Joanne Wrote:
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> Hi Sue,
>
> You sound as if you're reading me suggesting a
> plot by someone. I don't think that, well, not
> really.... I think our educational system went
> down hill around the time that scientism began to
> be actively promoted and used to take an
> anti-religious stance via organizations like
> CSICOP. I think the rise in ignorance is partly
> caused by those two. Extreme post modernism
> didn't help much either. Critical thinking is in
> critical condition in this country, I'm afraid.

Oh. What I'm getting at is that a poor education system can be very useful to certain agendas. How that system got as poor as it did probably has more to do with the economic and cultural divisions between the North and the South, between the classes, and between orthodox xtian fundies and humanists. Extremes on any one side can help make a mishmash of education, but the advent of standardized testing has become a huge bugbear, and that is basically racist at its core, though masked as something else and easily manipulated by the current theocracy in order to promote enough failure to justify vouchers and faith based options. What this means for science, engineering, and higher education is that corporations have to look to foreign countries for people with those kinds of degrees and expertise needed to fill tech and science jobs, which of course is rather convenient in that these jobs will cost much less. Thus, what we have, at heart, is a nice fine way for the large and the rich to plunder and pillage the world, justify it and gloat over it.

Sue