May 3, 2006
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. "If a
nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it
expects what never was and never will be," Thomas Jefferson declared in
1816. At the time, the populace of America understood the powers of
sovereignty are vested in the people and are exercised by the people,
not the government. Americans read and comprehended the Preamble of the
Constitution, where specific tasks are assigned to government. In the
early 19th century, John Locke’s "liberal" philosophy of natural rights
(universal rights derived from natural law) inspired and guided many
Americans. Now most Americans follow the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes,
although they have no idea of Hobbes or what he wrote about government.
Hobbes believed that sovereignty was vested in the state. As an example
of the Hobbesian state, consider that most Americans believe only the
government may grant "civil rights," when in fact rights are natural,
much like the physical laws of nature, and inalienable, that is to say
the government cannot take them away.
In 1810, an editorialist for the Portland Gazette and Maine Advertiser
wrote in response to Napoleon Bonaparte’s banning of printing presses:
"When people are … determined to be ignorant, what is the use of
printing? When a man is determined that he will not receive
information, it is of very little use to lay it before him…. You may
talk to him, and print for him, he will still be ignorant…. An ignorant
man is easily led astray—he envies the man of enlightened mind, and
would sooner vote for an unprincipled blockhead, than an honest and
upright man of talents and learning. This kind of system leads to riot
and anarchy—anarchy leads to absolute despotism, and ignorance fits the
people to bear that despotism."
In Napoleon’s time,
"prefects of departments and special censors" micromanaged news and
information. Now we have the corporate media releasing select
government propaganda to masses dumbed-down by decades of public
education. Many people are functionally illiterate and unable to
navigate the written language. Knowing the characters of American Idol
is more important than knowing the names of state representatives. In
such a fetid environment, tyranny grows quite naturally and
unopposed—and thanks to the corporate media and state administered
education, most people do not know their country is now a dictatorship,
or dangerously close to this condition, and the situation will be
nearly complete after our Napoleon and his minions ban the equivalent
of the printing press.
Of course, for our neolib rulers and
their bankster handlers, widespread ignorance—especially ignorance of
geography and, more importantly, igorance of the concepts of our
one-time constitutional republic—is the preferred state of existence,
for chattel unenlightened make for better slaves. As George Orwell
wrote in his dystopian novel, 1984, the state depends on ignorance and
fear to control the masses, who are of course the ultimate enemy:
At
this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war
with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private
utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time
been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it
was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in
alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge
which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily
under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened.
Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at
war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute
evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was
impossible.
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