When Indoctrination Is Enlightenment - 2

In the first post in this series, Dredd Blog noted that there is a growing confusion or controversy about what is heat and what is light, what is enlightenment and what is indoctrination.

There is a pundit storm swirling about the state of education within the state of the nation today.

Evidently someone checked the figures only to find that we are running an educational deficit to match our other deficits:

"As a country we've dummied down standards. We've reduced them due to political pressure and, we've actually been lying to children and parents telling them they're ready when they're not," Duncan said on Sunday during ABC's "This Week".

He also argued the educational system in America has reached a crisis point that threatens the nation's long-term economic stability.

"We have to educate our way to a better economy. In this country, we have a 25 percent dropout rate," Duncan said. "That's economically unsustainable and morally unacceptable. We have to get the dropout rate to zero as quickly as we can. The status quo is not going to work for the country, we have to get better."

Duncan said there are no easy answers to improving American schools...

(The Hill). We rank well below other comparable nations in our public education, as shown by our place in the list of 41 other nations:

Math (28th place)
Reading (18th place)
Science (22nd place)
Problem Solving (29th place)

(Education: US v World). The mysterious element in all of this is why anyone would expect anything different.

We are number one in war and military spending by a long shot, meaning that there is not much left for education after that.

In the final analysis, the solution to the mystery really depends on the meaning of the word "education".

Our War Colleges are booming while our schools decay, religious dogma trumps science, opinion trumps Civics 101, so "education" does not really mean what one would think it should mean.

When we have no direction for what we call "education", we will reach no destination, instead we will be blown by the winds onto the rocks of history, like all the empires that loose focus as to who they are and where they are.

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The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.