None so blind...

...as those who will not see. I couldn't agree more with this lament:

Many people in the United States purchase one or fewer books every year.

Many of those people have seen every single episode of American Idol. There is clearly a correlation here...

You see a lot of ostensibly smart people in airports, and it always surprises me how few of them use this downtime to actually become more informed. It's clearly a deliberate act--in our infoculture, it takes work not to expose yourself to interesting ideas, facts, news and points of view. Hal Varian at Google reports that the average person online spends seventy seconds a day reading online news. Ouch.

Most weeks, I can count on one hand the number of hours of TV I watch. What 'leisure' time I have in that sense is spent online. I do spend more than 70 seconds a day scanning online news, mind you, but I also take time to dig past what the journalists elect to include, and do my own diligence on the issues. In the past five to six years, I've probably learned more about history, political theory and economics than I did as a full-time student in college -- and I majored in two of those subjects!

The author is correct: a true education today is available to just about anyone who wants it, diploma mill or not. But just like freedom, you have to want it and be willing to work for it.

...we now return you to your regularly scheduled vacuous 'reality' programming...

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
-- Thomas Jefferson