Reply #174: Sorry to jump into this thread since I'm only 40 [View All]

[FlyingSquirrel]

But you have just hit the nail on the head. The nation has been dumbed down and it hasn't happened by accident. You control the masses by making sure they're stupid. John McCain plans to continue the dumbing-down of the country, (not for his own benefit obviously since he's not long for this world... so why?) It started with television, I think. Video games accelerated the process. But even with those handicaps, we could still have a reasonably educated electorate if they didn't constantly, year-in and year-out underfund education. If jobs paid enough to live on, so that parents weren't both working and weren't too exhausted to actually spend time helping their kids learn. If social services weren't constantly being cut and people didn't have to spend half their time sitting in waiting rooms trying to get the help they needed. If the government actually really cared about nutrition instead of preaching from on high about the food pyramid, while packaged foods full of who knows what continued to be churned out (and by the way, who has time when both parents work to cook a nice nutritious meal every evening when you can pop a couple of dinners in the microwave?) All these things affect the brain and the ability to learn and be an intelligent and informed person. Oh, and one more thing - the public school system refuses to acknowledge it when a kid is just not ready for the next grade level. Kids are on an assembly line and that assembly line does not stop (my stepson is absolutely not ready for middle school but there he is, a week into school already drowning. Soon he will just give up and stop even trying to learn, but they'll just keep advancing him till he drops out in high school.)