It’s depressing how little most Americans know, and how little they want to know. The refusal to wear masks or get vaccinated is only one example. More Americans believe in angels than in evolution. Enough Americans believe that Trump won the last election to put our democracy in real danger.

People are not born stupid. Anyone who has been fortunate enough to spend time around babies knows that we’re born curious, observant, and eager to connect the dots of experience. It takes years of conditioning to make people stupid.

Our consumer economy relies on an adequate supply of stupidity. If we could not be convinced to buy stuff we don’t need, the bottom would fall out of the global marketplace. Today’s deep hole would look like a pockmark. A critical number of Americans must believe that this perfume will make us sexy, this car will make us happy, this drink will make us high achievers. No ad suggests we should save our money or cut our consumption. We are trained to keep shopping.

Stupidity training starts as soon as we plunk a baby in front of a screen. The ads never stop after that, telling our children to want things that their families can’t afford, making them hungry for food that is bad for their health, convincing them they must have toys they would do better without. The average American child views more than 40,000 television ads every year, and more through social media. There is no counter-programming in schools, although learning how to spot a con should be required curriculum.

By default, we leave counter-programming up to parents, but most parents aren’t home to teach it. Ever since the cost of living outpaced income growth in the 1970s, it has taken two incomes to support a family. Women were forced to go to work whether they wanted to or not. The question of who was going to take care of the children was never faced by the federal government. Every family had to figure that out for themselves. Often the answer involved unqualified caregivers, or no caregivers at all – inaugurating the age of latch-key kids.

Now we have had more than two generations of children who were left pretty much to their own devices after school. Unfortunately their devices were usually television, or, more recently, cell phones.

Meanwhile, public education has been steadily degraded, although teachers and administrators still try valiantly to make it work. Republican administrations particularly have had it in for education; a well-informed public trained to observe, analyze, and think critically would never support cutting taxes for the rich, or waging unprovoked war, or subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. In other words, it would never elect Republicans.

Shortly after President Carter created a cabinet-level Department of Education, Reagan called for its total elimination, and succeeded in severely cutting its funding. When Reagan entered office, the federal share of total education funding was 12%; when he left 8 years later, the share was 6%. His Education Secretary, William Bennett, a neoconservative, oversaw these cuts in order to weaken public education in favor of private and religious schooling.

George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, which punished poor schools for failing without funding effective remedies. Trump put Betsy DeVos in charge of public education because of her lifelong devotion to private education.

Racism has played its part. Once public schools were integrated, white parents began to take their children out of the system. People with money put their children in private schools or moved to rich suburbs where taxes on expensive real estate resulted in good public schools. This removed parents with power and influence from PTAs and school boards in disadvantaged neighborhoods. White people with less money turned to religious schools.

Private schools make sure kids learn a second language early, experience music and arts, take field trips to museums and farms. Poor kids enter the lottery for charter schools or do without all that. Their teachers are forced to “teach to the test,” without the flexibility to teach anything but basic math and literacy. Most of the things that make school fun have disappeared.

State and local education funding account for 90% of what we spend on schools. School budgets were cut by an average of 7% during the decade following the 2008 recession, with predictable results. The 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment study of 15 year olds ranked the US 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Less than half of Americans are proficient readers. The pandemic, and the remote learning it required, has made things immeasurably worse.

4 out of 10 Americans believe humans and dinosaurs coexisted. 1 out of 4 believe the sun revolves around the earth. Almost half believe in ghosts. 4 out of 10 think homosexual people choose their own orientation. The poll didn’t ask why they think anybody would do that. 6 out of 10 believe that dreams predict the future. An astounding 3 out of 4 believe there is indisputable evidence that alien beings have visited Earth. How far away do they think the nearest stars really are, and do they know that the speed of light limits how fast anything can travel? The answers would indisputably be disturbing.

Possibly even more significant than American ignorance about science is our ignorance about our democracy. Only 9 states and Washington DC require a full year of education in civics or US governance. Most states require half a year. 11 states require none at all. Until the 1960s, most schools required three separate courses on American government.

Nearly half of Americans cannot identify the three branches of government. 1 out of 4 believe the USA won its independence from some nation other than Great Britain. 3 out of 4 do not know that the Bill of Rights prohibits the establishment of an official religion in the US. Most Americans believe we spend around 25% of our budget on foreign aid; the real figure is under 1%.

Ignorance is self-reinforcing. If you’re ever embarrassed by not knowing a subject, it’s much easier to mock the people who do know it as intellectual snobs than to learn about it yourself. You’re managing to feed and clothe yourself, so you really didn’t need to know that thing anyway, right? And it’s a comfort that your friends don’t know it either. Gradually, we have slid into a situation where knowing things makes a person different, alien, not normal.

We can stop being so stupid, but it’s going to take time and money. We can hire more teachers and pay them much better. We can stop funneling public money to charter and religious schools. People who believe in education can run for school board. We can put civics, history, geography, and the arts back into curricula. We can lengthen the school day and invite community members in to teach what they know.

Intellectuals and academics can venture out of the ivory tower and start talking to the rest of us again. The media might consider what we need to know in a time of drastic climate change and food insecurity, instead of feeding us the empty calories of celebrity gossip.

Stupidity might be good for the corporate bottom line, but it’s terrible for humanity’s bottom line. We got this far by being smart and creative. We can only keep going if we wise up. Vote Democratic. It’s our best shot at surviving our epidemic of Dumb.