Hypothetical:
You’re called in to a secret meeting at the White House. An unmarked black sedan shows up at your home, drives you to the east wing. You enter, pass some security gates, and then are taken into an elevator where you descend twenty-four hundred feet below ground. When the doors open, you are in a secret command bunker with equipment and supplies to live for years. Gigantic computer displays scroll information too fast to read.
You are led down a hallway and into a large presentation hall that looks like a college lecture room. Stadium-style desk seating, laptops at each. Seated inside is every other Straight Dope Message Board user. They greet you, glad that you arrived as well, but unsure as to what’s happening.
After a few minutes, someone in a dark suit opens the door, clears his throat, then steps aside. In walks in president Barack Obama, no suit jacket, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened. Everybody in the room stands, without being asked. Both gracious and bored, Obama motions for everybody to be seated. He walks to a table in the middle of the room, leans against the front of it, and rubs his eyes with his right hand.
“Here’s the thing,” he says. His voice is strained but casual, not the “yes we can” public address voice you’re used to, but the voice of a man who hasn’t slept in days.
“We have a problem in this country,” he continues. “Too many people are, well, to put it bluntly, stupid. National literacy rates are a disgrace, but beyond that, there is a virulent trend of prideful disregard for education. ‘Anti-intellectualism,’ most people call it.”
He scratches his chin while thinking how to continue. “If you look at polls,” he says, "a large majority of people believe in a higher power, which, on its own is fine, but it’s getting ridiculous. Core, fundamental concepts like evolution are skirted by the bulk of Americans. People are afraid of sex education, leaving teenagers vulnerable to disease and unwanted pregnancy. Education itself is being abandoned, watered down. 80% of high school graduates cannot name the three branches of government. 40% of them don’t know how many states there are. 20% of them cannot name the first president.
"Basic knowledge of the world around us is becoming a commodity. Half the country can’t find Iraq on a map, and the same number think Africa is a country, and think India is a continent.
"What’s worse is that people seem proud of this. Somehow it’s become ‘American’ to be an uneducated dummy who’d rather watch a monster truck rally than learn the name of their congressional representatives. This is a dangerous situation, and needs to be remedied. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Idiocracy, but, in a way, it’s not entirely out of the question to think that in a hundred years, the average American won’t be able to tie his own shoes.
“That’s why you’re here. I’ve been told you’re the smartest, most inventive group of people that our researchers could find. All of you now have been drafted into the American Destupidization Project.”
The president then explains that everybody assembled is expected to come up with ideas for how to fix the stupid problem in America. Because the growth of stupidity represents not only a national security threat, but a threat to the survival of the human race, no legal or constitutional limitations should be considered in ideas for destupidization. Short of killing every last human and starting over, anything is up for consideration.
Two trillion dollars in stimulus money have been set aside for this project, so cost or manpower will not be an issue.
The entire project will be carried out in secret. Americans can be lied to, politics can be manipulated, absolutely anything can be done to fix the stupid problem.
What do you propose?