The Declaration of Independence

[Marcus Bryant]

The Declaration of Independence
translated out of 18th century English and into 20th century American

by H.L.Mencken
from The Baltimore Evening Sun 7 November 1921

WHEN THINGS get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody.

All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, me and you is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain't got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time whichever way he likes, so long as he don't interfere with nobody else. That any government that don't give a man them rights ain't worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of government they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter. That whenever any government don't do this, then the people have got a right to give it the bum's rush and put in one that will take care of their interests. Of course, that don't mean having a revolution every day like them South American yellow-bellies, or every time some jobholder goes to work and does something he ain't got no business to do. It is better to stand a little graft, etc., than to have revolutions all the time, like them coons, and any man that wasn't a anarchist or one of them I.W.W.'s would say the same. But when things get so bad that a man ain't hardly got no rights at all no more, but you might almost call him a slave, then everybody ought to get together and throw the grafters out, and put in new ones who won't carry on so high and steal so much, and then watch them. This is the proposition the people of these Colonies is up against, and they have got tired of it, and won't stand it no more. The administration of the present King, George III, has been rotten from the start, and when anybody kicked about it he always tried to get away with it by strong-arm work. Here is some of the rough stuff he has pulled:

He vetoed bills in the Legislature that everybody was in favor of, and hardly nobody was against.

He wouldn't allow no law to be passed without it was first put up to him, and then he stuck it in his pocket and let on he forgot about it, and didn't pay no attention to no kicks.

When people went to work and gone to him and asked him to put through a law about this or that, he give them their choice: either they had to shut down the Legislature and let him pass it all by himself, or they couldn't have it at all.

He made the Legislature meet at one-horse tank-towns, so that hardly nobody could get there and most of the leaders would stay home and let him go to work and do things like he wanted.

He give the Legislature the air, and sent the members home every time they stood up to him and give him a call-down or bawled him out.

When a Legislature was busted up he wouldn't allow no new one to be elected, so that there wasn't nobody left to run things, but anybody could walk in and do whatever they pleased.

He tried to scare people outen moving into these States, and made it so hard for a wop or one of these here kikes to get his papers that he would rather stay home and not try it, and then, when he come in, he wouldn't let him have no land, and so he either went home again or never come.

He monkeyed with the courts, and didn't hire enough judges to do the work, and so a person had to wait so long for his case to come up that he got sick of waiting, and went home, and so never got what was coming to him.

He got the judges under his thumb by turning them out when they done anything he didn't like, or by holding up their salaries, so that they had to knuckle down or not get no money.

He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they could or not.

Without no war going on, he kept an army loafing around the country, no matter how much people kicked about it.

He let the army run things to suit theirself and never paid no attention whatsoever to nobody which didn't wear no uniform.

He let grafters run loose, from God knows where, and give them the say in everything, and let them put over such things as the following:

Making poor people board and lodge a lot of soldiers they ain't got no use for, and don't want to see loafing around.

When the soldiers kill a man, framing it up so that they would get off.

Interfering with business.

Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.

When a man was arrested and asked for a jury trial, not letting him have no jury trial.

Chasing men out of the country, without being guilty of nothing, and trying them somewheres else for what they done here.

In countries that border on us, he put in bum governments, and then tried to spread them out, so that by and by they would take in this country too, or make our own government as bum as they was.

He never paid no attention whatever to the Constitution, but he went to work and repealed laws that everybody was satisfied with and hardly nobody was against, and tried to fix the government so that he could do whatever he pleased.

He busted up the Legislatures and let on he could do all the work better by himself.

Now he washes his hands of us and even goes to work and declares war on us, so we don't owe him nothing, and whatever authority he ever had he ain't got no more.

He has burned down towns, shot down people like dogs, and raised hell against us out on the ocean.

He hired whole regiments of Dutch, etc., to fight us, and told them they could have anything they wanted if they could take it away from us, and sicked these Dutch, etc., on us.

