[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

The state run education is all about taxing, spending money and providing jobs. Teaching and learning anything of value is secondary. I am starting to think that there is a new and somewhat malignant idea growing. There is not the same need for literacy that there was fifty years ago. Think of the computer touch screen where one presses little symbols. Most people in the future will be pressing little symbols thus do not need to be able to read, write and cipher.

In addition, if people are educated they think too much and that can be unsettling to some. Combine mass illiteracy with the encouragement of the philosophy of extreme hedonism to keep the troops happy and one has nearly endless control. Huxley may have been right.

[an amused spectator]

Think of the computer touch screen where one presses little symbols. Most people in the future will be pressing little symbols thus do not need to be able to read, write and cipher.

I just installed a new printer. The instructions were entirely pictographic. I desperately needed words, also - just for my own peace of mind.

BTW - makes lawsuits harder, too. It's your fault you misinterpreted the picture!

[Phlyer]

The state run education is all about taxing, spending money and providing jobs.

A generation ago (or two, basically until about 1960) before the GI Bill started getting results, only about 20% of the population had a college degree. The lower half of that 20% - and teachers always come from the lower half, more like lower third, of college graduates - was still pretty far toward the intellectual end of society as a whole. They could think with logic and reason because all college graduates were required to do that, and they knew how to learn better than the majority of the population. In a cocktail party conversation, they were the recognized 'brightest people in the room' most of the time.

But when the majority of the population can get a college degree ("equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity", and no longer limited to those of demonstrated wisdom, like veterans smart enough to survive), the standards to graduate must be lowered. Now, the lower third of graduates are not even of average intellectual ability - and the vast majority of teachers come from that lower third.

They've never learned how to learn, so they can't help anyone else learn. To obscure their own failings and attempt to reclaim the mantle of intellectuals, they invent all sorts of pseudo-intellectual self-justification - none of which would stand up to honest, objective inquiry based on results.

So, the 'dumbing down' of education is caused by a dumbing down of the average college graduate through expansion to a much larger segment of the population, and teachers are the lower end of the college graduate spectrum, so their "dumbward acceleration" is greater than even the median of college graduates. And since they are no longer inherently selected for ability to learn (since anyone can get a college degree), they have nothing to pass along to the next generation.