Elitest or Educated?

We live in two Americas.

One America functions in a print-based, literate world.

The other America, which constitutes the majority, is dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information. It is informed by simplistic narratives and clichés.

This divide, more than any other, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. They never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.

This majority cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They cannot understand predatory loan deals, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They struggle with the most basic chores of daily life. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed.

Huge segments of our population lack the capacity to search for truth and cope rationally with our mounting social and economic ills.

All the traditional tools of democracies, including dispassionate scientific and historical truth, facts, news and rational debate, are useless instruments in a nation that lacks the capacity to use them.

We must strengthen the core values of our open society: the ability to think for oneself, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change, and to acknowledge that there are other views that are morally and socially acceptable.

Finally, I am talking about being able to function in our modern and complex society, for our own benefit and for the benefit of our fellow citizens. Some may call it being elitist; I call it being educated and a good citizen.