The True Bloodsuckers, However, Are Hardly Supernatural

   Are you afraid of vampires? I am.

    Not thatI believe there are supernatural bloodsuckers flapping around out there. No, I am afraid that my fellow citizens are letting go of the last vestiges of adulthood and slipping into a state permanent childhood fantasy. I stake this claim on polls that find more American adults clinging to belief in supernatural creatures like vampires than in a host of real threats that require their attention as voters. I kid you not.

    Spooked by tales of "death panels," higher taxes, and government bureaucrats making life or death decisions (in place of health-insurance beancounters), Americans have given up the ghost on healthcare reform. The proportion who told Gallup this month that they would urge their congressional representatives to vote for healthcare reform sank to 29 percent.

   Compare that with the whopping 37 percent who believe that some houses are haunted by supernatural creatures. (You can tell which houses by the rusting gates and creaking shutters.)

   Or the number of Americans who accept that global warming is a real problem caused at least in part by human industrial activity. Bitten by an oil-industry financed propaganda campaign, we have swooned. The sanity factor on global warming has plunged in the last year  to 36 percent.

   While I cannot find any reliable polling data that singles out belief in vampires, Gallup found that 73 percent of Americans believe in some supernatural or paranormal nonsense, and there can be no doubt that vampires are No. 1 in the monster hit parade. 

   Writing in Slate, Christopher Beam and Chris Wilson note that there have been only four brief periods in the last half century when vampires were not prominent in popular culture. The longest of these came in the Kennedy era, when Sputnik-inspired science briefly captured the American imagination.

     Today, young people -- the ones who are going to suffer all the consequences of bad decisions made today -- are the most superstitious of all. It's tragic. But there is a simple solution. Throw out 50 percent of the content we cram into students in public schools -- it's mostly useless trivia, anyway.

     I love knowledge, but I'm not worried about whether my daughter knows the key trading posts along the Silk Road, or names of the eras in the geologic column. (Ordovician, anyone?) Much of the math we teach students is useless, as well. Factoring polynomials is important -- but only to a tiny subset of a fraction of a percent of Americans. Meantime, most Americans cannot do a simple risk assessment when it comes to life-saving choices (see my blog piece on vaccines).

    If you think I am being flippant here, put my claim to these tests. First, pick any subject you like and think back to any year in school: How many facts can you recall? I believe the fingers on one hand will suffice. Second, ask yourself this: How much useful knowledge has sprung up since your principal handed you the old sheepskin and told you get out there and serve society? 

    Let's give all that useless baggage the old heave-ho, and replace it with a rich, stimulating curriculum centered on critical thinking. Teach students how to learn, how to love learning, and how to distinguish reliable knowledge from fraud, manipulation, and foolishness. These, along with reading and writing, are the truly foundational skills for a healthy democratic society. Yes, we need to slip in some general knowledge along the way, but if we can raise a new generation who can tell fiction from fact, and who are able to recognize and resist scare tactics, propaganda, and snake oil, we will once again be a nation of grown-ups.

    Meantime, make no mistake about it: there are real vampires. They suck blood from you and me every day, and then they fly back to roost in their dark corporate caves. They include pharmaceutical companies that spend more on TV advertising than on drug development and then plow their profits into buying congressmen, health insurance companies that make profits by denying claims and dumping patients once they get sick, hospital chains that fix bankrupting prices for routine procedures, and "natural" health purveyors who sell billions in useless products.

    Oh, and don't get me started on oil companies that put up "green" ads on TV while they secretly fund bogus citizen groups against global warming legislation -- groups which then buy scare ads on TV. That'll have to wait for another day.

Blah, blah, blah!