American education system: Critical infrastructure, ignorant adults

 "Unfortunately, in a great many places in our society, including academia and most bureaucracies, prestige accrues principally to those who study carefully some aspect of a problem, while discussion of the big picture is relegated to cocktail parties. It is of crucial importance that we learn to supplement those specialized studies with what I call a crude look at the whole...It is essential, in my opinion, to make some effort to search out in advance what kinds of paths might lead humanity to a reasonably sustainable and desirable world during the coming decades. And while the study of the many different subjects involved is being pursued by the appropriate specialists, we need to supplement that study with interdisciplinary investigations of the strong interdependence of all the principal facets of the world situation. In short, we need a crude look at the whole, treating global security and global politics as parts of a very general set of questions about the future."

What a radical idea.

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security. The Raptor's Eye is a recent publication. Reach John at cioran123@yahoo.com