He grabbed our own people when he found them in ships on the ocean, and shoved guns into their hands, and made them fight against us, no matter how much they didn't want to.

He stirred up the Indians, and give them arms and ammunition, and told them to go to it, and they have killed men, women and children, and don't care which.

Every time he has went to work and pulled any of these things, we have went to work and put in a kick, but every time we have went to work and put in a kick he has went to work and did it again. When a man keeps on handing out such rough stuff all the time, all you can say is that he ain't got no class and ain't fitten to have no authority over people who have got any rights, and he ought to be kicked out.

When we complained to the English we didn't get no more satisfaction. Almost every day we give them plenty of warning that the politicians over there was doing things to us that they didn't have no right to do. We kept on reminding them who we was, and what we was doing here, and how we come to come here. We asked them to get us a square deal, and told them that if this thing kept on we'd have to do something about it and maybe they wouldn't like it. But the more we talked, the more they didn't pay no attention to us. Therefore, if they ain't for us they must be agin us, and we are ready to give them the fight of their lives, or to shake hands when it is over.

Therefore be it resolved, That we, the representatives of the people of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, hereby declare as follows: That the United States, which was the United Colonies in former times, is now a free country, and ought to be; that we have throwed out the English King and don't want to have nothing to do with him no more, and are not taking no more English orders no more; and that, being as we are now a free country, we can do anything that free countries can do, especially declare war, make peace, sign treaties, go into business, etc. And we swear on the Bible on this proposition, one and all, and agree to stick to it no matter what happens, whether we win or we lose, and whether we get away with it or get the worst of it, no matter whether we lose all our property by it or even get hung for it.

source (http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~ckank/FultonsLair/013/mencken-declaration.html)

[Marcus Bryant]

21st Century Translation

OMG, 500 years ago white Europeans killed a large number of the indigenious peoples of the Americas to set up their Earth raping SUV patriarchal culture. Then the greatest leader of all times, a man destined to ascend to heaven two days after his death and resurrection, became the 43rd President of the World. At which time he and the oil oligarchs, in concert with the Illuminati, and Bill Gates invaded Irak and who knows how many endangered sand worms were killed in the process WTF?. After years of hard, hard work, the man who keeps the universe together when God shrugs, was turned on by ungrateful, latte sipping homo "liberals" and was replaced by Tiger Woods, but not before he could protect free enterprise by giving it free money.

[Yonivore]

One wonders if Marcus would be a happy citizen in any nation...

Well, Marcus -- and, in all seriousness -- is there such a place that exists?

[Marcus Bryant]

I'm not "happy"?

This country is an endless source of entertainment and amusement.

[fyatuk]

21st Century Translation

OMG, 500 years ago white Europeans killed a large number of the indigenious peoples of the Americas to set up their Earth raping SUV patriarchal culture. Then the greatest leader of all times, a man destined to ascend to heaven two days after his death and resurrection, became the 43rd President of the World. At which time he and the oil oligarchs, in concert with the Illuminati, and Bill Gates invaded Irak and who knows how many endangered sand worms were killed in the process WTF?. After years of hard, hard work, the man who keeps the universe together when God shrugs, was turned on by ungrateful, latte sipping homo "liberals" and was replaced by Tiger Woods, but not before he could protect free enterprise by giving it free money.


Just to point out... That's not a translation.

Can I sue you for false advertisement? :p:

[Marcus Bryant]

Just to point out... That's not a translation.

Can I sue you for false advertisement? :p:

Damn it. I forgot to translate the part about lawyers and the pursuit of billable justice.

[FaithInOne]

lol good find.

It's crazy reading letters by our founding fathers and others of that time period. Their level of education compared to our most recent generations is comical.

[Marcus Bryant]

Ever wonder why?

[FaithInOne]

Nope.

[Marcus Bryant]

Well, there you go.

[jacobdrj]

I stopped reading after the 1st paragraph. It isn't any easier to read or understand...

