Illiterates Are The 20 Percent
An acquaintance, Dr. Alex Lickerman, had some thoughts on his blog today regarding how our nation's poor educational level adversely affects our democracy. It is stunning to consider 1 of 5 working Americans are functionally illiterate; is it any wonder we get the results we do?:
"Wikipedia lists the rate of functional illiteracy in the U.S. (as measured between 1994-2003), for example, at 20 percent."There are a number of reasons this statistic fills me with dread, but I’ll mention only the one I find most troubling: The solutions our political leaders seek for our most pressing problems are largely determined by which are most popular. And which are most popular is largely determined by our population’s ability to understand the problems for which the solutions are being proposed. Which, as far as I can tell, is dismal. Which means the most popular solutions are also the solutions most likely to be wrong. Which means our population’s lack of education is compromising our political leaders’ ability to solve problems. (If enough constituents understood, for example, the true causes of our current economic crisis and demanded real fixes instead of the appearance of real fixes, politicians might actually feel able to implement them without committing political suicide.)
"We all seem too quickly satisfied with the easy answers our politicians spoon feed us. ... [I]f we don’t educate ourselves, if we allow our politicians and pundits to do our thinking for us, we won’t be able to demand of our leaders effective solutions for our problems.
"For the real solutions to our problems aren’t easy to understand. How do you fix healthcare? First by understanding what’s wrong with it. ... [W]ithout first understanding the root causes of the problems it’s trying to solve, how can anyone possibly judge the quality of its solutions?
" ... [O]ur collective opinion has power. If our political leaders seem to be pushing our country toward a cliff, it’s only because we the people are pushing them to do it."
Labels: dr. lickerman, illiteracy, the real danger of poor education
posted by Lisa at 9:22 PM
7 Comments:
Keepin 'em dumb on one end and going broke trying to obtain minimal education credentials: Real smart way to build a nation , que no?
Then again, a sure fire way to create Republicans.
There it is,
Deryle
Should have read:
going broke trying to obtain minimal education credentials at the other. Real
smart way to nation build, que no?
Then again...it doesn't take a genius to get the gist of plutocracy and oligarchy; many of the people who turned out for the general strikes in the early 20th Century, many of the people who fought for unionization, who voted for the New Deal in the Thirties, were semi-literate or illiterate, many of them were right off the boat with little or no English.
So let's not discount the effect of thirty-plus years of concentrated effort to pound the idea that "greed is good" and "no more taxes" into the proles' heads. It's entirely possible that every one of these people could be brought up to college-level reading and STILL insist that their "leaders" carry out policies that push the U.S. further towards a return to the Gilded Age...
Say it ain't so Cheif, say it ain't so.
"Spot on" as they say.
D
Chief and DP,
In the long run it's a flip of a coin .
It doesn't matter who is elected and it certainly doesn't matter if i vote, or if my vote is informed or purchased by dogmatic bullshit.
we do not have representative gov't ,nor does it care what we think-they only care for our whore vote and they pimp on.
jim
Chief,
You make an interesting point:
When people have good horse sense, they know what to do; if they are well-educated in a liberal arts sense, they can use reason to figure out what they need to do.
However, when the education is fair-to-middlin', and people pull into their little enclaves out of fear, reason goes out the window, oft times.
Gosh, could Santorum have been right about education not being all that ?!? (I tease, for they all speak from their own agenda; he thinks the poorly educated will be more malleable.)
PS: I just read this indictment of our rational capacities as being insufficient to save us, by biologist Ernst Mayr (paraphrased by Chomsky) --
"And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation."
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