Ignorance is a Prison

Those who choose not to know are slaves to those who do.

I wrote a post recently that proposed conspiracy theories were caused by lack of information - well, that is for people who try to pay attention to events, both current and historical.

Then I read a link from X about school officials and police in Houston, Texas, reporting and detaining a middle schooler for passing counterfeit currency and warning his grandmother, who gave him the money, for using counterfeit bills.

The counterfeit money in question?

A perfectly legal $2 bill. Produced until 1966, paused, and then re-issued beginning in 1976, it is rare these days, but is legal.

Shortly thereafter, I ran across the "controversy" about how Pete Hegseth, Trump's putative SecDef nominee, is a known white supremacist.

How do they know?

Well, he has tattoos of a swastika on his chest and a well-known white supremacist phrase on his arm.

The problem is the "swastika" is a Jerusalem cross and the phrase "Deus vult" (God wills it) are common Christian symbols originating at least a thousand years ago.

Then there are the "man on the street" interviews that show people don't know who the sides were in the Revolutionary War, WWI, or WWII or even the Civil War. Some people who were interviewed about the recent election didn't even know who was running.

Most interviewed did not even have a basic grasp of economics.

Donald Trump has lived a long life, much of it in the public eye. He has done media, written books and had his own TV show. He's been interviewed by people from Phil Donahue to Oprah. He was a leading figure in New York City real estate for decades.

And yet there are people will swear on a stack of Bibles that he is a secret racist, fascist, Nazi.

It's not just a lack of transparency that fuels these theories, it is ignorance – and often it is willful ignorance.

If you don't know such basic things, you are doomed to have your life controlled by others. A free society and a representative republic like ours must have educated citizens.

A century ago, a high school diploma signified an important educational achievement.

Fifty years ago, the mark of achievement was a college degree.

Today, a college degree is a mark of nothing other than a person who made it through some ill-defined four-year curricula at a specific location and was released, seemingly unharmed.

Over this past century, our systems of "education" have become indoctrination centers and diploma mills producing "graduates" with worthless pieces of paper that signify nothing. They exit college after sixteen years of schooling having been taught what to think and not how to think.

At the outset, the goal of our public education systems was to produce these educated citizens - but these systems have failed miserably.

Public schools are not "public", they are government schools, part of a system owing its existence to 19th century communism and anti-Catholicism.

Unable to compete with private parochial schooling provided by the Catholic church, other denominational schools appealed to the government for funding and protection - thus began the idea of government funded schools, and education became an industry - and as common sense teaches, when something becomes "free" (i.e. collectively funded by taxes), when the link between payment and service is severed, the quality of the product declines - and in this case, education is the product.

Because the schools are allegedly “free", parents are not as interested in assuring their child’s attendance or performance. Since public schools are guaranteed the revenues associated with each pupil in their geographical districts; there is no need for schools to strive for excellence, merely to assure a headcount.

The public-school systems then dance to the one who calls the tune - and the federal government, through the Department of Education and the funds it controls, calls the tune. Public schools have become the tools of indoctrination controlled by teachers’ unions, the goals of which place teaching children quite low on the list of priorities, all in the name of "equity".

The obvious and conspicuous failure of public schools are the best example of why the Department of Education should be abolished.

I don't expect everybody to be Elon Musk, Richard Feynman, Robert Oppenheimer, or Da Vinci, I'm certainly not, but everybody can't just be a dog faced pony soldier, walking around in a daze, and waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

Ignorance is a prison sentence for life.