Didn't Andy Rooney once translate the Star Spangled Banner into 20th century American English once on 60 Minutes... I have been looking for that one on YouTube, but I think that piece predated popular streaming video by about 2 years.

[LnGrrrR]

Well, there you go.

:rollin

[Marcus Bryant]

And now, our national anthem.

RssIN3ustUw

[Winehole23]

Ever wonder why?I blame universal education.

[sabar]

Ever wonder why?

We have artificially selected the genes that are passed into the next generation with technology. Medical science keeps people alive that would of been dead long ago. Naturally speaking, humans have only gotten weaker and weaker, dumber and dumber. Technology attempts to bridge this gap, with eugenics probably in a few generations to finish it.

People are quite stupid, most in here would agree that the average joe is pretty damn average. Something else to consider is that voting rights has extended who models our nation from the white educated upperclass to everyone.

If we ever get quality education to the masses, everything will be like the 1800's again. With government slowly creeping into every private area, I don't forsee this happening.

The best thing to happen to mass education is the Internet, but who's actually trying to learn other than the already learned?

[Marcus Bryant]

I blame universal education.

Then you might be interested in reading Nock's thoughts (http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~ckank/FultonsLair/013/nock/american_edu.html) on that matter.


The root-idea, or ideal, of our system is the very fine one that educational opportunity should be open to all. The practical approach to this ideal, however, was not planned intelligently, but, on the contrary, very stupidly; it was planned on the official assumption that everybody is educable, and this assumption still remains official. Instead of firmly establishing the natural limit to opportunity—the ability to make any kind of use of it—and then making opportunity as free as possible within that limit, our system says, Let them all come, and we will scratch up some sort of brummagem opportunity for each of them. What they do not learn at school, the college will teach them; the university will go through some motions for them on what the college failed to get into their heads.

[Winehole23]

I was thinking more of John Taylor Gatto (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm), but thanks for the link!

[Marcus Bryant]

We have artificially selected the genes that are passed into the next generation with technology. Medical science keeps people alive that would of been dead long ago. Naturally speaking, humans have only gotten weaker and weaker, dumber and dumber. Technology attempts to bridge this gap, with eugenics probably in a few generations to finish it.

Is there a correlation between intellectual weakness and physical weakness? It's interesting that you mention eugenics as there is a tacit form practiced today. While birth control and abortion are couched in terms of feminist liberation, the reality is that the white upper classes are content to see the poor illiterate non-whites abort themselves out of existence. Of course, the white upper classes are doing a decent job themselves of ending their own existence. Here we are back to the discredited Malthusian nonsense about the inability to sustain the current human population, and the need to curtail it, as well as the obvious connection to eugenic management of the masses.



People are quite stupid, most in here would agree that the average joe is pretty damn average. Something else to consider is that voting rights has extended who models our nation from the white educated upperclass to everyone.


Universal suffrage's impact on American education is undoubtedly an interesting topic. Rule by the people has led to a call to improve the basic intellect of the people. Of course, one might imagine that control of this improvement could be used by certain individuals to improve their view of the state's role in the lives of individuals, and drill the individualism out of the people at a very young age.



If we ever get quality education to the masses, everything will be like the 1800's again. With government slowly creeping into every private area, I don't forsee this happening.

The best thing to happen to mass education is the Internet, but who's actually trying to learn other than the already learned?

While the Internet's evolution has increased the efficiency at which we can access the store of human knowledge, it has also increased the efficiency at which superstition and innuendo can be spread. Lest we forget that for many the Internet is nothing more than a place to access funny videos of dogs and look at Japanese women pissing on each other. Not to mention discussing their favorite professional basketball team with a bunch of half-witted garlic eaters.

[Winehole23]

Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don’t want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it’s too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?


By 1940, the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites, 80 percent for blacks. Notice that for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were nevertheless literate. Six decades later, at the end of the twentieth century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites can’t read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled. Before you think of anything else in regard to these numbers, think of this: we spend three to four times as much real money on schooling as we did sixty years ago, but sixty years ago virtually everyone, black or white, could read.

