Against dumbing down

'Dumbing down' is often seen as being about the rise of reality TV and other dumb culture. In fact, says Frank Furedi, the problem is much bigger than Survivor. 'Cultural institutions like universities and galleries no longer challenge us or encourage us to question what we know. Instead they flatter us. But flattery will get us nowhere.' Not content with having taken on therapy culture and the paranoid parenting industry in his previous books, Furedi, a sociologist, lays in to dumbing down (or 'twenty-first century philistinism' as he calls it) in Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone? Both inside and outside the university, argues Furedi, the pursuit of Knowledge and Truth is today looked upon with suspicion, at best as the pastime of the fusty, old, out-of-touch academic, at worst as an elitist project that seeks to impose outdated 'Western values' on to the rest of the world. 'Our society seems to have a big problem with the idea of art for its own sake, or knowledge for its own sake, or education for its own sake', he says. Instead, such things are deemed useful only if they serve some other sake - if they work as instruments of 'economic advance, social engineering, giving communities an identity, or providing therapy for the individual'. More.