Thursday, March 11, 2010

Thomas Sowell: Artificial stupidity

Subject: txt bdd vals grn libs edu -
A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears.

She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide — a fancy chemical name for water.

A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times.

This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov's dog when we hear a certain sound— in this case, the sound of some politically correct crusade.

People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities.

In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators... [snip]

Will Rogers once said that it was not ignorance that was so bad but "all the things we know that ain't so."

But our classroom indoctrinators are getting students to think that they know after hearing only one side of an issue.

That's artificial stupidity.

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