🧵I’m increasingly convinced as I listen to political discourse in the US that we are paying the price for the deconstruction of the American educational system. We “educate,” or rather merely credential, people who lack the knowledge, rigor, language and discipline to reason.1/5
Ask yourself why the most ubiquitous colloquialism in American English today is the word “like”? “It’s like, you know, like, and like…..”—ad infinitum. This is an untrained mind deprived of logical linearity, grappling for order and meaning, struggling with imprecision. 2/5
Simply put, this is the voice register of the uneducated. The years of school or college no longer teach the basics of rhetoric, grammar, logic and most of all reasoning. With few exceptions, our educational institutions allow students to wallow in empathy and avoid parsing. 3/5
Why it matters? Because it’s brought into our public agora not the statesman and the critic, but the bully and the wall flower—those who rant instead of reasoning, and those who embrace instead of dissecting. They’ve replaced discourse in politics with insults and babbling. 4/5
Look at our leaders across the political spectrum in the US, listen to what they say and how they speak. And ask yourself if democracy can function properly when this is what our political class has become. Institutions are only as good as people who make them work. Or don’t. 5/5
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