"[Our resistance to fallacious information] could be much enhanced if material on the human predicament were woven into basic teaching in elementary and high school, and if every college student in the nation were required to take at least one course that gave a basic overview of the 'state of the planet.' At Stanford University, there has been considerable uproar over the content of a required 'Western Civilization' course. But most students (and most faculty) remain ignorant of the size and growth patterns of the human population, what is involved in producing food, how ecosystems provide essential services to society, the comparative deployment of U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces, how people's perceptual systems give them a biased and inadequate view of the modern world, the basic theory of evolution, and the laws of thermodynamics. All these are more important to the average citizen than what Plato or Richard Wright wrote or who was gathered at the Congress of Vienna. ... The complacency with which our education system at all levels accepts the production of citizens hopelessly unequipped to understand the population explosion and many other aspects of the modern world is a national disgrace."
-- Paul and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Explosion
"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
-- H.G. Wells
