The Race to the Dung-Heap of History continues apace.

The assault on our childrens’ minds in school is documented once again in this morning’s WashPost. In what is meant to be a heartwarming piece that points up the wacky high-tech world we live in, we are regaled with the gladsome news that this Yuletide, area children have taken to beguiling their cubicle-chained symbolic-analyst moms and dads in the only language they yet understand — Microsoft’s most toxic contribution to our culture, that bellwether of the whistling void that is the life of the mind in the Twenty-First Century: the PowerPoint deck.

No, I’m not actually kidding. To strut their virtue and the depth of their commitment to year-round Niceness (and their concomitant rejection of Naughtiness), the little dears have taken to composing their Christmas wish lists in the medium that has glazed more eyeballs, destroyed more will to live, ruined more creativity and spread more evilly jumbled thought than all the OxyContin that ever was made.

I’m not flaming the kids, here. Actually, little Katie Johnsen’s deck is pretty darned adorable, and when she learns that Arial is a dreadful hackneyed display face and that that green background has got to go, she’s going to be a fine kid. And I really hope she gets her puppy.

No, what’s irksome about the piece is the fact that Katie and her cohort are being taught to think in PowerPoint, to reach for it automatically as a communication tool. Further, it’s a lead-pipe cinch that nobody in her school is teaching her how to avoid the pitfalls of PowerPoint language, how to mold a verbal argument of subtlety, complexity and rigor. Edward Tufte, the eminently respected guru of information design, has this to say about the matter, in his highly regarded essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” (Link goes to a digested article at Wired.com; the whole book can be bought at Tufte’s own site.)

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

It’s a given today that in the spheres of business and politics, the speaker who gets to the point quickly wins the audience’s attention — and quite likely its sympathy. To take time for orotundity, digression, nuance, exactness of expression, is seen as overintellectualism, of tedious Frenchiness. Tad Simons, of Presentations.com, had this to say in March 2004, in an essay titled, “Edward Tufte Doesn’t Hate PowerPoint.” I don’t want to draw your conclusions for you, but see if you don’t detect a certain pointedness in here:

To be sure, most business in this world is conducted under the unspoken (and sometimes spoken) belief that people who get to the point fast are “smart,” and people who don’t – people whose thoughts are layered and complex and take time to unpack – are tedious to listen to and therefore irrelevant. In business folklore, guts and instinct are more respected than intelligence. And this simpleton streak, it can be argued, is simply an extension of the anti-intellectualism that has always existed in American society – a society that disproportionately glorifies physical achievement and beauty over intellectual, knowledge-based achievement every time…

Where stupidity and evil come into play is when this preference for logical shortcuts and easy solutions crowds out reason and leads to the assumption that ideas incapable of being bullet-pointed aren’t worth considering, or even sharing. Tufte’s true beef is not with PowerPoint, it is with the entire larger culture outside of academia: the culture that favors get-to-the-point practicality over ivory-tower idealism; the culture that prefers action over dialogue and fists over philosophy; the culture that doesn’t trust people who speak in complete sentences; the culture that says don’t think about it, “just do it”; the culture that, hate it or not, seems all too willing to deceive itself in the name of freedom, democracy and the American way.

Now, remind me: Who won the Presidential election last year?