Education and the Internet and Fred

Cartoon by BALOO

We now have technology that puts almost all human knowledge at our fingertips.  No computers when I was a kid, of course, and certainly no internet.  If you wanted to find out something about Charlemagne or algebra or Mercury (it had a twilight zone back then), you went to the library.  And I remember going to the library for stuff like that.  Now it's right there on the internet, and a whole lot more than at any library you might happen to find.

So why is everybody so ignorant?  Fred Reed has his theories here, and I certainly agree with most of what he says, but there are other factors.  For one thing, the educational establishment is dominated by a combination of lazy time-servers and left-wing ideologues.  To kids, these people are what "educated" means.  No wonder they don't have any respect for education or knowledge. They think it'll make them turn out like the losers assigned to teach them.

Another problem is that along with educated role models being pretty repugnant, their really cool role models are pretty uniformly ignorant.  And that brings us to the joys of multiculturalism.  We've been bombarded for decades with establishment propaganda that Blacks are cool. Cool and vibrant.  Gangstas are cool. Violence is really bad except when Black gangstas do it. Mistreating women is just horrible except when Black gangstas do it.  So if you want to do all this neat stuff you gotta be either Black or Black-oid, and when did a White kid ever get criticized for acting Black?  It only works in reverse.  And, part of being Black, in this popular imagination, is to be ignorant, lazy, irresponsible, and violent.  The code word for this is "vibrant."

Now, there have always been ignorant, lazy, irresponsible, and violent White kids, but until the elevation of Black culture to its current dominant position, their scope was relatively limited.  As in most human culture, everything is always present, but the proportions make all the difference.  The hoodlums were a subculture back in the 1950's, but they're the dominant culture now, and other ways of life for kids are the subcultures.

How do we break out of this downward spiral?  Suggestions are welcome.