As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.¹ Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.² Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.³ Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.⁴ The truth is that the want of common education … is not from our poverty, but from the want of an orderly system.⁵ The less wealthy people,... by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government; and all this would be effected without the violation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen.⁶

We have ... arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.⁷ Don't let schooling interfere with … education.⁸ Many scientific generalizations have been discovered but have not come to the attention of what we call the educated world at large, thereafter to be incorporated tardily within the formal education processes, and even more tardily, in the ongoing political-economic affairs of everyday life.⁹ Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.¹⁰

Scott, you seem to have a technical solution to what I might call "dysfunctional divergence" of thought. Blogs encourage divergence, perhaps to the point of dysfunction. Wikis encourage convergence, else edit wars produce dysfunction. There is surely opportunity to invent in the middle ground.²¹ The time I trust will come, perhaps within the lives of some of us, when the outline of this science will be clearly made out and generally recognized, when its nomenclature will be fixed, and its principles form a part of elementary instruction.²² By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.²³