[Winehole23]

If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it’s biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or that it’s nature’s way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature’s way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it’s evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.


http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/images/d_girlwbook2.jpgThe shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn’t real.


Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajoled, coerced, jailed. To idealists they represent a challenge, reprobates to be made socially useful. Either way you want it, hundreds of millions of perpetual children require paid attention from millions of adult custodians. An ignorant horde to be schooled one way or another.

[Marcus Bryant]

I've come across Gatto's name before, but haven't read any of his works. Perhaps it's time.

[Winehole23]

Sometimes the best hiding place is right in the open. It took seven years of reading and reflection for me to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. It was under my nose, of course, but for years I avoided seeing what was there because no one else seemed to notice. Forced schooling arose from the new logic of the Industrial Age—the logic imposed on flesh and blood by fossil fuel and high-speed machinery.


This simple reality is hidden from view by early philosophical and theological anticipations of mass schooling in various writings about social order and human nature. But you shouldn’t be fooled any more than Charles Francis Adams was fooled when he observed in 1880 that what was being cooked up for kids unlucky enough to be snared by the newly proposed institutional school net combined characteristics of the cotton mill and the railroad with those of a state prison.


After the Civil War, utopian speculative analysis regarding isolation of children in custodial compounds where they could be subjected to deliberate molding routines, began to be discussed seriously by the Northeastern policy elites of business, government, and university life. These discussions were inspired by a growing realization that the productive potential of machinery driven by coal was limitless. Railroad development made possible by coal and startling new inventions like the telegraph, seemed suddenly to make village life and local dreams irrelevant. A new governing mind was emerging in harmony with the new reality.


The principal motivation for this revolution in family and community life might seem to be greed, but this surface appearance conceals philosophical visions approaching religious exaltation in intensity—that effective early indoctrination of all children would lead to an orderly scientific society, one controlled by the best people, now freed from the obsolete straitjacket of democratic traditions and historic American libertarian attitudes.


Forced schooling was the medicine to bring the whole continental population into conformity with these plans so that it might be regarded as a "human resource" and managed as a "workforce." No more Ben Franklins or Tom Edisons could be allowed; they set a bad example. One way to manage this was to see to it that individuals were prevented from taking up their working lives until an advanced age when the ardor of youth and its insufferable self-confidence had cooled.

[Winehole23]

During the crucial years of the school changeover from academic institution to behavioral modification instrument, the radical nature of the metamorphosis caught the attention of a few national politicians who spoke out, but could never muster enough strength for effective opposition. In the Congressional Record of January 26, 1917, for instance, Senator Chamberlain of Oregon entered these words:

They are moving with military precision all along the line to get control of the education of the children of the land.
Senator Poindexter of Washington followed, saying:

The cult of Rockefeller, the cult of Carnegie...as much to be guarded against in the educational system of this country as a particular religious sect.
And in the same issue, Senator Kenyon of Iowa related:

There are certain colleges that have sought endowments, and the agent of the Rockefeller Foundation or the General Education Board had gone out and examined the curriculum of these colleges and compelled certain changes....
It seems to me one of the most dangerous things that can go on in a republic is to have an institution of this power apparently trying to shape and mold the thought of the young people of this country.
Senator Works of California added:

These people...are attempting to get control of the whole educational work of the country.
If it interests you, take a look. It’s all in the Congressional Record of January 26,1917.

[Winehole23]

Three major obstacles stood in the way of the great goal of using American schools to realize a scientifically programmed society. The first was the fact that American schooling was locally controlled. In 1930, when the massive socializing scheme was swinging into high gear, helped substantially by an attention-absorbing depression, this nation still had 144,102 local school boards.17 At least 1.1 million elected citizens of local stature made decisions for this country’s schools out of their wisdom and experience. Out of 70 million adults between the ages of thirty and sixty-five, one in every sixty-three was on a school board (thirty years earlier, the figure had been one in twenty). Contrast either ratio with today’s figure of one in five thousand.


