relevant references: The Dumbest Generation

138:

"The psychological delights are intellectual stultifying. For education to happen, people must encounter worthwhile things outside their sphere of interest and brainpower. Knowledge grows, skills improve, tastes refine, and conscience ripens only in the experiences bear a degree of umnfamiliarity-a beautiful artwork you are forced to inspect even though it leaves you cold; an ancient city you have to detain even though history puts you to sleep; a microeconomic problem you have to solve even though you fumble with arithmetic. Top take them in, to assimilate the objects intelligently, the intellectual took kit must expand and attitudes must soften. If the first apprehension stalls, you can't mutter, ''I don't get it-this isn't for me.' You have to say, 'I don't get it, and maybe that's MY fault.' You have to accept the sting of relinquishing a chrished notion, of admitting a defect in yourself."

147:

""

151:

"To draw a steady stream of new visitors, sites must optimize their 'searchability.' 'Unless you're listed on the first search engine results page,' Nielsen observes, 'you might as well not exist.' Because users usually type common words into the search box, a site whose keywords are technical terms, marketese, or any kind of exotic or sophisticated diction drops down the results list."

Nykytynn2, Stupid Internet Users.

159:

"running up opportunity costs"

"Without any direction from the menu, they stick with what they know and like. They have no natural curiousity for the historical past and high art, and if no respected elder introduces them to Romanticism and the French Revolution, they're rarely find such things on their own.."

199:

"betrayal of the mentors"

"Yes, the coursework is removte, but instead of blaming the curriculum and offering more blather about sparking 'intellectual curiousity' and 'independent thinking,' as the author does, let's blame "students' lives' for stretching the divide Young people need mentors not tio go with the youth flow, but to stand staunchly against it, to represent something smarter and finer than the cacophony of social life."

214:

"Again we return to knowledge-knowledge of current events and past events, civic ideals and historical models. it supplies a motivation that ordinary ambitions don't. Voting in every election, reading the op-ed pages, sending letters to politicians, joining a local association... they don't advance a career, boost a paycheck, kindle the dating scene, or build muscle and tan skin. They providce a civic good, but the private goods they deliver aren't measured in money or prospects or populatiry. Instead, they yield expressive or moral satisfactions, the pleasure of doing something one knows is right, and those vary with how much cultural memory each person has. Consistent voters vote because voting is simply the right thing to do. Rather than suffer the shame of not voting, they leave work and stand in line, and feel better for it. People take time to send emails to talk show hosts because not speaking their minds is more painful than speaking their minds is inconvenient. They join a boycott even though they like the things boycotted.

Knowledge heightens the moral sense that sparks such profitless commitments. It draws people out of themselves and beyond the present, sets their needs in a wider setting than private circumstances and instant gratification. Tradition raises conviction over consumption, civic duty over personal gain. Past models, whether religious, political, literary, ect., left the bar of daily conduct."

217:

"Knowledge breeds contention, then, but that's how a pluralistic, democratic society works through rival interests and clashing ideologies. Disagreements run deep, and messy pursuits and cravings for power cloud the ideas and values in conflict. But the battles that ensue solicit the intelligence and conviction and rightness of the adversaries, and they collide armed with the ammunition of ideas and phrases, works of art and lessons in philosophy and religion, episodes from history and literature. An informeed contentiousness serves a cruicial function, forcing each antagonist to face potent dissenters, to come up with more evidence and stronger arguments. When values, ideas, and customs collide in an open public contest, one side sins and the other retires, not returning for further contest until it amends its case. And the winning side gains, too, for a steady and improving adversary keeps it from slipping into complacency and groupthink. Good ideas stay fresh by challenge, and bad ideas go away, at least until they can be modified and repackaged."

223:
""

138, 147, 151 (nykytyne2), 159, 199, 214, 217, 223

182:

"These days, rarely does a tenth-grade English teacher say to a class, 'If you dont' read Homer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Austen, you will be an incomplete person and lead an incomplete life.'"

184-186:

"When teachers stand before the young and assure them of the integrity and autonomy of what adolescents think and say and write, teachers expect the young to respond affirmatively, to seek out knowledge and truth on their own. And maybe that works for the upper-crust students, those contending zealously for a place at Yale or an intership on the Hill. But beyond that talented tenth or twentieth student, something different happens. All of them expect the mentors to enter the room with credentialed authority, some know-how that justifies their position, even if some of the kids begrudge and reject it. When the mentors disavow their authrotiy, when they let their discipline slacken, when they, in the language of the educators, slide from the 'sage on the stage' to the 'guide on the side,' the kids wonder what goes. They don't consider the equalizing instructor a caring liberator, and they aren't motivateed to learn on their own. They draw another, immobilizing lesson. If mentors are so keen to recant their expertise, why should students strain to acquire it themselves?

The opposite of what the indulgers intend sets in. Knowledge and tradition are emptied of authority." (cont.)

192:

"Asked for a political opinion, they recall the images they catch on television, not the models of Washington, Churchill, and Pope John Paul II. Instead of understanding the young adult rollercoaster of courtship and rejection with the help of vonels by Jane Austen, they process their miasmic feelings by themselves or with sympathetic friends.... The currents of social life press upon them hourly, while the pages within The Delcine and Fall of the Roman Empire and Wuthering Heights seem like another, irrelevant universe."

212:

"Civic knowlege fills the viod left by Old World institutions whose authority has collapsed. This is why Thomas Jefferson counted so heavily on public schools to ensure the continuance of the Republic. Only the broad education of each generation would sustain the nation, 'the diffusion of knowledge among the people,' he wrote in 1786. If 'we leave the people in ignorance,' he warned, old customs will return, and 'kings, priests and nobles....will rise up amoung us.' Indeed, Jefferson would have it that no person would quality as 'a citizen of this commonwealth until he or she can read readily in some tongue, native or acquired.' Education would preserve the sovereignty of the people, and without it the very system designed to represent them would descend into yet another tyranny in the dismayingly predictable course of nations. He even relied on public schools to identify promising young men or merit but lacking wealth and birth, who would be supported in higher education by public funds. They would join a bigilant citizenry in tracking the actions of leaders and setting them against the ideals and examples of the Founders, a lineage passed along through books and in schoolrooms. Without watchful constituents, officials in power would stray and government would no longer reflect the will of the people. Jefferson, Madison, and other Founders expected men in government to behave all too humanly, letting the influences they wield tempt them away from public goods and toward special interests. The scrutiny of informed citizens checked their oppotunism, which is why the Founders valued a free press. In truth, they despised jounalists, but they acknowledged the essential watchdog role newpapers played. They are the eyes and ears of the people, popular informats keeping vested powers under inspection. A free electorate pledges to safeguard civic life, not only promoting some candidates and interests over others, but also guarding its prerogatives against any infringement, consciously controlling he powers their representatives assume. To do so, they need information they cannot obtain on their own.

Hence the essential connection of knowledge and democracy. Democracy requires an informed electorate, and knowledge deficits equal civic decay. the quation poses a special problem in that democracy does not force citizens to participate. One of the ever present potentials of a free sociaty is for its citizens to decide Not to follow public affairs, to determine that keeping apprised and ready takes too much effort with too little peroonal payoff."

("democracy does not force citizens to participate"? What about taxes!)