A very dear English friend of mine who lives in Portugal sent me this link. I'm sure you have probably seen it before. He asked me what I thought of it, and how it made him think that maybe having the voting franchise extended to everyone in the US may not necessarily be a good idea. He wanted my reply because he knew he could count on something out of me...So here it is:
Yeah, seen that before.
I sort of agree with you on that. So did the founding fathers. That’s why the US is a republic and not a democracy. And when it was founded the requirement was to be a property-owning male in order to vote. And even then, voting is only ever really for local elections. When Americans vote for president, they are not voting for the president but voting for the electors from their state in the electoral college who will vote for president. That’s why it is possible to lose the popular vote and still be president.
On the other hand, I suspect the only reason you might get different answers on the British street or the Portuguese street, for that matter, is that other countries impinge so much on day-to-day life that it is hard to avoid. But British schools now have an 80% literacy rate for eleven year olds, for instance. And fighting imaginary racism and raising global warming awareness seems to be the only thing British schools do these days (we’ve had to teach our daughter how to read and do her sums, despite the fact that she has attended the best state schools in the local area).
So I suspect the great unwashed masses are as ignorant in different countries in different ways.
When the leftoids took over education in the Anglosphere in the 60s, the focus moved away from an actual education to making children feel good. The Americans are just now beginning to raise themselves out of the slumber, there is a lot of educational activism and home-schooling, but they are still cheerfully going along here in Britain, thank you very much.
The reason universal education was one of the planks in the Communist Manifesto was that people could be made equally ignorant so that the State could take over much of their lives; I am really conscious of how much the State in the UK interferes in every one’s life now to a degree that would have been unimaginable two generations ago. And hardly any one is fighting back, because they’ve been educated otherwise.
I’d rather be ignorant and free, than educated and a slave to the State. Heck, I’d rather a bunch of ignorant yokels who cherish freedom and believe that we are born with rights run the world than a bunch of highly “educated” bureaucrats who believe Nanny knows best, and that the State grants rights to people, run the world.
But that’s just me...
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