I originally wrote this on July 17th, 2005, though I have made a few revisions to the text below - mainly typographical connections but I also added a fair amount of text and tweaked some of the wording. This was really intended to be as much of a call to action as a critique of our educational system.
I decided to repost it here after a lengthy conversation on this very subject with an artist in my neighborhood. He agreed completely with my premise here (and actually initiated the conversation), but I fear he has taken the wrong lesson from it and simply become more cynical rather than actively working to fix it in the political arena (though much to his credit he and his wife founded a school which does address much of the educational issues involved).
I think this is especially relevant now in light of recent events.
Originally posted at http://www.dailykos.com/...
I just finished reading a book yesterday by David Gerrold called Leaping to the Stars. It's mostly just a great action-adventure story, but like nearly all science fiction, it does hit upon some rather weighty issues including the relationship between man and technology and the nature of good and evil. In the context of a political science class, he described how the United States had collapsed after three hundred years. It was almost as if he was channeling both Howard Dean and Barack Obama when this book was written in 2001/2002 (first edition was printed in 2002, well before Dean exploded onto the national scene).
When asked why the US had failed, the students responded with a litany of complaints, all of which we're familiar with in some form or another (illegal aliens, liberals, fundamentalists, greed, special interests, etc.). After the students ran out of people to blame, the professor explained the truth in a way that I think will prove to be prophetic.
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