I'll begin by admitting that I was a slacker during most of my high school and undergraduate careers. I coasted on horsepower. Had I possessed a scrap of self-discipline and vision, I would be wiser now. This matters to me because as I wrestle with big ideas, I sorely feel my inadequate education. This probably sounds like backhanded boasting to some, but those of you who are truly, classically educated understand full well what I mean.

I know firsthand, in other words, the difference between going to school and getting an education. Charles Murray has written a fascinating series of op-eds in The Wall Street Journal this week, on the topic of intelligence and education. I suspect he may now need to enter a witness protection program. I once heard him remark in a speech that he had recently been booed, by a university audience, for saying that half of the population has below-average intelligence. We live in an age, in the West, where sentiment trumps reason.

One of Murray's arguments is that — insofar as we desire that colleges and universities provide a rigorous education — many students currently attending those institutions do not belong there. Society would be better served, he writes, by a system of vocational schools and skills certification. What happens instead is that university instruction is dumbed down in all but the most elite schools.

And yet, the dumbing process is apparently taking too long for some — witness the rise of websites, like Duenow.com, devoted to selling term papers and essays to students. In its typo-ridden FAQ page, Duenow boasts of "serving" five million students. As the Duenow sages tauntingly ask, "Do you have better things [to] do with your time than spend it writing a useless essay?" Absolutely, says Jeff, a student from Kansas, who writes in a testimonial on the website: "Kick ass site and papers dudes. You guys are the shizit!" There's also Missy, from New York, who promises to "definately [sic] tell my friends about you."

Please do, Missy. There are so many more important things to do, while spending your parent's money at college, than master basic writing and spelling.

Murray's thoughts on intelligence make me think that perhaps I shouldn't be so discouraged by the sight of people sitting in an airport lobby, staring at the television instead of reading. I shouldn't be depressed by the fact that many more people watch cable television regularly than read a quality newspaper or magazine. Half the people have below-average intelligence. They need something to do, and cable TV beats rioting and gladiator contests.

I am thankful that somehow I survived a peculiar trap that I think I see, which is children with above-average intelligence who become immersed in the dominant teenage and twenty-something culture of unintelligence. We probably all know at least one child like this, whose time is so absorbed in Myspace, Facebook, Xbox, and the regular diet of cable television, movies, and — this is my favorite — just "hanging" with friends, that he does not actually do very much of something that still appears indispensable if one is to rise above one's ignorance, which is to read. I am convinced that Russell Kirk had it right, when he famously seized a contraband television that one of his children had smuggled into their home, and threw it from the upstairs window.

This puts me in mind of a candidate for County Board of Supervisors where I live, who said in one of his campaign speeches, "While we all know it's the responsibility of the school district to educate our children, I believe the county government has a role to play as well..."

Yes, of course. It's someone else's job. The city, the county, the church, the college, the Congress, the president. Somehow we have delivered all responsibility from the shoulders of the three people who have the greatest control over a child's education, namely, the parents, and the child himself.

In this regard, I think Murray is missing something. The dilemma in American education is not only that we waste too many resources on students who are neither capable of nor interested in a true university education. The more frightening problem, to me, is that vast swaths of the students who are mentally capable simply have no interest, as evidenced by what they actually spend their time doing.

We are embarking, then, on a dangerous experiment. We are adding, to the bottom half of the intelligence ladder, intelligent people with inferior skills and a poor grounding in history, logic, theology, fine arts, and sciences. We are doing so in an age when news, entertainment, and politics are dominant and interchangeable, and when government is constrained less and less by constitutional parameters than by the whim of bureaucrats and judges.

Perhaps, were I better grounded in the history of civilizations, I might be able to conjure some hypotheses from all this. One thing seems clear, however. If the relatively short-lived American experiment in liberty and prosperity is ended in this century, thoughtful people picking through the rubble will know exactly whom to blame — every one of us.