In the late 1960’s and into the early 1970’s Ronald Reagan was the governor of California. While in office he began the experiments he later brought to the entire country in the 1980’s. One of those experiments was to reduce the funding given to “public” schools, colleges, and universities. The goal of this experiment was to reduce the number of college educated people by limiting who could afford to go to college.

Why would anyone want to conduct such an experiment?

Roger Freeman, adviser to Reagan and Nixon, warned governor Reagan that by offering free or nearly free college education “We run the risk of creating an educated proletariat” which he said would be dangerous.

Who was the proletariat freeman feared would become educated? Literally the boomer generation but more generally he meant the lowest socio-economic groups in society.

Put another way he meant poor people. Peasants. Dregs. Probably nonwhite people as well but let’s leave the fundamental racism of the statement aside for now.

That statement was made in 1970, 54 years ago. The dumbing down of society experiment has been running for 54 years now and the results of that experiment are all around us. Rising superstition and distrust of science, decisiveness and hatred and the never ending blame game of scapegoating the group de jour one side or the other has decided is the reason why people are struggling so much.

The thought I had which lead to me picking up my phone to type this post out was simply this–

Hasn’t the experiment run long enough?

Do we really need to continue this process which has lead to society being such a mess any longer? Can’t we all imagine what the result of further dumbing down will be?

I get it, educated people are difficult to fool, to intimidate, to control but isn’t the trade off of a society moving forward, instead of backward, and advancing, instead of regressing, worth it?

To be fair I could be wrong and increasing education amongst the proletariat may not improve anything, and to be fair to the scientific method we must run another experiment and make advanced education as easy and inexpensive as possible to see what will happen.

Run the new experiment for an equal amount of time, 54 years, and then at the end of that period we can compare notes.

I for one, think this is worth trying.