Do we Really Think? An Impertinent but Necessary Question to Ask Ourselves

The title and text of the following entry is entirely borrowed from a book af essays and observations. I will give proper credit at the end, so that the reader has a chance to respond as intended/expected.

"We Americans are firm believers in education. The litle red schoolhouse is the very backbone of our entire experiment in government and living. Education is widely encouraged and made available to almost everyone."

"It would shock most of us, then, to hear that our education is sadly in need of repair. That despite our buildings and books and teachers and endowments we have overlooked the most important result which any education should give."

"The truth is that, as a nation, we have not been educated to think. We are filled with dates and names and even a wide variety of knowledge, but the ability to think --- to think through to the very end of a problem --- is stil a very rare quality with us."

"Millions of men come to problems which they earnestly seek to solve. On paper the solution they bring seems to be the right one. Weeks later, Time has proved it the wrong one. Isn't that the real reason why so many men who are sincere, ambitious, and hard working still meet with so little success?"

"As a nation, we enjoy a fine percentage of literacy. We read, write, spell, count, and talk reasonably well. Yet the ability to think, to rationalize --- to reason coldly and logically, is something apart from all this. And to men in business, this remains and shall always remain the greatest of assets."

"It is time to inquire into this. It is time to realize that in this machine age, average knowledge, average ability to do anything, is worth only half of what it was fifty years ago. We are building machines today which add better than men can and faster too. It is only a matter of time before machines will spell and provide information and carry out tasks of all kinds. In short, the mechanical man we are perfecting threatens to do almost everything we do - except one, and that is to think."

"Thinking on the surface---or halfway--- or three quarters of the way --- is like making half or three fourths of an automobile. And thinking this distance is just as useless.

"It is time to ask: are we really thinking things through?"

Heatter, Gabriel. Faith: a selection from essays and editorial that appeared in "The Shaft." United States of America, 1936.

Seventy-five years ago, at least one voice was forewarning, and forecasting, the perils that plague us in 2006. How prescient for a pre-WWII radio man to see that we were headed for an eduational disconnect that has not gotten better in the end?

Too many of us aren't thinking, about anything, all the way through to the end.

Admit it, if the 'red schoolhouse' and the dated computer references hadn't given it away, you would have thought this was written today.

How else to explain the current predicaments we are in? Pick a current issue - the Gulf Oil leak, the various war zones, the global economy, the jobless rate, the bailouts. You cannot tell me that the perpetrators would have taken us to where we are now had they thought there various situations through to the very end.