A Greater Threat: Part Two
Educational inequality may be as great a threat as economic inequality
ByPpl
It is not just economic inequality that lessens the “good” that democracy has to offer. Another inequality is less visible, perhaps, but no less a threat. It is the inequality of education.
A fully realized democratic society has citizens not residents. Owners not renters. People who can steer a ship.
When a society is divided between the informed and uninformed, between the capable of understanding information and those merely aroused by a news cycle, we have at best only a partial democracy and near to losing even that.
It is the slippery slope toward authoritarianism. For in the absence of understanding people insist upon decisive action, of one kind or another, theatrical or real, a shadow show of heroes and villains, without regard to cost.
And the puppet masters pick the pockets of the restless crowds.
We cannot afford the degree of information illiteracy that we have. Perhaps before modern social media, the “other” were convinced of their own ignorance and left “governing to “their betters.” Or were more or less content with their place, subordinate to some, but better than their own “lessors,” i.e. new immigrants or African Americans.
Or was it that we gave them few ways to “act out.” Their religion promised later and ultimate payoffs. Their isolation on the fringes of urban life, kept them at safe distances. And hidden, and not so hidden, barriers to voting kept them permanently on the sidelines. Women differing to their fathers or husbands?
Our “democracy” has always been like South Africa during Apartheid. Or Athens. A democracy of the elite. No wonder there was little profound dissatisfaction with policy results, just differences of opinion between gentlemen.
Lincoln’s quote about fooling some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time, is no longer good enough, if it ever was.
We are now a nation of “all of the people all of the time.” To make this work, we need a “send the first person to the moon” effort to create a culture of intellectual excellence, fully realized in the lives of all of us.
It all comes back to education. Not certifications of authority. Not specialized skills. But the ability to understand the nature, extent and risks of the pursuit of common interests.