Newsweek is Incredible

Newsweek cover: “Why are Obama’s critics so dumb?”

By "incredible" I refer to the appropriate sense of the word meaning "not credible." Government interests, hence Obama's interests, are actually served by the opposite of the Newsweek assertion: keeping people stupid and docile.

In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present eduction conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen – of whom we have an ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way. -- John D. Rockefeller General Education Board (1906)

The quote could have been written by Obama himself. Docile stupidity also serves government's sibling, crony capitalism, since stupid people are uncompetitive people. As such, Obama has firmly positioned himself the anti-innovation president, stifling it wherever it may be found.

John T. Gatto blows the lid on compulsory government schooling. 

Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. Small business and small farm economies, like those of the Amish, require individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation. Our own economy requires a managed mass of levelled, spiritless, anxious, family-less, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Coke and Pepsi is a subject worth arguing about.

The extreme wealth of American big business is a direct result of school training in certain attitudes like a craving for novelty. That's what the bells are for. They don't ring so much as say, “And now for something different, thank god.”