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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: The consequences of dumbing down a generation [1]
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Date: 2025-06-28
The considered, deliberate rejection of science — now most apparent as a matter of policy for the current administration — often forms the basis for the “dystopian” aspect of so-called “dystopian filmmaking.” Although director Christopher Nolan finally received his due from the Academy of Motion Pictures for his work on Oppenheimer, his earlier science fiction film, Interstellar — incorporating elements of this genre -- is frankly a whole lot more interesting.
While the main plot sequence in Interstellar centers around the journey of a former NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey) in his and others’ desperate search for another planet suitable for human habitation, the condition of the Earth he leaves behind is given more perfunctory treatment. We understand that as a result of climate change the ability of mid 21st century Earth to sustain the human population has been degraded, resulting in massive dust storms, radical weather changes and devastating crop deterioration, notably in the American Midwest.
But in the film it isn’t simply the climate that has degraded, but the capacity of human society to address it that has atrophied, evidently from the same type of science denial that the Trump administration has now fulsomely embraced as it deliberately sends this nation into a probably irreversible death spiral of state-sponsored ignorance. In Interstellar, by the mid-21st, the public schools are no longer providing education but churning out basically uneducated students to eschew college and carry on the task of farming what is left of the Earth’s arable land. Students are deliberately steered away by their teachers from science and engineering, with teachers promoting conspiracy theories about subjects as mundane as whether the Apollo moon landing actually occurred, or was simply a hoax designed to bankrupt the Soviet Union by tricking them into pursuing political advantage through “useless machines.”
When Cooper goes to a hastily called parent-teacher conference about his school-age children, he experiences firsthand what public education by 2050 has become. One of his children is denied college eligibility at age 15, but still praised, as he will make an “excellent farmer.” The other, brighter child, his daughter, is also praised for her intelligence but described as a discipline problem because she keeps insisting, among other things, that the moon landing was real, and has brought in her father’s textbooks to prove it. In fact she’s gotten into physical fights with her classmates over the issue.
The (rather jarring) scene is here:
Recall this film was made in 2014, well before the phrases “fake news” or “alternative facts” were ever injected into the mainstream, least of all by our political leaders. Audiences at that time probably reacted with: “Wait, what?”
Sadly, today it’s no longer a stretch of the imagination to see how the public school system could be so dumbed down as to teach “lunar landing denial” to its students. Conservative-led states have actively attempted to distort or eliminate mention of climate change, for example, in public school curricula. As reported by Chris Walker, writing for Truthout, the state of Oklahoma is now including “election denial” in its required official curriculum.
The Oklahoma Board of Education has passed new curriculum standards that require educators to teach that the 2020 presidential election was rife with fraud or discrepancies — despite numerous judicial rulings and audits indicating that the election was legitimate. The new standards were inserted into the curriculum by State Superintendent Ryan Walters, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, shortly before the board voted on them earlier this month. At least one member of the board took issue with the fact that the changes to the curriculum were introduced well after the public comment period. The curriculum now requires schools to have high school students “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information,” telling educators that students should examine the supposed “security risks of mail-in balloting”; dumps of ballots; and the “halting of ballot-counting in select cities.” The curriculum also states that educators should point to the election’s “unforeseen record number of voters” as a sign that something was amiss.
The now-approved Oklahoma curriculum also requires that children be “definitively” taught that the COVID-19 virus definitely originated from a Chinese lab, and, as Walker reports, promotes “Christianity and Christian principles” throughout the curriculum. Of course, this is all occurring against the broader backdrop of science denial now promoted in by the Trump administration in the EPA and Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the complete dismantling of the Department of Education and the intentional omission of any acknowledgment of racism or sexual identity.
As anyone who has seen Interstellar knows — and at the risk of giving away any spoilers -- the ultimate outcome is positive, if a bit unrealistic. Ultimately it is the same engineering and scientific principles, derided as useless “propaganda” in a vain effort to solve an insoluble problem, that actually manage to save the human species.
The film has been deservedly praised for its strict adherence to scientific facts, a premise that Nolan dogmatically adhered to when making it. Less remarked upon, though, is the more subtle subtext of the film itself: that the denial of science and the distortion of basic facts has inevitably led to the existential disaster humanity is forced to deal with in the first place. Ultimately, the sad truth is that none of us gets to live out a future so neatly scripted and tailored to satisfy a movie audience’s sensibilities.
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