The thing that astonished me the most when I came to the United States was the public library. Every city and even rinky-dinky towns have public libraries. These are open to all and for free, unlike say university libraries.
Fortunately for me, my formal schooling prepared me by giving me the tools (reading comprehension and numeracy) for me to use libraries. I think that at the very least, everyone should be given those tools so that they can access libraries. That’s all that you need to do to get an educated citizenry.
Now of course thanks to the incredible advances in information and communications technologies, we have the internet, cheap smartphones, cheap online access, and an unbelievably huge amount of open access content, we are no longer restricted to physical public libraries. There’s more content than your heart can ever desire. In fact, there’s too much out there.
Anyway the thing is that if you are serious about learning something, you can do it. If you’re interested in understanding economics, here’s a resource I recommend:
Essential Scholars — A project of the Fraser Institute.
Right now they have Milton Friedman, Adam Smith and F. A. Hayek. I sampled the Friedman content by reading from the Essential Friedman the chapter on Capitalism and Freedom.
I categorize this post “Economics Library” and intend to add content to it as I go along.
Life is a Random Draw 