This explains a lot about our current situation....

[Newest Reality]

28. Good Quote!

Let's also consider that the ignorance is useful to some extent by those with vested interests. I would venture that if it were deemed important or useful, we would have an education system that would make ignorance and the lack of thinking skills, (how to think just as important, if not more so, than what to think) rare, considering it is compulsory anyway.

You don't want a nation full of people who are like Noam Chomsky or Issac Asimov, etc., if you want to preserve a given framework and capitalize on it, while managing to avoid threats to that system. We can consider people's willful ignorance and delusional thinking to be a problem, but how our country handles education and the dissemination of information in a broader sense is also very important.

You can fill kids up with all kinds of information, (teach for the test) and they will get a by rote stock of preferred information, (based on the value to a capitalistic, class-driven society) but it is more essential that they learn the HOW of thinking as early as possible, (based on stages of development) and that includes reason, logic and critical thinking overall.

Ah, Betsy DeVos, anyone? That is not to say that general education here, (for the masses) has been superlative, at least for a long time now. However, DeVos is a good symbol for the problem at hand.

Aldous Huxley's social classes in Brave New World seem to illustrate that well.

"A thinking man is a dangerous man." as I recall. That truism holds.