The first task of scientifically managed schooling was to transfer management from a citizen yeomanry to a professional elite under the camouflage of consolidation for economy’s sake. By 1932, the number of school districts was down to 127,300; by 1937 to 119,018; by 1950 to 83,719; by 1960 to 40,520; by 1970 to 18,000; by 1990 to 15,361. Citizen oversight was slowly squeezed out of the school institution, replaced by homogeneous managerial oversight, managers screened and trained, watched, loyalty-checked by Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, the Cleveland Conference, and similar organizations with private agendas for public schooling.


The second obstacle to an ideological takeover of schools was the historic influence of teachers as role models. Old-fashioned teachers had a disturbing proclivity to stress development of intellect through difficult reading, heavy writing assignments, and intense discussion. The problem of proud and independent teachers was harder to solve than the reading problem. As late as 1930 there were still 149,400 one-room/one-teacher schools in America, places not only cheap to operate but successful at developing tough-minded, independent thinkers. Most of the rest of our schools were small and administrator-free, too. The idea of principals who did not teach came very late in the school game in most places. The fantastic notion of a parasitic army of assistant principals, coordinators, and all the rest of the various familiar specialists of institutional schooling didn’t exist at all until 1905, except in the speculations of teacher college dreamers.


Two solutions were proposed around 1903 to suppress teacher influence and make instruction teacher-proof. The first was to grow a heretofore unknown administrative hierarchy of nonteaching principals, assistant principals, subject coordinators and the rest, to drop the teacher’s status rank. And if degrading teacher status proved inadequate, another weapon, the standardized test, was soon to be available. By displacing the judgmental function from a visible teacher to a remote bastion of educational scientists somewhere, no mere classroom person could stray very far from approved texts without falling test scores among his or her students signaling the presence of such a deviant.18 Both these initiatives were underway as WWI ended.


The third obstacle to effective centralization of management was the intimate neighborhood context of most American schools, one where school procedures could never escape organic oversight by parents and other local interests. Not a good venue from which to orchestrate the undermining of traditional society. James Bryant Conant, one of the inventors of the poison gas, Lewisite, and by then chairman of a key Carnegie commission, reported in an ongoing national news story after the Sputnik moment that it was the small size of our schools causing the problem. Only large schools, said Conant, could have faculty and facilities large enough to cover the math and science we (presumably) lacked and Russia (presumably) had. The bigger the better.


In one bold stroke the American factory school of Lancaster days was reborn. Here a de-intellectualized Prussian-style curriculum could reign undetected. From 1960 to 1990, while student population was increasing 61 percent, the number of school administrators grew 342 percent. In constant dollars, costs shot up 331 percent, and teachers, who had fallen from 95 percent of all school personnel in 1915 to 70 percent in 1950, now fell still further, down and down until recently they comprised less than 50 percent of the jobs in the school game. School had become an employment project, the largest hiring hall in the world, bigger than agriculture, bigger than armies.


One other significant set of numbers parallels the absolute growth in the power and expense of government schooling, but inversely. In 1960, when these gigantic child welfare agencies called schools were just setting out on their enhanced mission, 85 percent of African American children in New York were from intact, two-parent households. In 1990 in New York City, with the school budget drawing $9,300 a kid for its social welfare definition of education, that number dropped below 30 percent. School and the social work bureaucracies had done their work well, fashioning what looked to be a permanent underclass, one stripped of its possibility of escape, turned against itself. Scientific management had proven its value, although what that was obviously depended on one’s perspective.

[Marcus Bryant]

Not sure if you've come across The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America (http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/) by Charlotte Iserbyt. She makes the same connections to Rousseau, the Prussians, and Dewey (hard not to). But she does ultimately veer into NWO land.

