Comment by bsenftner
9 hours ago
Somewhere, I am not the historian to say, teaching people the basics of an education, that being “reading, writing and arithmetic”, failed to recognize the critical role that communications play in everything people do, and try to do. That phrase ought to be “reading, writing, arithmetic, and conveying understanding” because that would include why one reads and why one writes, and connects that to the goal of conveying an understanding you have to others. However, this is the root issue.
General society being generally poor communicators is caused by this lapse in our understanding of education. The understanding that the purpose of an education is to both use it and to help others understand what you may and they do not, as well as understand how to gain understanding from others that they have and you do not.
Because we do not teach that an education is really learning how to understand and how to convey understanding in others, the general idea of an education is to be an owner of a specialized skill set, which one sells to the highest bidder.
This has caused education to be replaced by rote memorization. Which in turn created a population that is only comfortable with direct question and answer interactions, not exploratory debate for shared understanding. This set the stage for educators, nationwide, to teach students to be databases and not critically analyzing understanders of their vocations.
Note that the skills for conveying understanding in others, additionally carries the skill how to recognize fraudulent speech. Which, as of Dec 2025, is the critical skill the general population does not have that is potentially the death of the United States.
When a population of people do not have an emphasis on critical analysis, but rote memorization, as the basis of their education that then creates a population that has heightened sensitivity to controversial lines of reasoning, lines of reasoning where there are no clear answers. Life itself has a large series of mysteries based on faith, religion being chief, which in a population that is comfortable with debate to convey understanding is perfectly safe to engage in discussions about mysteries within these areas requiring faith. But a society that is not comfortable with such discussions, one that thinks debate’s purpose is to "win, at all costs" then such discussions are taboo. They get shut down immediately. When people cannot debate to understand, but as a combat, learning is not accomplished. And useful critical analysis skills are not taught.
I have no idea if such a national situation can be manufactured, but I believe this is where we are at as a nation. We no longer produce enough adults with developed critical analysis skills to support democracy. Democracy depends upon an educated population with active critical analysis capabilities, a population that can debate to a shared understanding and accomplish shared goals. That foundational population is not there.
This can be fixed, but it may take more than a generation. Our educational system needs foundational revisions, which include additional core subjects, chief of which being how to communicate and convey understanding in others. Which lies at the roots of our demise, this lack of this basic skill.
>General society being generally poor communicators
period dot.
Don't insinuate there was a golden past where humans in general were great communicators, it didn't exist. Furthermore the need to communicate in the modern world has increased network sizes many times over what humans developed in the 'monkeysphere'. For all most of all human evolution the number of people you interacted with and communicated with was relatively tiny, like 150 or so.
Before we developed radio communication to crowds was a rare thing done by few people. Radio itself lead to massive crowds but few communicators themselves (Propagandists quickly realized its power for example). And really TV was much the same. But in the last 40 years we've had a geometric explosion in the ability to communicate by the average person. In terms of societal growth, this is a tiny sliver of time. Now your 'average idiot' can communicate with the world, poorly, and still garner a huge audience, and or work requires much less 'doing things' and communicating.
Nowhere do I claim that such a "golden past" existed. I am saying that the critical skill of communication to convey information, to gain information, to learn via one-to-one communications is rapidly being lost. It is not respected by education, it is not taught, and it is truly one of humanity's greatest skills: conveying understanding. Which has the side benefit of teaching one one how to identify illogical speech.