(. . . with our dumbed down leaders)
Education in America has done a fine job. “Despite nearly constant news coverage since the war there began in 2003, 63 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 failed to correctly locate the country on a map of the Middle East. Seventy percent could not find Iran or Israel,” reports National Geographic. “Young Americans just don’t seem to have much interest in the world outside of the U.S.,” mused David Rutherford, a specialist in geography education at the National Geographic Society in Washington. Young Americans are so ill-educated, half of them can’t find New York on a map, let alone Iran and Iraq. “Many young Americans also lack basic map-reading skills…. Told they could escape an approaching hurricane by evacuating to the northwest, only two-thirds could indicate which way northwest is on a map.” But it is not simply geography.
“Three in ten respondents put the U.S. population between one and two billion (it’s just under 300 million, according the U.S. Census Bureau). Seventy-four percent said English is the most commonly spoken native language in the world (it’s Mandarin Chinese).” Considering the widespread ignorance of the American public—and older Americans are not much better when it comes to finding countries on a map, or for that matter naming their state representative—it makes perfect sense a gaggle of neocons, espousing what amounts to fascist authoritarianism, were able to capture the government, invade two countries in six years, and now threaten to attack a third.
As John Taylor Gatto writes, “the once mighty reading Samson of America was led eyeless to Gaza with the rest of the slaves.” Gatto points out a few astounding facts. “Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered,” writes Gatto, a former New York teacher of the year.
According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don’t want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it’s too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?
Dictatorship and despotism thrive when ignorance and stupidity rule societies . . .
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