It was also crushed by weight of enormous economic crisis.
Smart people pushed to the wall will be more dangerous than stupid(ish) people who have something to lose.
I don't have many vivid memories of my primary school education but one of them was being taught how to be suspicious of claims made in advertisements. That one class stuck with me for a long time. (This was in Melbourne, Australia sometime around 1988.)
Turning your descendants into doctors and lawyers is one of the traditional ways families use to preserve their wealth. It isn’t because these people were smarter.
FWIW, advertising and to a larger extent advocacy in 1988 and what is today are entirety different animals.
Though I do agree with your point. The number of college graduates does not equate to higher critical thinking of a nation's populace.
I did attend a journalism class almost a decade ago. Even though the powerful effects of mass media on people were likened to a magic bullet [0] It would be correct to assume that social media tech today has transcended this very capability and in more powerful ways than ever imaginable by its inventor.
There certainly are more forms and techniques of advertising, but if you teach the fundamentals sufficiently well, the critical thinking skill set can adapt as advertising adapts.
An important fundamental is to recognise that you have a desire for a product or service and to know to be conscious of the chain of events that have led to that desire.
Even if everyone experiences the same schooling, everyone isn’t going to be equally educated.
Keeping children in school for 12 years doesn't mean they are educated.
Keep in mind that between 7-9% of school-age children in the US are homeschooled.
James Madison, The Federalist Papers
I’m not sure how to break that cycle. It seems to require some kind of forcing function which pushes the topic into verifiable facts and logic but that’s hard to against opposition and only works when things are fairly clear-cut (e.g. you can show Robert E. Lee was a bad person from historical records but it’s not easy to objectively prove the causes of poverty or crime rates).
I disagree. If you notice with American politics both sides believe in strong dogmas. There is no middle ground.
They both have made their beds and they will lay in it.
Corporate Dems (control the Democratic Party) and the MAGA (control the GOP) have their own ecochambers. MSNBC, CNN, etc indoctrinate the Dems. Talk radio for the GOP.
The two cults will continue to clash. I wonder if the people will wake up.
The "wake up" approach doesn't seem to be working, but we do need some way of reforming our society around the idea of the mighty middle that is not represented by the extremes.
Being left or right doesn't mean that you necessarily have to throw reason and critical thinking out the window. Being an extremist, sure; devotion to dogma is often a feature of extremism, but that's not the same thing.
I'm an independent. I like some of the ideas of the Right that they believe that States are governments to experiment with. I'd suggest FPTP and other solutions to just attempt to do this locally and in a State or two. It will get traction, if it's worth it to the governed population. That's my suggestion, start small.
That's mostly feels like just all talk, though. A concrete example: California would love to do some health care experiments, including going single-payer. However, the state can't do so without permission from the federal government to use Medicare funding in different ways (obviously there is no way a state could fund something like that itself without state-level tax increases that would never get past the electorate). GOP-controlled Congress would never go for that, in part because they don't want to be seen by their base as "supporting socialism", and also in part (I'm conjecturing here) that they're afraid that it'll work and they'll be proven wrong.
From the GOP's perspective it more seems like "states should experiment... as long as they're experiments we agree with".
This is the really tricky part, though... absolute free expression only prevents people from enacting total control if it persists; however, free speech is not something that can’t be undone.
This is a form of the paradox of tolerance. If people use their absolute free speech to push lies and propaganda that allows them to gain enough control to then suppress future free speech and maintain their own power, we are no longer protected by free speech.
Even if you believe truth always eventually wins out if free speech is allowed, that doesn’t mean that we won’t hit a point along that path where free speech is restricted, and our meandering path towards truth suddenly stops.
Now, I don’t think restricting free speech is the answer, but we can’t pretend that it is impossible for people to use their power of free speech to prevent free speech in the future.