For anyone who would like to be challenged that reason, rationality, or even critical thinking work wonders or lead to a safe place, I'd suggest the book quoted below.
"...In the United States large sections of the population were happily abandoned to illiteracy from the very beginning. Now new sections are added to this lumpen proletariat with each passing year. Everywhere one hears the elites saying to each other, in private: "Well, of course, they are not educable." There are endless statistics to confirm the already educated in their pessimism. Seventy-two million Americans are illiterate, the majority of them white. This doesn't include the functionally illiterate. One-quarter of American children live below the poverty level. Forty percent of children in public schools are from racial minorities. The whites who can afford to are slipping away into the private school system. Twice as many children are born to American teenagers as to those of any other democracy. But if you begin to add such facts as that forty million Americans do not have access to medical care, you are also obliged to wonder if the problem lies not with the population but with the elites, their expectations and their own education." p131 'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
"Within the ethos of reason there was also the idea of encouraging generalized education. Education instilled knowledge. Knowledge dispelled superstition, thus making it possible to reason. A man capable of reasoning was fit to be a citizen. But this idea of creating citizens was vague. What did the elites want them for? The eighteenth-century philosophers believed, after all, in permanently established but benevolent authority. Educating the masses was intended only to improve the relationship between the top and the bottom of society. Not to change the nature of the relationship. [..] Like any elite holding great power, the technocrats are not particularly interested in the creation of subsidiary elites. Thus, while a fortune continues to be spent on state schools and universities, the entire system continues to decline. The intellectual muscle needed to give it direction is concentrated instead upon the continued refining of the education of the technocratic elite. Indeed, whatever may be quoted about the need for general education, there has always been an underlying contradiction in what the nation-state wished to teach the citizen. The masses, it was believed, could not be given more than a basic education: basic skills and - nowhere in elite education does this appear - a moral framework. In other words, they were to receive the nuts and bolts of a humanist formation." p130 'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
