Stupidity-Tolerance Quotient

Scratching my beard over a Shakespearean quote—“ The fool doth think he is wise but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” has given me an interesting observation to fire up my sleeping neurons.

Why does a fool doesn’t admit that he’s a fool? The obvious answer is he’s stupid or has no prudence. But is it so?
I think society should be put to blame for this and not any individual per se.

As a society, we never encourage stupidity. A simple math mistake is enough to brand a kid as “dumb” and ridicule him. The whole class and sadly even the tutor joins in this upsetting parade. Obviously, the grading system makes things even worse.

This puts the kid in a kind of “fear coma” and haunts him in his otherwise playful dreams. Further, it kills his intuition and a curiosity to learn things and become wise, if there’s anything as such.

This starts a dangerous and sick loop from which the fragile mind never comes out. No help is given to the “Dull” mind and no chance to correct the follies. Not knowing what to do, the kid takes the shortcut.

He starts rote memorization of stuff and lives in this ignorant-fear bubble without salvation unless a miracle happens so. By this logic,
the fool doesn’t think he’s wise but portrays himself as wise out of sheer helplessness at least to a point in his life. I know this isn’t an excuse for a fool to remain ignorant thorough out his life but this system puts such habits in the mind and pushes him into the path of stupidity.

The solution can be raising the stupidity-tolerance quotient I.e. the ability of the collective society to tolerate foolishness and idiocy. And give permission to stay foolish as often as one can.

As an old African proverb reminds us— it takes a village to raise a child. Here it takes a society to make one wise. The rest as Shakespeare in his Hamlet says is silence.