I was just reading the morning news when I read this article on the Health Care Town Hall meetings.
The quote from on of the town hall participants shows exactly what I was talking about in my education and facts post. The lady says, “This is no less than liberty versus tyranny, good versus evil, and there is no middle ground.”
When you educate people (in any country) to adhere to one set of facts and ideas they start to compartimentalize concepts that are abstract and broad reaching, when they obviously should not be. Instead of taking a wholistic appraoch to thinking about the subject, people just try to compare the situation to the set of facts they learned in school rather than critically analyzing the situation and making an informed and logical decisions (based on the situation, not a preconceived notion). We are taught that nothing is new about a given situation, and that it can always be measured and compared to some arbitrary standard like American History or the American Christian experience.
A truly educated person would never make the statement, there is no middle ground in a situation as complex as this, whose solution almost undoubtedly land in the middle somwhere. It seems that the status quo educational system has conditioned American’s to only think that things actually black or white and never grey. If they don’t fit into your paradigm, they are wrong and evil. If they fit into your paradigm, they are wonderful and good.
Can we really not think even two nanometers outside of the box?
Active Philosophy 