I would agree with you if the purpose of educating the public was simply to make them personally happier or more productive. In democratic societies, this is not the case. The purpose of education is to produce citizens capable of participating in there own government.
Thomas Jefferson was a major proponent of dire necessity of public education for the continuance of democracy. He asserted four basic principals -
- "that democracy cannot long exist without enlightenment.
- that it cannot function without wise and honest officials.
- that talent and virtue, needed in a free society, should be educated regardless of wealth, birth or other accidental condition.
- that the children of the poor must be thus educated at common expense."
Are we educating citizens in America today? Nope, public education is grinding out worker drones that are specifically taught not to think. Jefferson would never have believed that the political sanction of free speech and inquiry that is occurring on campuses today would even be possible in the society he was envisioning. Let alone the outright programming of the populace to conform to the authority of the government, their employers, and God, in that order.
Instead of citizens capable of rational participation in their own government, we're producing franchisees of that Government, who've been formally taught, for seventeen years in most cases, that:
- every idea is just as important as every other idea (there's no way to prove anything definitively, so why not ID, etc. Gravity is just a theory, after all),
- that there are lots of ways to be intelligent (music intelligence, gee-its-too-bad-your-poor intelligence, etc.),
- that it's more important to feel good about your self than to actually achieve anything, and
- that worst possible thing they could do is form a judgment.
Being politically correct is the very most important ideal, with being economically performant running a close second.
This process produces plenty of highly suggestible votes for the "democratic" process, since the sole and only criteria for participating in the democracy is the ability to fog a mirror. By not teaching anything about true politics it also produces a great deal of nihilistic apathy about the processes of government (which is much, much better from the incumbent office holder's point of view). Want proof? Ask the next person you see who their state representative is, who their city councilman is, and how the Electoral College works. Of course, if you need to look the answers up yourself... well, you get it.
So, what to do? Throw out public education? Beef-up public education? It really doesn't matter. Jefferson's ideal is unattainable because Americans are inherently uninterested in self-governance. The fact that nobody ever mentions the true purpose of public education in these discussions is prima facie evidence of our inability to successfully govern ourselves or even understand that we should. We'll continue on, living under the tyranny of the uneducated (though often credentialed with MBAs), uninterested, NASCAR-loving, not-particularly-moral majority, blissfully ceding our liberties to his majesty, Tyrannous Ignoramus, until our Chinese overlords put a stop to this "one-man-one-vote" nonsense. Probably sooner than later.
