- guardian.co.uk, Saturday October 28 2000 01.02 BST
But it is not as simple as that, which is why there is a question mark on the end of the title. Certainly, a lack among younger people of a reasonable standard of general knowledge (over the next three weeks Dumb? looks at everything from politics to Pokemon, unzipping the very idea of what culture is) raises issues for the future of democracy: how can people exercise an informed choice with apparently empty minds?
Yet we are looking, in 18- to 24-year-olds, at the first generation to have grown up with computers readily available. They know, almost instinctively now, how to retrieve information, and they know they do not have to commit it to memory. In a world of information overload, that might even be a bad idea.
There is plenty in Dumb? that is good news. Our comparative study of exams since 1951 shows pretty conclusively that far from being easier, they are now more sophisticated, more inflected with a real sense of what a society needs from education. In other areas, too, such as the rise of popular science, it is clear there has been a change for the better.
Yet still some will take the view that low culture is in the ascendant. The series in fact suggests something quite otherwise: that "high" and "low" categories are, if not outmoded, then usefully antagonistic, always nourishing each other. Cultural value and cultural diversity are alive and well. You just have to know where to look.
