Bullshit Literacy

(The bullshitter) does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Once again I’ve had a perfectly nice Saturday morning ruined by yet another set of “21st Century Literacy” skills dumped on my lap. Sent to me by my good (and I am sure well-intentioned) friend, Ian Jukes of Committed Sardine fame, this one comes from the New Media Consortium - whatever that is.

New Media Consortium Global Imperative: the Report of the 21st Century Literacy Summit joins a couple others, including NCREL (Learning Point) eGauge 21st Century Skills and Partnership for 21st Century Skills, excoriating we simple educators for not doing an adequate job of preparing this current batch of kiddies for the big bad work world of the future.

If current employment trends continue, it looks like about 90% of our students will work for Wal-Mart where the most important job skills are:
- Looking good in a day-glow vest
- Passing drug screenings
- Living on the minimum wage, not getting ill, and coping with the relatives who are wiling to take them in.

For the other 10% of the workforce, their single, salient marketable skill will be knowing how to bullshit. (See professor Frankfurt’s definition above.) When, then, are the responsible think tanks going to call summits and issue papers addressing this serious gap in our schools’ curricula?

Since this is a beautiful morning and I’ve only been thinking about this topic for about ten minutes, the core competencies in bullshitting below are somewhat sketchy. You, dear reader, need to embellish.

The Bullshit Literate Student will:
1. Show no social conscience or balance when deliberately distorting factoids, data, or expert opinion in presenting a conclusion.
2. Skillfully use any medium and all persuasive techniques in order to convince others. This includes the ability to use technology to doctor images and edit text.
3. Consistently, vociferously, and blindly hold to a single point of view, and know that volume, repetition and rhetoric trump reason. (ie: Stay the course.)
4. Convincingly fake sincerity.
5. Ably disguise personal gain as public good.
6. Take a single incident or news story or incident and follow it to an illogical conclusion. (See employment prediction above.)
7. Claim any idea as original.
8. Deny prior knowledge. (ie: Nobody expected the breach of the levees)
9. Create a website, wiki, blog, or podcast. (beginning level). Find a publisher, broadcaster or corporate sponsor for whom the bottom line is the bottom line. (advanced).
10. Never, never, never show doubt.

OK, I think I have that out of my system. I’m going on a long - hopefully cynicism-draining - bicycle ride.

Other skills the Bullshit Literate should master?

A follow-up post with a link to Art Wolensky's rubric for measuring bullshit literacy attainment.

A 2009 revision is here.

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2 Comments »
[…] Bullshit Literacy. Oh yes. This one really works for me. All those surface ideas that sound good but lack substance: 8. Deny prior knowledge. (ie: Nobody expected the breach of the levees) […]

Pingback by Tangled up in Purple » Slacker — September 10, 2005 @ 2:07 am

we have in washington, an administration that makes blatant use of these skills. they are completely in the open about it and have been since day one. and they got re-elected. conclusion: 1 through 10 above are not merely tolerated — they are rewarded.

i long ago came to the conclusion that a politician’s job is to listen to what people say, to look behind the words so you can give them what they *really* want, and then convince them that the two are the same.

Comment by jim shirey — October 4, 2005 @ 2:10 pm

Riding and Random Thoughts

My First Bicycle

Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia. H.G. Wells

One of the genuine benefits of physical exercise - that goes beyond developing excellent glutes - is how walking, running, or biking stirs the thinking process. Excess oxygen to the brain or something. Somehow I always get my best ideas or solutions to problems when doing something at least semi-aerobic.

This Labor Day weekend the LWW, her daughter, her daughter’s SO, and I bicycled the beautiful Cannon River trail from Cannon Falls to Red Wing and back to Cannon Falls. An easy 20 miles in each direction. Plenty of time for a bit of musing.

Idle Thought #1
Bicycles are one of the best technologies ever invented. I remember reading once that a bicycle is the most energy efficient form of land transportation. I believe it. It’s incredible how improved the technology of bicycling has become since my earliest bike riding days as a kid, proud of his new one-speed $30 Coast King bike, to today with my 21-speed $300 Cannondale velocipede. The Cannondale, now seven-years-old, weighs half of what the Coast King did and can be geared down to the point it will nearly climb trees. I do believe it it’s no more physically demanding to ride 20 miles on it than it was to ride the mile or so to my cousin’s farm when I was a kid.

I was reminded once again that one way to look at technology is that is simply a device that amplifies and extends a natural human ability. The bicycle amplifies the leg; the telescope, the eye; the telephone, the ear. I am still trying to figure out what exactly the computer and Internet amplify.

Idle Thought #2
Can’t we pass a law that would require that any mandated state test must first be passed by the legislators who voted for it?

Idle Thought #3
I rather pride myself in that I almost never watch television. But I may have to rethink this after watching some of the footage of the impact and tragedies of Hurricane Katrina. The realization that the majority of the horrors that came after the storm have fallen mainly on the poor African-American population simply wasn’t apparent to me until watching the evening news. While I read two daily newspapers, scan Newsweek, and listen to NPR, there was something about the television images that illuminated this heartbreaking story in a way no other medium could. Maybe I better watch the TV news more regularly.

Idle Thought #4
Each year I set as goal more regular visits to the buildings in my district. Each year, it seems, my desk exerts greater magnetic pull. While that can be explained in part because I can solve more problems and communicated effectively with folks throughout the district via e-mail, I am not sure it is the complete answer. Whatever the cause, I plan this year to really demagnetize myself and get out and talk to my media specialists, teachers and principals on a regular basis.

Idle Thought #5
The Onion continues to be the funniest and smartest satire going. While LM_Net alerted everyone to the “story” about Google destroying all information it can’t catalog, their piece, Intelligent Falling, is even funnier (and more pointed).

