The difference is whether the teacher or scholar lording it over others is our example, or the teacher or scholar who teaches as well and as many as possible. We SAY our people should have and must have universal education yet with test scores and literacy rates in a tailspin it can obvious that we have anything BUT a widest universalness of primary and secondary education program in mind. Not to leave out college education, which has been known for the graduation of people who were totally illiterate.
For the first time we actually have an opportunity for a whole world's population to share not only air or water, but also to share the world of ideas, of art or of music and other sounds. . .anything that can be digitized.
Do you remember what the first protohumans did in "2001" [the movie by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark] ?
They chased their neighbors away from the water hole.
Will let the Thought Police chase us away from this huge watering hole, just so they can charge us admission, for something our tax dollars have already paid for?
The Internet Conquers Space, Time and Mass Production…
Think of the time and effort people save simply by being able to consult a dictionary, an encyclopedia, thesaurus or other reference book, a newspaper or magazine library of vast proportions, or a library of a thousand books of the greatest works of all history without even having to get up and go to the bookcase.
Think of the simple increase in education just because a person can and will look up more information, judgements become sharper and more informed….
Unless someone believes that good judgement, an informed population, and their effects are their enemies, it is a difficult stretch to understand why certain institutions and people want to limit this flow of information.
Yet a great number of our institutions, and even some of the people who run them, are against this kind of easily available information…they either want to control it— or they want to maintain their "leadership" in fields of endeavor by making sure we "have to do it the hard way," simply because they did it the hard way.