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Comment by myfavoritetings | Hacker News Reader

"Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that our culture is now composed of poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated, lack sophistication and nuance, and accordingly have terrible taste?"

Hasn't this always been true though? Widespread public education systems did not exist for 99.9999% of human history. How could it be that education is more present in the world than it has ever been in history yet we somehow have worse critical thinking skills? Blaming the ills of society on education doesn't make much sense when we've had societies much longer than we've had public education.

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I don't read it as blaming the education system. In my mind it's an indictment of all the trends of the past 20 years in the public education system: austerity, lack of autonomy for teachers, heavy reliance on metrics and standardized testing to establish success. What we're getting now out the other end of that is a lack of critical thinking and a reduction in traits that can't be quantified like critical thinking.

Basically if our education system sucks, it's because we've spent 20 years cutting corners, cheaping out, over-relying on metrics, and enforcing top-down control over teaching and curriculum. No wonder it sucks. Our public policy has been to stamp the outliers out of the system and crush it into mediocre mush.

The illiterate weren't able to communicate outside of their immediate vicinity. They simply weren't part of the conversation

Illiterate couldn't read, but not necessarily didn't have critical thinking skills.

And how would they tell anyone not right next to them what they thought? Word of mouth certainly isn't an answer, ever played telephone?

Critical thinking does not depend on sharing those thoughts. Not sharing a thought does not make it less critical and vice versa.

Let alone that with your train of thought critical thinking must have not existed before literacy became a thing.

Why do you equate widespread public education systems with amount of critical thinking?

I didn't, the comment I responded to did "poor critical thinkers who are poorly educated"

> Blaming the ills of society on education doesn't make much sense when we've had societies much longer than we've had public education

Why? Education may easily have negative impact. Modern education was created to teach people to read instructions how to operate factory machinery. Critical thinking is not needed for that. In fact, society without much critical thinking is easier to work with.

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