Knowledge-Deficient Education Has Produced Ignorant American Citizens--- So That We Must Move Forward to the K-12 Revolution

Over the long-term, the most important task for Americans is the overhaul of K-12 education.

In the short-term, the new Biden-Harris administration must mount an effective response to the Covid-19 pandemic;  recommit the United States firmly to the Paris Climate Accords;  work toward reestablishing United States presence in the Iran nuclear deal;  end an array of anti-immigrant policies and provide a route to citizenship for long-time immigrant residents and for those fleeing dangerous situations in home countries;  broaden Medicaid coverage and provide a public option in seeking universal health care coverage;  establish a $15 minimum wage and inaugurate responsible fiscal and monetary policies in which all classes thrive in a flourishing economy.

But the reality is that few Americans have the information base to participate in discussions on these matters.  They are ignorant as to pertinent facts on these issues and many matters at the core of existence at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century:

For example, most Americans cannot immediately locate Iran and Afghanistan on a map.  They command very few details as to the contents of United States Constitution.  They have little knowledge of pre-Columbian Native American life.  They have little knowledge of the great West African empires and the later slave-trading states of the Ashanti and the Dahomey;  how the slave trade worked in detail;  the particular injustice of African American life between 1877 and 1965;  or the array of complicated factors that have led to the challenges of life at the urban core.

Most Americans do not know the meaning and significance of Gross Domestic Product, the difference between debt and deficit or between fiscal and monetary policy;  the distinctions among Freudian, Skinnerian, humanist, and neural psychology;  the defining characteristics and beliefs of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or Confucianism;  beyond selected reading in Sunday school and sanctuary service selections, any detailed understanding of the text of the Bible, any sense of the structure and the messages of the Bible, the Torah, or the Talmud.  Few Americans have read with comprehension even one Shakespearean play;  few are even aware of the plays of August Wilson.  Most Americans have little understanding of the fundamentals of English grammar.  Many think that fractions are mysteries that constitute advanced mathematics.  Knowledge of world visual and musical art is abysmal.

Thus do Americans live out their existences without the cultural enrichment that broad knowledge provides.  They have little capacity for engaged citizenship.  Most are not vocationally prepared for remunerative and fulfilling employment.

Thus do we get a society in which many people feel such deprivation of purpose that they stay mired in drug-induced hazes.  Knowing that something is wrong but not quite understanding the nature of the wrong, many Americans retreat to a warped form of evangelical belief, worship of demagogues, commitment to the nonsense of Q-anon.  Incitement of insurrection incites limited fury.  The electoral process is little understood;  democracy becomes no more than mouthed shibboleth.

Knowledge-deficient education has given us this society. 

Thus, over the long-term, the most important task for Americans is the overhaul of preK-12 education.

Overhauling preK-12 education will allow Americans to overcome their abysmal ignorance so as to go forth to lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and vocational satisfaction---  maximizing the chances for happiness on this one earthly sojourn.