enhancing their job prospects only, not in enabling them how to think critically.

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  4. The Mound of Sound5:39 PM, May 10, 2015

    Pamela, you're right. This has happened before. It's the sort of thing that Pierre Berton put down to the American people's docile acceptance of authority even as they see themselves as standing for rebellious independence.

    I have this uneasy sense that the American people have been conditioned to accept a degree of servility that can do none of them - or their country - any good.

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  5. The Mound of Sound5:41 PM, May 10, 2015

    Tony, I wonder what Bloom would have made of this rightwing shift. If anything it seems he would have welcomed it and the new conformity it evidences.

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  6. The Mound of Sound5:45 PM, May 10, 2015

    Lorne, I saw what you write of back when I was in law school. The philosophical side of the discipline, anchored in areas such as jurisprudence and equity were incompatible with the transformation of law schools into trade schools. In latter years it got even more constrained, more sterile and, in some ways, mechanical.

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  7. Anyong3:13 PM, May 11, 2015

    Lorne's comment is so very correct.

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