I am reminded, while reading this article, of Jose Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses. One thing characterizing “mass humanity”–what I like to call the Ones-at-Large–is the notion that they do not need to be taught, they do not need to learn. An interesting aspect of our current “constant education” is a rhetoric that paradoxically states, “While I am learning, I do not NEED to learn… I am just refining what I already know to be true.”

The decline of civility and civic literacy in American society is a political dilemma, the social production of which is traceable to a broader constellation of forces deeply rooted in the shifting nature of education and the varied cultural apparatuses that produce it, extending from the new digital technologies and online journals to the mainstream media of newspapers, magazines and television. Politics is now held hostage to what the late Raymond Williams called the “force of permanent education,” a kind of public pedagogy spread through a plethora of teaching machines that are shaping how our most powerful ideas are formed.

via Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie: The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism.