Those words are painted on the 16th street facade of ex-Stuyvesant High School, now home to no fewer than three separate schools. Stuy is an alma mater of mine, and I always walk by it entertaining a backward glance in the mind.
I wish the Dems would adopt that priceless homily as a campaign slogan, to blunt the privileging of ignorance that has become a standard tactic of those across the aisle.
Knowledge is power, and ignorance, if perhaps a form of bliss, is also a path to ruin, producing the credulous public that Trump as well as his GOP rivals count on to countenance a platform that runs counter to the continued survival of the species, and thus, to put it mildly, counter to the interests of the electorate.
And the right-wing’s attacks on literary and culture are part of the strategy of disabling through ignorance. And our defunded arts world, our deprogrammed public school arts curriculum, all play a role in making our population less and less able to think realistically, let alone constructively, creatively, imaginatively–or even, dare we mention it, poetically–a word that, if any politico dared mention it today, would be seized upon by the economic-political elite as a surefire giveaway of “elitism.”