Dumb down the masses/Make it illegal to discuss or teach controversial issues
Two items of interest which I read this week from the States and the UK:
"US to cut higher-education funding
The United States House of Representatives is scheduled to vote
tomorrow on a budget-reconciliation resolution that contains potentially
devastating cuts for higher-education programmes, according to higher education unions.
The Senate has already cut student-aid programs to provide for
hurricane relief efforts, but it is considering even deeper cuts to an already
inadequate student aid programme. The proposed Bill reduces student
loan programmes by $US14.5 billion to pay for deficit reduction, disaster
relief and tax cuts.
A background paper from the American Association of University
Professors says the Bill includes several concerning provisions, including more expensive student loans, intrusions on academic freedom and
institutional autonomy and fewer checks on fraud and abuse in the for-profit sector."
What greater way to ensure the masses are kept ignorant so that the truth of the motives of a corrupt government are kept hidden.
"UK universities fear research and lectures may be illegal
Academics and university librarians could fall foul of the UK
Government's new terror legislation unless they curb debate in tutorials and restrict the range of research materials available to students, vice-chancellors have warned. Universities UK (UUK) and the Association of University Teachers (AUT) said the day-to-day work of thousands of academic staff may be criminalised if the new laws, being debated in the Commons this week, are passed.
Professor Drummond Bone, UUK President, said that the Bill was drafted
in such a way that it might well get in the way of normal academic work.
"It might provoke the kind of suspicion and intolerance we are trying to
deal with," he said.
Vivienne Stern, Public Affairs adviser to UUK, said that the Bill is
unacceptably wide and will, in the view of UUK, expose academic staff
and librarians and, by virtue of that, the university management to the
risk of committing criminal offences during their standard work."
Pretty soon libraries will be forbidden to hold copies of 'controversial' books which reveal the true nature of what's really going on in the world.
The world is getting dangerous as apparently paranoid governments impose more restrictions, take away more freedoms, make life more difficult as they take on greater and greater powers. I don't see democracy at work here. It's all greed and power, ensuring that the masses are tightly controlled and unlikely to be able to topple the corrupt autocracies. We all have to protest such moves for our own safety and wellbeing. The threats to our daily lives are not coming from 'terrorists' but from our own supposedly democraticlly-elected governments.
