Quora question: "Why is the United States so messed up right now in 2021?"

My answer:

100+ years of “public education” has produced the electorate we have today. Too many people can’t reason, have no coherent philosophy, have no knowledge of actual history (only “social justice” history), have been taught that Western Civilization is the root of all evil in the world, etc.

It started in the very early 1900’s, driven by the wealthy industrialists to set up a system that would produce a two-tiered output - the actually educated sons & daughters of the elite who would be managers, and the people who would be working in their factories and buying the resultant products. All the “Progressives” were in favor of it. They wanted obedient, unquestioning workers who could read, write, and do math, but not think for themselves.

Shortly afterward the “Progressives” suborned the system to create ever-greater numbers of “Social Justice Warriors,” culminating in what we have today. After more than five generations the population consists of essentially four groups - those that despite being in the public system still managed to get an education, those who were privately educated, those who the education system didn’t radicalize but instead made numb, and the radicals. (Note: a lot of the radicalized went back into the education system as teachers and administrators in a positive feedback loop.)

The private system has always been oriented towards the elites. The majority of the nation, I think, are the numb. Those who educated themselves are a minority and the radicals are too, but they - being radical - have influence far beyond their mere numbers.

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." - H.G. Wells, 1920

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"Give me a child for his first seven years and I'll give you the man." - Quote attributed to the Jesuits

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"All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth." - Aristotle

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"A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) has footnotes explaining what words like 'arraigned,' 'curried' and 'exculpate' meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today's expensively under-educated generation.

"There is really nothing very mysterious about why our public schools are failures. When you select the poorest quality college students to be public school teachers, give them iron-clad tenure, a captive audience, and pay them according to seniority rather than performance, why should the results be surprising?

"Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

"In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees." - Thomas Sowell

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"It is only from a special point of view that 'education' is a failure. As to its own purposes, it is an unqualified success. One of its purposes is to serve as a massive tax-supported jobs program for legions of not especially able or talented people. As social programs go, it’s a good one. The pay isn’t high, but the risk is low, the standards are lenient, entry is easy, and job security is pretty good...in fact, the system is perfect, except for one little detail. We must find a way to get the children out of it.”—Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian.