ANOTHER CORONA FOR THE ROAD, PERHAPS? THE FAILURE OF EDUCATION

You want to see where COVID-19 is raging like a viral wildfire, just break out a map of the Confederacy, throw in the Inter-Mountain West and the Dakotas, and you’re bad to go. And then punch up a map showing which states spend the least on education. Overlay the two maps and you will see they are essentially the same. The Land of Cotton, where science is soon to be forgotten, has quickly become the Heart of COVID.

Here’s the 2017 Report Card from the trusted organization “Education Week” for each state when it comes to quality education. It paints a pretty sad, but obvious, picture. The Northeast puts a premium on education and they are wearing their masks, practicing proper social distancing, and slowly getting a handle on the virus, while the Confederacy and much of the western United States wallow in their ignorance, and do so at their extreme peril.

https://www.edweek.org/ew/qc/2017/2017-state-education-grades-map.html

Let’s try a little Q & A.

• Can the Internet help make us smarter? Of course, but like anything else, it has it’s pitfalls and limitations.

• Would you expect to find, on average, that communities with access to reliable Internet are smarter than those without? Absolutely!

• Where is Internet unavailable? Rural and impoverished America.

• Were will you find the dumbest Americans? In rural and impoverished America.

• Why don’t we consider the Internet to be an integral part of our national infrastructure, like electricity or a road? Because the powerful, and by this I mean both Democrats and Republicans (but Republicans more so), don’t really want an educated populace. They would rather have the great unwashed watching sports and video games, listening to pop crap and Jesus cons, shooting shit, and poisoning themselves with fried junk and sugar.

And this has been going on for a long time. Listen to this old George Carlin monologue if you doubt what I’m saying. George was always one of the smartest kids in the class and he knew this simple, age old truth: The powers that be do not want a nation of critical thinkers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtgfzzwoyK4

Any way you slice it, even in backwoods poverty centers like Mississippi, they spend a helluva lot of money on education (at least 40 percent of total state revenues), and yet they still manage to get it wrong. A high school diploma in rural America isn’t worth very much these days, and a strong argument could be made that vocational tech schools would be of much greater value — at least the worker bees might learn a marketable trade.

Do you want to know why so many poorly-educated people question whether COVID-19 is real, won’t wear masks, ignore social distancing, and vote for Donald Trump?

• Almost 45 percent of Americans believe in ghosts and demons.
• The same number, 45 percent, doubt that vaccines are effective.
• A third of Americans don’t believe the holocaust ever happened.
• Another 30 percent believe humans and dinosaurs lived on the earth at the same time.
• Only 20 percent of young adults in the United States can find Afghanistan or Iraq on a map, after we have been fighting a goddamn a war there for the past seventeen years. About 11 percent of young citizens of the U.S. couldn’t even locate the U.S. on a map. And the Pacific Ocean’s location was a complete mystery to 29 percent.
• Only 37 percent could name a single Bill of Right and 26 percent could not correctly identify the three branches of government.
• Three hundred years after Sir Isaac Newton proved otherwise, 25 percent of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth.
• A substantial number of Americans, like the basketball star Kyrie Irving, think the world is flat.
• Almost 51 percent of Americans believe in Creationism and think evolution is a lie.
• Nearly 80 percent believe in aliens.
• Many Americans think that sexual positions determines your child’s gender (standing up delivers a boy and missionary gets you a girl), and that you can wash and reuse a condom.
• And here’s the kicker. Over half of Americans believe that Fox News is the most trusted name in news.

I am sorry to have to tell you this, but countless math and science studies over the course of the last decade have proven that in relation to the industrialized nations of the world, like Germany, Norway, France, and Japan, we are just plain stupid. And we are fast becoming the hillbillies of the world. A laughing stock. When it comes to scientific literacy, we have far more in common with Mexico than we do with Italy or Spain.

Europe and Asia were initially devastated by COVID-19, but they followed the science and clawed their way back out of the grave. Meanwhile, the U.S. leads the world in cases, along with the other dumb kid nations in the world classroom — Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Peru, Mexico, Columbia, and Iran — all of whom are run by thugs who are telling their people the coronavirus is no worse than the flu and that they’re the greatest.

I guess the old public service announcement they played when I was a boy was right. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”