Are Educated Brits Idiots?

John Sydenham

What does the ordinary, educated, middle class Brit believe?

Let’s start with philosophy. The large number of atheists, especially in the middle classes, shows that few people have ever asked how they could be seeing the world.

Certainly people have been taught that light reflects off objects to be focussed in both eyes into an image at the back of the eyes. But simple questions such as how do the different images in each eye get combined into a single image, where is this single image, how is this image ‘seen’, how is it seen as if we are separate from it, how does hearing and feeling get combined into a mental space with sights, touch taste etc. all placed appropriately are seldom discussed or even contemplated.

The ‘educated’ middle class Brit has been taught that they hear because pressure waves strike the eardrum and wobble hairs in the cochlear. But simple questions such as how does a wobbly hair produce sound at the lips of a speaker in the single image of the world in our heads are never asked.

I could go on with these questions from the philosophy of mind. But the average ‘educated’ Brit is atheist, not agnostic. They believe they know all the answers.

The educated Brit believes they know history. They believe that the worst crimes in history were slavery and genocide. Few realize that slavery was not a crime or a sin for all time until about 250 years ago. In 1750 hardly anyone thought that it was wrong to have slaves. Almost everyone did it everywhere in the world. Slavery was not wrong to the people who lived 250 years ago and even ex-slaves could be found who had slaves.

The modern, educated Brit seems unaware that slavery was defined as a sin and a crime by the British (See Irritated in Africa). The British Empire changed the entire world. How do the ‘educated’ middle class Brits react to tales of slavery in the past? They blame their own ancestors! They curse the British Empire! They even make up stories about the British Industrial Revolution being based on slavery. Had the age of coal, iron and steam, the age of machinery, been based on slavery then Brazil or Spain would have been its birthplace (See Slavery, the Slave Trade and Reparations). The ‘educated’ Brit would never ask whether machines became attractive because there was no free labour in England: the last serf in Britain died in the early 17th century.

The average, ‘educated’ Brit believes that countries become prosperous by being completely open to multinational corporations and international banks. They are blissfully unaware that China rigged its currency so that it had a trade surplus with the world for decades and used petty regulations to transfer foreign investments into Chinese hands. They know that historically the great countries of the world had powerful domestic, manufacturing economies. But they still believe in free trade when free trade is the necessary environment for multinational business, not national prosperity. (See The UK needs tariffs on the EU).

The ‘educated’ middle class Brit believes that a country can be multicultural. They have been taught that if the English in the UK were suddenly exchanged for people from Italy or China it would be exactly the same country. They seem unaware of the words of Julius Nyerere, first President of Tanzania:

Educated Brits believe that the Sukuma tribe discovered the source of the Nile because they lived round Lake Victoria, that the Muslims were responsible for the seventeenth century scientific revolution because they contributed to algebra. That ‘world art’ is more important than European art and so on. They have no understanding that education should place a person in their own culture and inform the people about how that culture grew.

I could continue. What is clear is that the education system in the UK has failed. It is a catastrophe for the country.

A national education system should teach children that they live here, they have a responsibility to their families first and their country second. Our Internationalist teachers are busy burning our identity and letting it dissipate like smoke in the wind.