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Critics often warn that American schools are failing, and that our students are ill-prepared for the challenges the future holds, and may even be ""the dumbest generation."" We can think of these claims as warning about a Stupidity Epidemic. This essay begins by tracing the history of the idea of that American students, teachers, and schools are somehow getting worse; the record shows that critics have been issuing such warnings for more than 150 years. It then examines four sets of data that speak to whether educational deterioration is taking place. First, data on educational attainment s

Academic achievement --- Educational accountability --- Educational statistics. --- Intelligence levels --- Stupidity.

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Intellect --- Intelligence levels --- Intelligence tests --- #KVHB:Intelligentietests --- #KVHB:Intelligentie --- #KVHB:Psychodiagnostiek --- Intellect. --- Intelligence levels. --- Intelligence tests. --- Intelligence quotient --- IQ (Intelligence quotient) --- Educational psychology --- Intelligence testing --- IQ tests --- Mental tests --- Psychological tests --- Human intelligence --- Intelligence --- Mind --- Ability --- Psychology --- Thought and thinking --- Testing --- Cognitive psychology --- Philosophical anthropology

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In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, ideas of genius did more than define artistic and intellectual originality. They also provided a means for conceptualizing women's participation in a democracy that marginalized them. Widely distributed across print media but reaching their fullest development in literary fiction, tropes of female genius figured types of subjectivity and forms of collective experience that were capable of overcoming the existing constraints on political life. The connections between genius, gender, and citizenship were important not only to contests over such practical goals as women's suffrage but also to those over national membership, cultural identity, and means of political transformation more generally. In The Genius of Democracy Victoria Olwell uncovers the political uses of genius, challenging our dominant narratives of gendered citizenship. She shows how American fiction catalyzed political models of female genius, especially in the work of Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Mary Hunter Austin, Jessie Fauset, and Gertrude Stein. From an American Romanticism that saw genius as the ability to mediate individual desire and collective purpose to later scientific paradigms that understood it as a pathological individual deviation that nevertheless produced cultural progress, ideas of genius provided a rich language for contests over women's citizenship. Feminist narratives of female genius projected desires for a modern public life open to new participants and new kinds of collaboration, even as philosophical and scientific ideas of intelligence and creativity could often disclose troubling and more regressive dimensions. Elucidating how ideas of genius facilitated debates about political agency, gendered identity, the nature of consciousness, intellectual property, race, and national culture, Olwell reveals oppositional ways of imagining women's citizenship, ways that were critical of the conceptual limits of American democracy as usual.

American fiction --- Women in public life --- Women and democracy --- Genius. --- Genius in literature. --- Women in literature. --- Democracy and women --- Democracy --- Creative ability --- Intelligence levels --- Woman (Christian theology) in literature --- Women in drama --- Women in poetry --- History and criticism. --- Women authors --- History. --- Cultural Studies. --- Literature.