Quotes About Dumbing-down

Charlie] Moon was trying hard to get a handle on this. Maybe he's got a PhD. What with pass-fail replacing conventional grading, Internet diploma mills, and who knows what other academic innovations that has been driving the dumbing-down in American education, you couldn't tell who might have a sheepskin tucked away in his hip pocket.

In Britain, we've tended to replace the kind of architectural culture valued in much of Europe with an in-flight magazine lifestyle - all branding, marketing and 'accessibility', a word that usually means dumbing-down.

How could one engage the world and yet not be cheapened by the aggressive dumbing-down that was the lifeblood of the commercial culture, the festering underbelly of the polity he sought to lead?