Ack, I misquoted (er...mis-paraphrased) you. My defense is that it's early in the morning.

This idea that the average person in 2006 is significantly stupider than in any other era is the nastiest of self-fulfilling prophecies. I'm told that schoolchildren in Soviet Russia used to read Dostoevsky in grade school. When I marked grade 10 literacy tests a few years back, I was thrilled when I came across a student able to construct a sentence in English.

All of this leads to: "Well, they obviously can't think for themselves, so we must think for them."