Idle Thought #6
Increasingly, I’ve been having what I call “charmed life” moments - a sudden realization just how incredibly lucky I am to have the life I have - wonderful family, decent health for all of us, a beautiful home in a beautiful state, some financial security (working wife!), a job and profession I love, and a bit of leisure time to simply enjoy life. I once believed that the truly lucky people were those born to great wealth. I was wrong.

The most recent of these moments came while sitting outdoors eating breakfast at the St. James Hotel in Redwing yesterday morning eating delicious rye toast with strawberry preserves, watching slow traffic moving up and down the Mississippi, and enjoying the company of my lovely wife and two bright and funny 20-somethings. If I ever sound whiney or ungrateful about anything, somebody please dope-slap me. Thank you.
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3 Comments »
the computer and the Internet amplify my tendencies towards ADD…

Comment by SaraKellyJohns — September 6, 2005 @ 10:22 pm

 
I’ve had my own random thoughts lately, several of which parallel yours…the legislative tests, for example. But I just sent this quote to my friends and colleagues: “If I ever sound whiney or ungrateful about anything, somebody please dope-slap me. Thank you.”

Thanks for expressing it so well.

Comment by Donna — September 7, 2005 @ 12:08 pm

I’ve had reports that some folks don’t know what a “dope slap” is. I hear it regularly referred to on NPR’s Car Talk. Maybe it is a Boston expresssion. BUT it has universal applications.

From The Urban Dictionary

Dope Slap: A light “whappp” to the back of the head, done with an open palm in an upward motion. The physical equivalent of the phrase, “Whatta you, a moron?!”

Someone oughta give that damn Illinois driver a dope slap for driving like an idiot!

Comment by dougj — September 7, 2005 @ 2:16 pm

Bloglines: Exacerbating My ADD

As if I needed one more online distraction, I’ve gotten hooked on Bloglines, an RSS Feed Reader. (In English - a single webpage that shows when your favorite blogs have been updated.) It’s called an aggregator, but I believe that’s just a typo for “aggravator.”

Right now I’ve got 15 feeds of blogs of professional interest that generate (in aggregate) quite a number of new entries every day:

2 Cents Worth (David Warlick)
Alice in InfoLand’s blog (Alice Yucht)
Bloglines | News
The Committed Sardine Blog (Ian Jukes)
Cool Tools
Dictionary.com Word of the Day
The Ghost of Charlie Hoban
The Google Weblog
Kathy Schrock’s Kaffeeklatsch
MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors
Quotations Weblog
Quotes of the Day
The Shifted Librarian
Spyware Daily
Wired News

Bloglines is a simple tool to use. Paste the URL into the little blank provided and click “subscribe” after it finds the site. Delete the blogs you no longer wish to have listed. I’m afraid my list seems to be growing rather than shrinking, however.

I suppose I am the last person on the planet to know about this, but I recommend it highly to others afflicted with ADD and need something to keep them from getting their real work accomplished. Or to those who want to know more about the kinds information and ways of getting to it that kids are into.

So what blogs am I not reading that I should be?
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3 Comments »
Take a look at:

1. Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed (there is a good RSS guide on his site also).
2. Michael Lorenzen’s The Information Literacy Land of Confusion library instruction, librarianship, information literacy, and search engines.
3. Librarian Way Connections for Librarians web-based Technology and Research Resources
4. Tim Lauer’s Education Technology Principal at Meriwether Lewis Elementary School, Portland OR
5. Phil Bradley’s Blog focus on search engines and searching.

I also subscribe to political blogs and some of feeds from Seattle PI, NYTimes, . Easy to scan for most important / interesting and avoids all the different interfaces on the sites.

My whole list is at

Comment by Robert Eiffert — September 2, 2005 @ 7:27 pm

Yes - bloglines is great. I use it every day to follow my favorite blogs & keep up on other areas of interest. It will soon take over my life and I will never be seen again….. To see my full list of blogs - just go to my pseudo-blog at: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/JacquieHenry/
(I created the blog using bloglines - just as a way to teach myself the process. I don’t have any plans to update it - but it is there if I ever want to…)

But here is the issue that is making me CRAZY. I am SO upset that our content filter blocks it & our tech committe will not unblock it. When I first discovered Bloglines - I immediately fell in love with the power it gave me to follow my favorite blogs. I also fell in love with the ability to save articles for future reference. I wanted to teach the students - especially the seniors before going to college - how to set up folders for all their research projects. That way they can easily drop good articles into the folders as they ran across them. I also like www.savethis.com for saving ANY article I find on the web. So far, our content filter allows Savethis. That could change tomorrow. However, I really wanted to encourage the students to set up rss feeds if they have not already done so. So Bloglines is really necessary. I know that there are downloadable rss feed readers. Alas - our tech committee not only turned down my request to unblock Bloglines, but, because of budget cuts and dying computers, they have put a freeze on downloading ANY software. THIS IS SO FRUSTRATING!!

Comment by Jacquie Henry — September 3, 2005 @ 7:22 pm

Consider these:
Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search, at http://joycevalenza.edublogs.org/
Michael Stephen’s Tame the Web: Technology & Libraries, at http://www.tametheweb.com/ttwblog/
Christopher Harris’ Infomancy, at http://www.schoolof.info/infomancy/
Fernette and Brock Eide’sNeurolearning blog, at http://eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com/
Uglcoyote’si Endless Faculty Meeting, at http://wildwilliam.blogspot.com/

and — for a truly honest take on the realities of education: http://www.comics.com/comics/frazz/

Comment by Alice Yucht — September 9, 2005 @ 8:06 pm |