We don't need no education

There is plenty of data that supports the idea that there is a growing income disparity in America and I don’t think it’s an unfair stretch to say that the policies of the current administration or the Party for which it stands, have made the rich richer and the middle class poorer. Is it also fair to look at their policies to explain the apparently increasing knowledge gap?

Certainly the US does not lack for educational institutions nor for graduates thereof, yet from an older person’s viewpoint, it is frightening to hear from adults who have degrees and who don’t know what century our civil war was fought in, the dates of WW II or why there was a Berlin wall. More frightening that history repeats itself before blind eyes and knowledge is still made tongue-tied by superstition, mythology and the anger of the ignorant.

In an interview in Tuesday’s New York Times, Dr. Jon Miller, a political scientist who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School tells us that “At a time when science permeates debates on everything from global warming to stem cell research, people's inability to understand basic scientific concepts undermines their ability to take part in the democratic process.”

As important, is that it also undermines their resistance to manipulation. Much of today’s world involves a far greater knowledge of science and scientific method that most Americans have. According to Dr. Miller, American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.

How much smaller is the percentage that know anything about the geological record, paleontological record, the movement of charges across semiconductor junctions, quantum mechanics, relativity or any of the other cornerstones of the last century’s knowledge?

Is it the opinions of those who see a tiny, tidy and new universe filled with magic spirits who are most easily bought by the Religious Right, the kleptocapitalists and the party that represents them? Our republic was put together by educated men and it’s being disassembled by men who stimulate the anger and confusion of the ignorant and use it against all of us.