Crows

Following on from my last post, I'm beginning to think that the biggest problem driving populism, conspiracy theories, and general undermining of institutions is the failure of our educational system to provide a grounding in how major historical events and advancements in the totality of human knowledge led to the modern era, something that would provide young people a mental framework for why we're better off today than we were a half-century ago, and why (for example) it does not actually make sense to reopen the question of whether Hitler or Churchill was the real bad guy. Public education doesn't generally aim to do this, or at least currently hits very wide of the mark. At its most mediocre, it seeks to teach scattered facts and/or isolated, context-less skills that are useful only for further schooling and that will thus be relevant to only a small percentage of adults seeking post-graduate education; and at its worst, it seeks to configure into the plastic brains of...