The Crisis of Ignorance is an expansive work of social criticism, memoir, educational philosophy, and civic argument organized around a central conviction that intellectual passivity carries consequences far beyond the classroom. What do you want readers to understand when you say, “Ignorance is a disease”?

Throughout my book, I argue that ignorance is not the same as a lack of education. An educated person can still be profoundly ignorant if they refuse to question what they have been taught or accept information without examination. Propaganda, censorship, misinformation, political manipulation, poor education, intellectual complacency, and the suppression of dissent can cultivate ignorance. Ignorance becomes dangerous when it is accompanied by indifference. Not knowing something is natural. Choosing not to know, particularly when the information is accessible and consequential, is something completely different. Ignorance weakens liberty; a person who cannot distinguish evidence from propaganda, or who lacks the willingness to question authority, is more vulnerable to manipulation. In that sense, ignorance can undermine the intellectual foundation a free society requires. This connects directly to the larger argument of The Crisis of Ignorance: the struggle against ignorance is ultimately a struggle for human autonomy. If individuals cannot think critically for themselves, their ability to make meaningful choices, participate in democracy, challenge authority, and defend liberty becomes increasingly compromised.

You describe yourself as once being an indifferent student who struggled with reading. What changed your relationship with learning?

I was once the student I now worry about as a teacher: indifferent, struggling with reading, and seeing school more as something to endure than an opportunity to discover something. I didn’t initially understand the value of education because I hadn’t yet found a reason to care about learning. My relationship with history changed. As I read more and understood the world beyond my immediate experience, I discovered that knowledge was not simply information to memorize for a test. Knowledge let me understand people, societies, governments, conflict, and ultimately myself. History opened a door I didn’t know existed.

Travel also changed how I understood learning. Visiting different countries and encountering people, cultures, and historical places firsthand made the world feel much larger than I had imagined. I began to understand that learning was not confined to a classroom or textbook. The world itself was a classroom. Eventually, reading stopped being an academic obligation and became a form of freedom. The more I read, the more questions I had. And the more questions I had, the less willing I became to simply accept someone else’s interpretation of the world. I began to recognize that education is not merely about acquiring answers; it is about developing the courage and ability to ask better questions.

That realization ultimately changed my life. The student who once struggled with reading eventually became a teacher, and later a researcher and writer. That transformation is one reason I wrote The Crisis of Ignorance. I know firsthand that indifference does not have to be permanent. A person can awaken intellectually. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that we should never confuse a student’s current relationship with learning with that student’s potential. Sometimes a student does not lack intelligence or curiosity. They simply have not yet encountered the question, experience, teacher, or idea that makes them want to know more. How has the modern information environment changed the challenge of distinguishing knowledge from misinformation? The modern information environment has fundamentally changed the nature of ignorance. In the past, one of the greatest challenges was accessing information.

Today, we face the opposite problem: we are surrounded by more information than any individual could process. The challenge is no longer simply finding information. It is determining what is true. Social media, search engines, artificial intelligence, 24-hour news, podcasts, videos, and online communities have created an environment where accurate information can exist alongside misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, half-truths, and deliberately fabricated claims. What makes this especially dangerous is that misinformation does not always look like misinformation. It can be presented professionally, repeated thousands of times, paired with images or statistics, and delivered by someone who seems credible. Technology has therefore made critical thinking more important than ever. We have to ask: Who created this information? What evidence supports it? What is the source? What might the author want me to believe? Is there credible evidence that contradicts it? And perhaps most importantly, am I accepting this information because it is true, or because it confirms what I already believe? The danger is that people can now construct an information environment that continually reinforces their existing assumptions.

Algorithms can expose us to more of what attracts our attention, while social networks can create the illusion that the people around us represent the entirety of reality. We can become extremely well-informed about what we already believe while remaining profoundly ignorant of perspectives and evidence that challenge us. This is why I believe the crisis of ignorance is not solved simply by giving people more information. Information without judgment can actually deepen the problem. What we need is the intellectual discipline to evaluate information—to distinguish evidence from assertion, knowledge from opinion, and truth from manipulation. For me, this is where education becomes essential. Education cannot simply fill students with information. It must teach them how to think, question, investigate, and recognize when someone is trying to manipulate their understanding of reality.

What larger questions do you plan to explore as The War Against Ignorance Series continues?

As The War Against Ignorance Series continues, I intend to ask increasingly uncomfortable questions: Who benefits when people stop questioning? Who controls what a society remembers, what it teaches, and ultimately what its citizens are permitted to believe? And what happens to liberty when ignorance becomes easier than thinking? Volume II, The Influence of Ignorance: Teaching the Complacent Mind in an Age of Apathy, which I hope to publish in November, moves from the crisis itself to the forces that allow ignorance to take root and influence us. I examine apathy, conformity, education, technology, media, politics, and the growing willingness to accept information without questioning its source or purpose. We live in an age in which information is everywhere, yet genuine intellectual engagement seems increasingly difficult to find. The question is not whether people have access to knowledge. The question is whether they still want to seek it. Volume II asks what happens when complacency becomes a habit and students—and society—become comfortable letting someone else do the thinking for them. That leads to a darker question: Can ignorance be used as a weapon? If ignorance can be cultivated, manipulated, and passed from one generation to another, then education becomes far more than the transmission of information. It becomes a battleground for the human mind. That is where The War Against Ignorance ultimately takes us: into the struggle over who gets to shape the way we think—and whether we have the courage to think for ourselves.

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