If you’ve read my blog for any length of time you know that one of my hobby-horses is primary education in this country. Today I stumbled across an answer at Quora that illustrates my concerns.
The question asked was: “Do democracies inherently require well-educated leaders to properly function?”
The answer was:
No, democracies require well-educated people.
That is partly why democracies are not yet efficient power-sharing societies, even in the “developed” countries;
For equal access to high standard education you need a democratically and collectively owned and controlled economy that supplies the science and information without any influence of the conservative oligarchs whose private ownership corrupts our old, sad capitalist system.
The author lives in Hungary. Hungary. The mind boggles. But that’s what’s being pushed for here.
“For equal access to high standard education you need a democratically and collectively owned and controlled economy…” That does not sound like a democracy to me that sounds more like socialism. But what do I know? Grew up in NYC during the 50’s and 60’s and the public school system was terrific, now not so much. Yes there are bight spots here and there but too many failures. But the school system now has been captured by those getting on the school boards which was supposed to make schools more responsive to parents. Does seem to have worked – the way it was itended
See, funny thing about that…
We have ‘equal access’ to education and information. You can audit courses online at MIT. You can surf the non-political portions of Wikipedia and pick up a lot of things.
Do not tell me someone has no access when they have a smartphone. If you’re lucky I will only call you a moron.
The problem is that a lot of people don’t want to go swimming in the deep end of the pool — not because they might drown, but because they might learn something inconvenient.
Learning something inconvenient such as It takes a lot of work to achieve anything worthwhile out of life, same goes for not drowning as well, takes a lot of work. You get out of life only that which is equal to the amount of effort you are willing to put into it. Since the beginning of the printing press and availability of information to the masses there has no limit to what you can teach yourself – if you have the fortitude to pursue it.
There is one truth that can’t be denied – “the more you learn, the more you will realize how little you know.”
I was in the IT industry and while in it “earned” a BS, an MS and an MBA. It the age problem and so went to teach at a university and got a PhD in Information Systems. That was when I really understood how little I knew, 4 degrees and 28 years in the IT industry. Boy was it an eye opener.
“For equal access to high standard education you need a democratically and collectively owned and controlled economy that supplies the science and information without any influence of the conservative oligarchs whose private ownership corrupts our old, sad capitalist system.”
There is no such animal as equality, in anything. As Thomas Sowell is fond of pointing out, you can’t even achieve equal environmental conditions among identical twins, much less anyone more different than that.
Access? Sure. Common, cheap, easy access? Sure. Equal amounts of time, time management skill, attention span, native intelligence, and a host of other factors affecting what benefit it is possible to get from a given amount of access? Never happens.
And I note that the person who gave this answer is either okay with the dominating influence of the agendas of statist aristocrats in the education system of “a democratically and collectively owned and controlled economy,” or he/she doesn’t admit the existence of such. The reality is that for state-run education to be free of the agendas of the statists who control it is far less likely than for a dog to naturally and spontaneously be free of fleas.
Well, Hungary has only been under any sort of democracy for 33 years now.
So, either he’s older, and “trained” well enough in socialist ideals, or he’s younger, and never ever, ever, ever had to deal directly with what that leads to.
I once was sitting around with five former Cubans. Four of them were very, very, very, very anti-anything that *hinted* at Communism. The other wasn’t so much.
Also of interest, was one of them’s father had been a fairly important muckity in the Communist setup. Seems that that kept him out of the fields during the sugarcane harvest. Whereas the others got to spent a month “in school” harvesting sugarcane. For several years.
That I’m referring to the exact same person surely doesn’t make sense, right?
Kevin,
Please, do keep this in mind; You can’t fix stupid, with any amount of education.
The goal of “modern education” is INDOCTRINATION.
And a democracy….any democracy….ALL democracies….is
nothing but mob rule at the ballot box where 51% of the voters
can vote to rob, rape and pillage the other 49%.
Leftists like to pretend that socialism can be democratic. This requires ignoring the immense power imbalance that results from giving some people (called the government) control over the economy. When you control not only a man’s job but _every_ job he can ever get, you have more control over the man than an Cheka or Gestapo and prison camps can give you.
The USSR had freedom of the press right in its constitution. You could print anything – IF the government let you use its printing press, its paper, and its ink. The government also controlled who could run for office, but was that necessary considering their ability to control whether the vast majority of people [1] had even heard of the other candidates? And the only socialist countries that don’t have that sort of control are the ones where the socialist takeover is far from complete.
[1] The vast majority here was everyone that didn’t circulate and read underground newspapers, created by copying them on typewriters. Anyone in possession of these papers was at risk of being banned from all employment or even sent to the Gulag, so it was only those who had found their own way to dissidence – and who had the courage to continue on this perilous path – who had any information source that wasn’t approved by the government.