Lack of education?

Just because the Egyptians might have a long (democratic) row to hoe does not mean that we should advise them against it. Remember, Jefferson said that education was essential to the proper functioning of a democracy, but he did not say that it was a guarantee.

We only have to look at ourselves, or at the United Kingdom, or Germany to know that having a well-educated populace does not guarantee effective democracy. This is particularly questionable in light of the degree of surveillance that the Anglo-axis in the West has been pursuing. So many people acted so surprised when they found out because they didn't "know" how bad it was.

Does this make them uneducated or simply uninformed? Obviously they were uninformed, but does that excuse them for (a) being so surprised and (b) not being willing to do anything substantial about it. Anyone who has a critical slant of mind has suspected for quite sometime that there's more going on behind the scenes than "they" (in this case, the "powers that be", or PTB) are telling us. After all, there are a lot of facts and tons of information available to all of us in the newly declared Information Age, so apparently access to information isn't all that helpful in certain critical areas, such as our rights to privacy and freedom from intrusion, or even oppression.

What my little digression into literacy rates last time tells us is that in the West, at least, we're sending everybody to school, and just about everybody can read and write, but not everybody can think. When I say "think", I mean "think critically". Thinking critically is not complaining about anything and everything, it is not whining about others doing things I don't agree with, it isn't viewing everyone with a different opinion as mentally deficient. No, in fact, critical thinking is precisely the opposite of all that: it's raising questions, especially uncomfortable ones; it is trying to understand why others act as they do and why it is different from how we ourselves might act; it is engaging other opinions and testing them for their accuracy and validity. And that, my dear friends, is what I hardly see at all anymore, especially in all those allegedly highly educated societies (whereby I am including the US here, for simplicity's sake: we know they don't have nor want a society anymore, they are apparently more than satisfied just with their economy).

Yes, the reactions of those around me to what has happened in Egypt said much more about us than it will ever say about them. We are in the process of equating information with knowledge, of assuming that being informed is being educated, of believing that everybody else is all screwed up but we've got our ducks in line. What's becoming ever clearer to me, though, is that we really don't know if they're ducks, and we've got even less idea what order they are in.