Fellow Progressive Janet Ramstack tells a truth here.
The seemingly wilful stupidity of so many of our fellow citizens comes from four decades of GOP cuts to, and downsizing of, public education.
One must be taught critical thinking and be given factual data about financial, political and historical subjects to effectively use those skills.
One cannot teach effectively on a shoestring, and the GOP has spent forty years privatizing education, using the smokescreen of 'charter schools.’ Complicated subjects like those listed require continual study from first grade up through 12th in public schools. That is not happening. It is forbidden in most Charter schools.
It started in 1980 with President Ronald Reagan's first public rants about schools teaching liberalism, and how that was a bad thing. (Liberal education? “Intellectual elite?” liberal media bias?) Critical thinking is the bedrock of a liberal education.
A for-profit corporation delivers product at the lowest possible cost and at the most profitable percentage, two factors that cause privatizing education to be a massive and inevitable and expensive failure. That is, privatization is a failure for everyone except GOP politicians, who owe their elections to the cumulative ignorance of their voter base who posses low critical thinking skills and little pertinent data.
That truth is that the for-profit corporate culture is generally very inefficient at delivering any type of public service. The privatizing experiment has not proven itself to be good for the citizenry in any public service institution.
And seemingly wilful stupidity is the end result of education being privatized and the resulting starvation of public education institutions.
Anyone who believes that was not a wilful plan is, of course, pretty naive.