We live in a world where people do not consider education important. To be honest with ourselves, this is the case.
Education is almost always on the agenda, but it is perceived at best as an initiation ritual. I often hear that people that passed through the University receives something important. In this case, the interlocutor can't explain what it is that the student receives. The higher education is transformed into a semi-mystical process of gaining status and sacred "knowledge of life".
Few said that it is important to have adequate representation about the world. And what views of the world depend on our actions. This simple and even somewhat banal idea, unfortunately, is absorbed pretty bad, because we live in a culture, which celebrates the belief in miracles. A wrong view of the world is not only a hindrance, but is presented as a desirable ideal. In movies, in music and in literature, the dominant feature is it is a call to believe and not something to double-check.
We live in a culture where it is normal to say "I don't care how it actually" is wrong and will look like a slob, which spoils the mood, insisting on questioning and research. It is easier for us to answer "Yes" or "no", and everything else is from the evil one. What the world is much more complicated and that such binary in science is almost never used it again looks like an unnecessary complication. From this it is customary to dismiss. "Keep it simple" - I will say to the skeptic.
In General, the angle of illumination of reality often focuses on emotions and moral prescriptions. Belief in miracles is good because it is associated with certain moral precepts. Rational behavior is rarely considered compatible with kindness and morality, we will give the fight allegedly started opposite - mind and heart.
And you could say that it's just other issues that do not contradict the study of the world for what it is. But, alas, for many, the codes of moral rules, the division of people into right and wrong and it turns out what they mean by education. Even dry information about the world are often regarded as the moral precepts.
The hoax of education, whatever its cause, leads to the fact that people rarely feel the need for something to truly explore. Even more rarely, they feel their own incompetence. Reasoning about biology, physics, Economics, usually the goal is not to lose face in the dirt. Important again is not how the world works actually, and status.
And when I ask questions about the activities of the society of skeptics, you have to explain, or at debating what to invent the world and have a real idea of his device is not a small difference in the world, and fundamentally different approach to life.
Therefore, the problems of education are, from my point of view, not that his little - it a lot - but with which I began this post: people do not feel that an accurate view of the world is important. In some incredible way, is that the truth is something like taste. And to believe that cancer can be healed by prayer is the same peer opinion, like everything else.