Your article made me think a lot more about the importance of education. Throughout Antiquity, the renaissance, the enlightenment, and the industrial revolution, most men were educated by teachers and professors who had to compete for students. In the United States, public schooling spread around the early 1800s, but until the progressive era schools were run exclusively by local governments and rarely taught anything outside of basic reading, writing, maths and history. After the progressive era, the education system has changed very little. While much has changed in the past 100 years, have people become more educated? How many people do you know that speak more than one language today? Who could name more than a handful of the founding fathers of the United States? Who could find Iraq on a map? who know who Napoleon Bonapart was? Could name more than three philosophers in the history of the world? If you meet people who come out of public schools, you'll find very few you can pass any of those tests. But your article also made me think outside of education itself. In today's western culture, the government funds socialist and subjectivist academics, they help socialist politicians get elected by destroying the minds of young people while also making them more obedient to all of their goals, and the cycle of intellectual cannibalism continues. But if the power over young people's minds was striped from the politicians, there would be a much greater opportunity to fertilize a culture of reason and freedom. Some time earlier, I started a discussion about improving our system of elections, to change the framing of politicaldiscussion (no more Republican vs. Democrat, lesser of two evils, pragmatic politics nonsense). While my suggestions, and those made by Steve and others on other threads could amount to some opportunity to make change, even these modest reforms are unlikely with the minds of most voters being pulled like puppets as they are. Thank you very much for your article Joseph!
|