[Winehole23]

I'm not familiar with it. So long as the scholarship is there, I can forgive a few kooky conclusions.

Thanks for this link as well, MB.

[sabar]

Interesting reads in here.

The genesis of all these problems lies in the industrial revolution. Consider that the mass media began in the late 1800's along with rapid advances in technology. There are several things to consider:

1. Are people getting dumber or are complex things reaching more people?

Things like the political process, economic models, biology and other things that only academics would of known are now taught to all people at some fundamental level. My point about voting rights being extended has a similar problem in that the rights were denied to those who never got a good education to begin with. There is no doubt that the oppression of groups many years ago still trickles down to today's generations. Certain things like black culture and the amount of women in jobs like aviation clearly show this. How long until everyone is really equal? How much does this even affect things?

2. Too much information or too much misinformation?

There is a wealth of information out there, with just as many, if not more lies for each one. There are anecdotes for what causes cancer, how to stay healthy, and so forth. There are entire multi-billion dollar industries based on lies (rapid weight loss, body detoxification, cults, etc) and thousands of myths.

3. Class warfare

Abortion can get rid of children we don't want. Organ transplants can let us live when we should be long dead. Medicine in general extends our lives far past what they should be. Technology makes us more efficient, faster, stronger. We can replace body parts and some organs with machines. What do these have in common? Only the rich can afford them, usually at the expense of the poor. Class warfare is the root of a lot of our problems and not surprisingly, it stems from technology. A rich girl can abort her child and bypass the costs she would of borne, while the poor one takes the burden of a birth. A rich man can get a new heart, but at a massive cost. $150,000+ to extend your life by 2+ years. We should be glad that organs cannot be sold, or there is no doubt that the poor would be harvested for the rich, as the rich need the organs and the poor need the money. High technology widens the class gap, but there is no obvious solution. When the poor stay poor, they stay uneducated and feed into this cycle of dumbness.

4. Artificial Selection?

Now, my point on artificial selection was in jest, although there is no doubt that humans bypass just about every obstacle of natural selection. AIDS is an excellent example, as there is no way someone with little to no immune system can survive in the wild, but they can live and die as they want with medicine. Medicine cures or alleviates the young of genetic cancers, heart problems, mild retardation, being born a "runt" or sickly, and many other factors that would kill the person off. Yet these people grow and pass their defective genes onto another generation. I am sure it won't be long before we can scan DNA and abort anything that we don't like.

5. The Cycle

There is little doubt that anyone born poor can make themselves brilliant, but it takes a large personal effort. Part of the problem is that stupidity breeds stupidity. A child going to a bad inner-city school can still get a great education from their parents. Unfortunately when the parent knows nothing, it is hard to teach. This is one of the prime reasons that the poor stay poor and the dumb stay dumb. There are not many ways to avoid a class gap. The naive solution is welfare on a large scale, but this unfairly removes liberties from the middle class and the rich. There are many ethical arguments towards issues like organ transplants and such that avoid the politics and debate over the ethics of implementing different schemes. These are excellent reads, but I'm afraid I checked them out of a library quite a while ago, with no names handy.

Like most things in life, there are many reasons that people seem less educated as time goes on. A lot of it is relative as in more information gets to people who never had it before. A lot of it is serious, such as the gargantuan influence that the mass media has over a wide audience. One only has to look at Nazi Germany and current-day North Korea to see how a propaganda machine can delude a huge percentage of a state's population into thinking anything. While I am not silly enough to compare today's mass media with Joesph Goebbels, I am bold enough to say they have the same influence over people. Hundreds of years ago people young and old begged to be able to read, while nowadays showing interest in being an intellectual is grounds for being outcast from your peers.

I'm sure there's a lot more on the subject. I imagine this problem arises naturally in any society. We have yet to see the solution.

[Marcus Bryant]

What might happen if once upon a time, say, a century ago, the captains of American industry sought to use the public schools to create a compliant workforce, predictable and malleable citizenry, and population of credulous consumers?