As to what is achievable, I think we are of one mind on the idea and so it does not need continued debate.

You’re free to do as you will in America. I suppose you’re also free to sprout wings and fly to Mars, if we considering the realities of the probabilities you face.

In reality, a vast majority of your citizens aren’t nearly so free as they imagine themselves. Ignorant people are never truly free, especially when they’re ignorant of their own conditions.

If one only cares about the results, then they cannot appreciate freedom. I know you don’t think this way, but it’s another comment that could cause people to form the wrong impression of you. Still, I suppose it is better to speak your mind and have to explain later than not speak at all. I agree that education needs to be fixed but I do not think one should be forced to take a test to show that one has the right, shall we say, mental fortitude to cast a vote. It’s too easy to tamper with and, I think, would limit the potential of voting in general. What we really need is MORE people voting, not less. Too many intelligent people just don’t bother.

As for your conclusions and your assumptions about my impending smackdown of you, I’d say you’ve misread me. Can a solid classical education lead to the sorts of qualifications I think should matter at the ballot box? Certainly. But I’m sure you and I have also both known our share of well-educated morons (and I can think of at least one major industrialized nation that elected one as president).

On the other hand, it is more than possible to come by tremendous knowledge and wisdom by other means. You’re not only a self-taught college student, but the astuteness of your analysis marks you as a very WELL-taught student. I can’t imagine setting before you any reasonably good-faith voter qualification test that you wouldn’t pass with flying colors.

My focus, then, was not about the FORM of the education, but instead the ends of it. I’m nothing if not a pragmatist, and all I care about are the results.

I’m sorry you read my thoughts and concluded that I’d be hostile to you. On the contrary – you seem like precisely the sort of person the US needs more of on Election Day.

You also link classical education as the way of being worthy to vote in your comment that the founding fathers only allowed white landowners to vote because “those were the only people who could afford sufficient education to participate intelligently in the government”. Certainly that is true, but you add weight to it when you refer to it as “the most pragmatic and sensible reason of all”.

This causes issue because, despite your comment about not needing to bias based on class, you emphasize the importance of a classical education, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and ends up being predominantly a) those who can afford it b) those few who can make it on scholarships and merit. Few of the lowest classes can make it through college. Certainly you, of all people, can see the trouble of that argument. Regardless of what you meant to say, it is what you said.

I must say, though, I admire the backhandedness of your rebuttal. Calling them unethical one minute and then complimenting them the next. It gives you the benefit of being insulting while also leaving you a chance to come off as caring despite a rebuttal that is, in many ways, just as alarmist as the Society’s.

If you are just as flamboyantly confrontational as you appear to be, I’m sure you’ll start commenting on how I obviously don’t understand you and say that I don’t have the credentials to cross swords with you. So let me clarify beforehand. My name is John Burch, and I am a self-taught college student. I have a boyfriend I plan to marry one day and I suffer from pronounced mental illness. I have to deal with people disregarding me every day. I don’t have a fancy name like “Dr. Sidicious Bonesparkle” and I haven’t shared drinks with the founding fathers as you say you have in your writer’s bio (and before you comment, I do in fact know that it’s an attempt at humor), but I do have an opinion that I feel is valuable.

And nobody, not even your prestigious self, has the right to judge me as incapable of casting a ballot. Start paring away people with opinions you think are unfounded, and next you can start paring away people with opinions you think are stupid. Next come ones that threaten your views, then those you simply disagree with. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

As Plato described in The Republic, the perfect society would be ruled by one who does not wish to rule but realizes that he is the best for the job. Since nothing is perfect, I suppose we have to deal with what we have.

Fire away, Mister Bonesparkle. Fire away.

I, too, have sympathy for the monkeys… bless their little hearts. They take BS and themselves far, far too seriously; however, if they’re about the age I think they are, it’s a normal, healthy feckless egoism. And if you play with the big kids, you take your knocks. If BS feels they’re worth a smack, it’s his blood pressure, not mine.

JS:

Add manic-depressive exes with loooooong memories to the list.

I’ve experienced both.

That’s precisely the point I made in the post below.

http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2007/05/14/got-an-opinion-attach-your-real-name-to-it/

Perhaps Bonesparkle should pass on this advice from Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson to the supposed “skeptics”:

“Much information is in some way incomplete or imperfect. The proper response to evidence you dislike or dispute is to supplement it or discredit it with better evidence.” Repeat: “with better evidence.”

On the whole, Jim, you and I have taught a wide range of students, grad and undergrad, and hailing from across all disciplines. So I feel qualified to say that while they might be quite adept as physics grad students, on the skills required to do what they’re attempting to do in that post they’re probably on the level of precocious sophomores or juniors? They’re well intentioned and as Sid says the goals they’re pursuing are worthy, but they have overestimated their own readiness a tad.

Still, I encourage them. I’m a teacher, and I always want students biting off a challenge. You don’t get to be the best without engaging the best. Poking Bonesparkle with a pointy stick, though – not so sure about that approach.

Well, I could quote Emerson here: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Wait. I just did….

So maybe that means they’re attacking you for being…logical and consistent?

Or does it mean they don’t have to be logical and consistent? Therefore, your being so makes you…hmm….

Are you sure they think intelligent design is bad…?

Could someone please show those math geeks the way to the humanities building so they could be made to read some Aristophanes, Juvenal, Rabelais, Swift, Pope, Diderot, Franklin, Voltaire, Kant, Twain, Gide, Vonnegut, or Bonesparkle…?

But they read Bonesparkle, didn’t they?

Well, I’m just a boy from a small town in the South. We have a word for such as the St. Louie Skeptical Society…

Dumbasses.

Btw, most people are glad to say they are from St Louis. Even Josephine Baker realized this about a century ago.

Nuff said!