Educated populations are harder to control than uneducated ones. That’s why competing ideologies target education to destroy thriving democracies.
Children who grow up poor and uneducated often rely on emotional cues rather than intellectual ones. So when the lights dim in Egypt, Syria, or New Orleans, they’re more likely to blame Jews and George Bush for the tyrannical mediocrity they endure. Tyrannical governments cannot survive without uneducated laborers, which is why primitive Muslim governments restrict education. But this is not a recent invention.
Democrats outlawed black education because they feared the loss of control over their slaves. When Republicans forced the end of slavery in 1865, Democrats used racial segregation to slow black education. And when Republicans forced the end of segregation in 1954, Democrats turned our public schools into asylums, far from the private schools that their own children attend.
Today, K-12 education in America is far below that of many poorer democracies – and many of our universities are headed in the same direction.
This might explain why Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Zawahiri and many Democrats share a mutual respect for one another, and ignore the pro-democracy students and activists who risk their lives demanding freedoms that uneducated Americans now take for granted.
Because I lived, worked, and traveled around the world, I know that there is much more to Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela than their saber-rattling dictators. I know little about Democrats like Pelosi, Spielberg, or Penn, but we get a pretty good idea from the people they associate with – and from a good understanding of their party’s history.
