T h e F i d o G a z e t t e Volume 15 Number 13 September 22nd,
2021
[...]
...The dumbing down of America is
most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in
the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites
now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator
programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and
superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of
ignorance"
~Carl Sagan, 1995
" And yet he felt repelled by the teaching machines. For the entire Public School was geared to a task which went contrary to his grain: the school was there not to inform or educate, but to mold, and along severely limited lines. It was the link to their inherited culture, and it peddled that culture, in its entirety, to the young. It bent its pupils to it; perpetuation of the culture was the goal, and any special quirks in the children which might lead them in another direction had to be ironed out.
" It was a battle, Jack realized, between the composite psyche of the school and the individual psyches of the children, and the former held all the key cards. A child who did not properly respond was assumed to be autistic--that is, oriented according to a subjective factor that took precedence over his sense of objective reality. And that child wound up by being expelled from the school; he went, after that, to another sort of school entirely, one designed to rehabilitate him: he went to Camp Ben-Gurion. He could not be taught; he could only be dealt with as ill.
[PKD, Martian Time-Slip]
--- SBBSecho 3.14-Linux
* Origin: The Rusty MailBox - Penticton, BC Canada (1:153/757.2)