Most of goober/rural and suburban America is in a brainless anti-education trance in 2024. Like my current hometown, this movement is disguised by code names like “Moms for Liberty,” the “1776 Project,” and other quasi-patriotic sounding names echoing similar Brownshirt movements from 1936 Nazi Germany. These Soviet-patriots are even using the same fascist tactics to harass and threaten board members. I’ve been here before and it wasn’t pretty. In the 1950s, in many school districts, the Christian-right and other generally uneducated and superstitious deplorables were so terrified of evolution and science education and what it might mean for their easy money that they dumbed-down public education to “readin’, ritin’, and ‘ritmatic.”
Then came Russia’s Sputnik and the whole half-witted portion of the country freaked out and started buying bomb shelters. The US military discovered that what passed for “scientists” and “engineers” from the majority of public schools were barely able to mechanically manipulate a slide rule, let alone do complex calculations with that device. So, the federal government and states tried a variety of mostly-unsuccessful tactics to crank up US education standards. And religion, as usual, freaked out and fought back. Mostly, what that accomplished was creating education ghettos across the country. In California and the Left Coast, where higher education was publicly-supported so strongly that anyone who could support themself and could afford college, produced high-tech idea generators like . Places where religion was dominant, like the Midwest and Southeast . . . not so much. The end result has been economic deserts where poverty, ignorance, and social and economic inequality are accepted norms.
Public education is not and should not be intended to support and promote parental “beliefs.” Good parents, probably about 1-10% of the breeding herd, hope their children will be smarter, happier, better educated, and more competent than their parents. Awful parents are jealous of their kids’ successes and terrified that their children will grow up to realize their parents are clueless, arrogant, entitled morons. As a friend recently reminded me, the purpose of public education, though, is to provide society with citizens capable of making intelligent decisions, supporting themselves and their families, adapting to changing technology and new information, and promoting the improvement of the culture. That is the ONLY reason that “childless cat ladies,” other taxpaying childless adults, wealthy people who can afford to sent their children to private schools, and seniors can be rationally required to pay for public education.
The only way a culture can provide that kind of public education is by supporting schools that protect teachers from idiot parents, regressive school boards, incompetent city management or school administrators, and that pay teachers enough for them to make the sacrifices necessary to be good teachers. In most US public schools, the starting salary for teachers is almost half of that for police and fire employees. If a country wanted to make a strong statement of values and priorities, that is about as blatant as it gets.
Personally, I’m tired of hearing about “public education’s failures.” What needs to be said loudly and often is that parents are failing their children and the conservative cowards are failing the country. (Remember, the word “conservative” means “averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values.” There is nothing courageous about resisting change since change is an inevitable variable of life.) George Washington wrote, ““The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment, for promoting human happiness, by reasonable compact, in civil Society.” That was not a statement from a conservative, but someone who understood that change is a constant and a scientific “experiment,” such as democracy, has to be adaptable and constantly evaluating the outcomes of that experiment. Without a high quality public education, independent of politics and corruption, a society will quickly evolve into the kind of tyranny that the United States was designed to resist.
No comments:
Post a Comment