Two thousand Five hundred years ago a spiritual and intellectual revolution had taken place that the world had not seen before and has not seen since. It was the age of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Babylonian Talmud, Zarathustra and Buddha. How could this have happened at an age when 99% of people were illiterate? How was this era able to surpass all in such a way that its light shines through history up to this day, while collective education was not a fraction of what it is today?
This era could only be approached somewhat by the Enlightenment, but it was also only remotely. I think Martin Heidegger said, and I don’t think he was wrong, that mankind, in the intellectual sense, has developed nothing, if not back, for two thousand five hundred years. And the question again. How can this be in an age when science, literacy, and collective knowledge have developed exponentially?
In the age of the internet today, everyone has access to virtually endless information in the blink of an eye, which not have been available for scholars even in library of academies few hundred years or even few decades ago. Literacy is not only unlimitedly available to the rising generation today, but is mandatory in most countries around the world. And yet we got stuck in such weird intellectual ice age. This vacuum in the intellectual sense cannot be filled even by collective knowledge. What is the reason for this?
First, education is not the same as intelligence. You can learn to write and read flawlessly, you can list the capitals of the world while your intelligence doesn’t grow, and you don’t even see through the most basic logical connections. In other words, you do not learn to think, that is, you do not develop intellectually, only by acquiring knowledge. And if you have no life goal, or the necessity to have it, you do not develop spiritually either. My conclusions, however, are even more shocking about the spread of literacy around the world, which encourages me to go logically at a totally different path than the vast majority of people. What is described here, therefore, puts an unusual approach in what people call development.
Nor do I see a chance that the world would become more civilized with the spread of literacy and the suppression of illiteracy. I see no sign that the spread of literacy would help anyone to gain self-knowledge and live a happier, more livable life. What’s more, in most cases I see and experience the exact opposite. Mankind has always really evolved when it has taken the form of social self-organization. Paradoxically, civilization has always flourished in an environment where literacy was the privilege of a small number of people. The age of the ancient Greek city-states, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment for instance. Meanwhile during the 20th century in the age of genocide, totalitarianism, mass destructive weapons, and global wars, the literacy spread at such a scale as never before. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, illiteracy had declined to an unprecedented extent. But still, decivilization is total.
Cuba, for example, is proud to have a literacy rate of 96%. But what does an average Cuban read? Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for instance, or Plato’s Apology? Maybe Dostoevsky or Hemingway? None of these stuffs I suspect. State propaganda disguised as news are all they used to read.
In contrast, in a time when literacy was not widespread, everyone was brilliant of what they were dealing with, which can be observed to this day in the hidden corners of the world in the world of micro-communities. Even though our ancestors were illiterate, they witnessed incredible ingenuity and intellectuality. For example, legends, tales, songs that spread from father to son by oral tradition, and that scholars devote special energy for exploring.
And what do we need to see today?
Students who can be said about everything but not being illiterate, are smashing their own colleagues and the street for ideological purposes. They don’t do anything useful, they don’t create, they just destroy everything in their way for their ‘rights’. They are unable to think for themselves. They have no independent, individual thoughts, just empty slogans, and ideological clichés all they mantra. The most infamous example is the 68s, or postmodernists. What a revolution they made? The revolution of barbarism, vandalism, nihilism? Civilization is in decline with the triumph of the fight against illiteracy.
Don’t get me wrong I am not against the spread of literacy, but I see the meaning of it only if it is organized from below, in response to the needs of the people. However, this is not the case today. State power was crucial in spreading literacy. If the state educates the children, the state has a control over the knowledge children get. That is, the momentary interests of the most narrow-minded bureaucrats and politicians dominate in education, far from both ordinary competencies and intellectual values. And that, I believe, does more harm than good. If the state is the sole monopolist of literacy and education, then literacy will not increase the tendency to think, but the tendency not to think, not to question anything. Everything is inside the box, nothing outside. The thinking through literacy and filtered knowledge is monopolized, outsourced, standardized, and collectivized by the state, hence you have no longer a privilege to think independently as an autonomous entity. Thus the ideological brainwashing prevails over the spontaneous autonomous tendency of intellectual thoughts. The schools are no longer function as schools but an ideological indoctrination camps, where the children are indoctrinated to worship the State, and abhor free thoughts for generations.
Does anyone really believe that the state monopolizes education to make children more educated? Shocking enough, but the vast majority of people really believe in this, while they don’t even recognize that every knowledge that they access from media, and their children from education lacks of any intellectual value and content.
With central coordination from above, of course, you can really teach every child to read and write, illiteracy can really be eradicated, everyone can be integrated to everyone, it just won’t make sense. By making education massive, universal and, moreover, compulsory, it completely loses its standard, value, and meaning at the same time. If something is free for everyone, it has no value to anyone. And because being coerced from above is anti-natural and anti-life, and because it’s coercive ( means by engaging in violence), even it’s immoral. But it works great for social thought control. Where everything is available, nothing has any meaning. Thus, literacy or as we call it today, does not increase intellectual propensity, but is the most effective means of mass brainwashing. The facts are stubborn things, but unfortunately no one cares about the facts.
Too much of what is called “education” is little more than an expensive isolation from reality
Thomas Sowell
Thanks for reading!