I'm not talking about those who choose not to educate themselves on a specific field. Obviously, we have only have so much time and energy and it is ludicrous to expect people to use what time we have to study everything. I have little interest in the details of quantum mechanics. I find the concepts interesting, but my entire family and I tell my brother to shut up when he starts rambling about the mathematics of it. I don't have a problem with people partitioning their education in that manner. My problem is those refusing education. I have two subsets of this type of person.

The first subset is the type of people who purposefully AVOID knowledge being gifted to them, or outright refuse to learn more about a subject (particularly when it contradicts their biases and opinions). One of the people that anger me the most in this category are a certain brand of animal activist. These individuals will have all their information from poor and incredibly biased sources (eg. PETA)and, when they are presented with information that is either an impartial statement of facts or an explanation of practices they disagree with, intentionally ignore this information or write this new knowledge off as "wrong" just because it disagrees with their opinion.

The second subset is the type of person that doesn't know basic knowledge that they would have been taught in school, and doesn't care. We all forget details that we really should remember, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people who don't know that Africa is a continent, not a country. People that don't know what the significance of Pearl Harbor or don't know the country where we dropped the atom bombs. These types of people are all very frustrating, but the qualifier of "and doesn't care" is what makes these people one of the worst types of people. The willful disregard for knowledge about elementary geography and world/nation changing events is inexcusable for anyone living in today's world.

As a note, I find the second subset of person the most depressing. Not only is their lack of interest in the world around them and loss of curiousity disheartening, but it saddens me to know that there are people in this world who would love to have the education that was wasted on them. When I was taking a Wildlife Course in South Africa, I was getting help from one of the native South African hands with my task. We were chatting as we could, and he was telling me how he wished he could become a doctor so he could help people. He wished he could come to the united states and learn here. And there are people, a simply APPALLING number of people, that take their gift of education and squander it like so many dollars on lottery tickets.

At least the people who refuse to acknowledge any information contradicting their opinions are still learning knowledge relevant to their opinion...People who just don't care are just...ugh.