Education Should Be Dangerous

A Random Opinion (tm) by WS (Skip) Mendler

(To be fair, conservatives aren't the only ones guilty, as we will soon see.)

The thing that should come immediately to your mind, of course, is, "What do you mean by 'educated,' buddy?" Like so many issues of controversy in the political arena, precise definitions of key concepts are few and far between, and misconceptions and misinterpretations, both accidental and intentional, abound. Let me discuss what I mean by "educated" --

• Properly educated people are capable of thinking for themselves.
• An educated person can evaluate information and come to an independent conclusion regarding the truth or falsity of a statement.
• An educated person is not prey to demagoguery (from whatever source -- left, right, or center), but is hip to the ways that rhetoric and logic can be abused.
• An educated person is therefore a tough sell.
• An educated person is also very difficult to govern.
• An educated person understands and appreciates the acheivements of his or her race, class, gender, or nation -- but also understands his or her place in relationship to other groups and to history, and knows that the strength of others does not come at his or her expense. The educated person also appreciates and is not threatened by diversity of culture or of opinions.
• An educated person understands the wider effects of his or her actions, and is neither insular nor uncaring about those effects.
• An educated person knows injustice when he or she sees it.
• An educated person understands how to analyze situations, and can plan and execute creative, appropriate, and effective responses.
• An educated person does not accept things as they are, but always questions the status quo.
• An truly educated person is therefore ipso facto a revolutionary, in the best sense of that term.

And I submit that a bunch of well-educated, socially aware, independent-thinking, capable, and empowered individuals is the last thing that the Powers What Be want to have around -- and as proof, I submit the vast majority of material produced by the infotainment zaibatsu, or, as Orwell tagged it, "Prolesec" (the folks in charge of entertaining the proletariat), and indeed, much of what is happening in industrial-model schools today.

Relevance to cyberspace? Many of us see cyberspace as an important tool for creating the above-mentioned bunch -- or rather, more properly, facilitating the self-creation of that bunch of real revolutionaries -- or, even more properly, removing the barriers to that self-creation that have been thrown up by said self-protecting Powers What Be.

Comments? Any additions or deletions to the definition posited above? Please send them along to me at smendler@well.com