Idiocy-Dominated Communities: Trivial Education and Ineffectual Technology

ABSTRACT

This article examines the nature and reproduction of ‘institutional idiocy’, seen as a form of collective cognitive incapacity generated by cultural conditions. It shows idiocy to be active in numerous paths, wearing different clothes and taking dissimilar forms, spreading to the extent that it dominates communities. An empirically driven framework is established for idiocy-dominated communities – communities with access to futile education and fruitless technology. It demonstrates how idiocy-dominated communities disguise and protect their shared idiocy and handle non-idiotic minorities. It explains that idiocy-intense communities are not necessarily chaotic and arbitrarily organised, entailing ‘formulas of life’, ‘identity politics’ and ‘schools of thought’. It describes that a whole community can thoroughly adapt to life without critical thinking, living in an illusion. Whereas previous works have scrutinised individual idiocy, this research goes beyond this to inspect institutional idiocy by presenting idiocy as a system (and ‘ideology’) that constitutes the foundation of groups. While such notions as technocracy and epistocracy detail the domination of cognitive maturity, this article goes in another direction by recording the domination of cognitive immaturity (idiocracy). It avoids thinking about idiocy binarily (idiocy versus intelligence), viewing it as a question of not intellect but behaviour, culture and ‘being-with’.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• technology
• intelligence
• giftedness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

There is no data set associated with the paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abdulrahman Essa Al Lily

Abdulrahman Essa Al Lily, DPhil (Oxon), is a Saudi associate professor, Amazon bestselling author and Oxford graduate. He is the Assistant Director of the National Centre for Research on Giftedness and Creativity. He has published with the largest academic publishers globally: Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, SAGE, Palgrave, Nature Research and Oxford University Press. His writings and interviews have been translated into different languages, such as Chinese, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic and English. He co-coined ‘the theory of multiple stupidities’, ‘the theory of retroactivism’ and ‘the pedagogy of poverty’. For more information, please visit: https://abdulallily.wordpress.com.

Ahmed Ali Alhazmi

Ahmed Ali Alhazmi is an assistant professor at Jazan University. His research interests lie at the intersection of education, sociology and anthropology, with a focus on the Arab context. He has worked with well-known publishers (Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley) and written in different languages for impact-factor journals. He has co-coined ‘the theory of multiple stupidities’, ‘the theory of retroactivism’ and ‘the pedagogy of poverty’. In addition to academic work, he has been involved with the leadership of academia.

Saleh Alzahrani

Saleh Alzahrani, MA (La Trobe University), is a lecturer at the Department of Educational Technologies, King Faisal University. His interests lie at the intersection of education, technology, social theory, identity and fine arts. He co-coined ‘the theory of multiple stupidities’ and was one of the first academics to call for the incorporation of fun theory into the management of higher education institutions.