I was thinking about making this topic title about Americans, about us, in particular because I know we have been ignorant for much of modern history. We act like we're the best and we act like we don't know why what's happening and the reasons things are happening. I feel that a lack of knowledge of history is what caused my ignorance. Now I feel that history is asking many of the why questions that I've had. A knowledge of history will also keep oneself from getting programmed into mindlessly believing what they are told by the mainstream press, or, the mainstream media, or, mindlessly following everything in the present. A knowledge of history is what will solve much of our ignorance. That, and common sense tells us that a group of elites are always working against our best interest. It wasn't until I had some basic depth of historical knowledge- where- I could see these elitest roles play out, and, how they work against people and the masses, and how it has an effect on us.

I don't know if this is the right forum- if it isn't- please mods move it, but I placed it here because I think it's relevant to education.

[edit on 22-7-2009 by Frankidealist35]

I had a dream two weeks ago which seems closely related; a person not from this plane of existence (future me, maybe?) tried to explain to me the purpose of history:

"The purpose of history is not to learn how we should or shouldn't be; it is to learn how we are."

Not sure what to make of it when I woke up. It held me busy for.. two weeks maybe it's my subconscious self telling me to stop being a hypocrite. At any rate, I wanted to share it with you - seems we're somewhat on the same train of thought.

As a 'funny' sidenote, in Orwell's 1984 one of the largest way to control the population was to be able to 'change' history as well as make the population focus on the 'now'. The former has always been somewhat true, as the victors write the books; the latter has been made true by western culture itself, if not anything else. All my hope is with the school's history teachers..

To be honest I've encountered quite a few children (children to me are those younger than about 12 years of age) who came into the store I work in. One group of kids I remember quite vividly was that one of them was handing them a penny and kept saying "Penny for your thoughts sir!" With the one child just responding with "I don't like to think" to me I just thought that it's pretty much over, threw up my hands and started to walk away from the register until someone else came up.

It's just that people are finding more meaning in various other things like music (which isn't to bad) but they think they can go all the way to the top if they devout all their energy and willpower into it, or they choose to game quite a bit (Which I do myself, but only through the night and read through the day, scheduling got messed up sadly).

I'd say priorities are just being slightly messed up at the moment.

P.S. Did not mean to demean those who are musicians trying to rise, in fact my friend is starting to make it big and have been trying to support him since I knew him back in Middle school, thing is he plans to devout at least 50/50 but when school starts it becomes practically 75/25.

My approach is be successful in the eyes of society and research under the guise of something that the elites accept.