“We are … profoundly ignorant. People don’t know anything about their own religions. We know little of our own history, let alone our history in context with the rest of the world. We worship sports heroes who torture dogs, but we point at scientists and laugh. A profoundly messed-up woman like Christine O’Donnell can run on a platform of ‘See? I can’t manage my finances either. I’m you.’ We had eight years of a dry drunk as president because people thought he was the guy they’d want to have a beer with — as if that were ever going to happen. Now there are people who would vote to give the nuclear codes to an aging high school mean girl because they’d like to fuck her — as if that’s ever going to happen. Smart people are regarded with scorn as ‘elites.’ Ignorance is regarded as a virtue.
“This is how an empire dies. And we are going to be around to see it.”
— Jill, “A New Study Shows That Americans Are idiots,” Brilliant at Breakfast, Oct. 11, 2010. (H/T/ to Bartcop.com.)

“It all really started to slide horribly down hill with NCLB [No Child Left Behind]. That policy effectively doomed social studies/history programming in schools. Civics classes, forget about it. We are no longer challenged to think critically, but to simply do sight recognition of a question and regurgitate an answer. As a society we are certainly doomed. It’s not teachers or students that are the problem, its the lack of curriculum that will come back to bite us on the ass.”
— Comment by PridePress at above site.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
— Thomas Jefferson