Reply #61: Education is anathema to fundamentalists

[depakid]

One thing almost all fundamentalists lack is the ability to think critically and to consider alternative points of view. This is one reason why they persist in denigrating the public school system- and disparaging higher education. People who complete their cognitive development are typically not fundies, unless they're in it for the power or for greed (they're also less susceptible to advertising and other crude means of persuasion).

So the key to fighting fundamentalists (as well as other afflictions on the body politic is education- not merely the compilation of facts, but learning the process- the ability to think in the abstract, use logic and apply it through experience. The famous cognitive psychologist Piaget called this final stage of development the "formal operational," and surprisingly enough, most studies indicate that only forty to sixty percent of American college students and adults ever fully achieve it.