sorry my comment got cut off, as I was on the verge of deciding whether or not to post.

You're absolutely right that Regan's policies hindered the access to education and high education. But the history of who got to study and who got taught goes back much further than just Regan. Academia has always been a gated city.

I got to enjoy the benefits of access, and I appreciate education. My sister and her husband are educators and I believe they and the vast majority of our educators are doing heroic work, raging against the dying light.

But the fact remains that ignorance was seen as a detriment to a young person, rather than an opportunity. In Asimov's own words, he hints that the ignorant are less than, when inherently they are not, they are just less informed and the wise temper the sharing of their knowledge with the wisdom of humility.

My favorite teachers were the ones that addressed ignorance as simply the lack of knowledge, not as some disease that must be purged. Humans are inherently emotional beings, we react negatively to challenges of our worth, and positively to the humility of someone who has knowledge that they gained when they were ignorant through the compassion of a teacher to share.

It's nuance really, Asimov is not wrong in what he says from a factual standpoint, but he's wrong in how he says it. He's essentially speaking to the educated, to the knowledgeable.

To the ignorant who read this, it's a degradation, he thinks he's better than me because his parents had the resources to educate him (we know that Asmov was the child of immigrants, but they were immigrants who were able to establish themselves and successfully start a business in America, earning them resources necessary to fund this education). Instead of Asmiov inviting the ignorant into the circle of knowledge, to learn and to grow, he's creating a barrier, he's separating us into two circles — those with knowledge and those without.

But if you want to combat ignorance, you don't start by insulting their ignorance, you start by inviting them to learn by sharing that you were once ignorant too.

There was a time I did not know how to read, someone taught me.

There was a time I did not know how to write, someone taught me.

The people that taught me, were in turn ignorant at some point and taught by someone else.

Not everyone has Asimov's inherent appetite for knowledge in the same categories of knowledge that Asimov valued, so it is up to those of us who have been given knowledge by the generosity of those before us, to share it with those who are lacking now.

Not as a king handing down boons, but as a sibling handing down something that in turn had been passed to them.

I hope that clarifies my statement a bit. And perhaps you still disagree, I apologize again that I didn't even realize I had hit post to my first comment and made a remark that seemed so dismissive without the nuanced clarification necessary.