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Republicans have been trying to undermine education for 50 years. They want people uneducated and uninformed, they need it. They want people afraid, particularly of other beliefs, cultures, and colors. People who are less educated are easier to frighten. This is why Republicans do well in red states where the GOP have been undermining education for decades. Republicans need frightened, under-educated voters in order to win elections. People who have been taught critical thinking skills can figure out when they’re being lied to.
I don’t think your premise is far off, but really I think it’s simpler than that. Angry people vote, and children are an exposed nerve among “values” voters. “Won’t somebody think of the children!” has been a meme for longer than memes have been called memes. Conservativism relies on outrage and fear to motivate voters, so they manufacture it in school districts and PTO meetings. And because the outcome is so inconsequential, it doesn’t even matter if they win. They want the fight, so that progressives must spend time and resources defending against fiction. Win or lose, their supporters are energized and primed to hate anyone who is trying to corrupt their children.
This 1000%. Birth rates decline with more education, empathy goes up, religiosity goes down, critical thinking and skepticism go up. All of these shifts are antithetical to high-control systems.
They are failing in red states for thanks to the internet. Why they are attacking it and banning of books.
It’s racism, pure and simple. In my hometown, rural south, the schools were forced to integrate in 1973. The next year, a private school opened and magically only white kids were allowed in. All the talk about quality of education and school choice boils down to this: conservatives don’t want their kids to be in the same building with black and brown kids.
Its even worse, honestly.
They are adding in Christian doctrination to the curriculae, and also privatizing public schools by trying to make vouchers for charter schools the norm.
This will impact all races, because its targeted at the poor and middle class.
Been watching this play out for a few decades.
To my mind this anti-education crap started with Limbaugh, or at least that was the first I heard of it. He made “ivory tower liberal” a conservative mainstream talking point and insult.
The man was extraordinarily smart, and I think he was trying to head the education issue off at the pass. Issue being, it’s quite clear that Democratic voters skew towards the more educated.
So how do we explain this? Sure makes conservatism look dumb. Rush got the idea out there that wild-eyed college professors were indoctrinating the youth. It snowballed from there until conservative voters became anti-education on all levels.
Now we’re at the point where they can weaponize schooling and GOP voters don’t care, at best, or are actively applauding such moves.
Conservatives have been going after schools since the 1950s. They want everyone to be strictly in order they way they want it. Absolutely nothing distinctive or out of uniform. Individualism in a sin with Conservatives. Stay within the extreme limitations they create and also be white.
As usual, I think Democracy in Chains would shed light on this.
Read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”.
There are 2 thinking-systems.
I call 'em Kahneman System-1 & Kahneman System-2.
System-1 is animal-reaction, prejudice, addiction, and trained-expertise, including all its defects.
System-2 is considered-reasoning.
What the Repubs, AND MANY OTHERS throughout the world, are doing, is fighting-off System-2, for animal-reaction’s totalitarianism.
Biblical-literalists, Quran-literalists, Rashists, kkk, nazis, marxist-leninists, fascists, etc, the 1 thing that the ALL have in common,
is that they NEED to break System-2 from interfering with their animal-“reasoning”/reacting, and they use System-1 conditioning ( propaganda ) to displace System-2 from their own kind ( preventing objectivity all they can, while repeating, repeating, repeating, the “special narrative” that conditions System-1 into embodying the pushed-narrative ).
From my perspective it is simply humanity’s ignorance working itself into a planet-killing tantrum/pogrom.
I no longer expect more than 1.5% of humankind to survive this century.
Germany outlawed homeschooling, and because the education-system did sooo much damage to my potential, I was against Germany’s answer ( I’m not of Europe, this just bugged me ),
but then, through the years, I’ve seen what the cults do with “homeschooling”, and … Germany is right.
There are 2 independent reasons for homeschooling:
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education is bad, abusive-of-potential, etc, and homeschooling looks to be a convenient means of letting the problem remain, while saving a few kids
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wanting to prevent the schools from seeing the brainwashing, the abuse, the molestation, etc, and so keep the child within the cult/abuse regime
The real correction for bad education, is to correct it, at all scales.
From removing conflict-of-interest in all institutions, to, Scandinavian-style, removing alternative to public-education, so that the rich who want their kids getting better education, have only 1 path available: improve education itself.
( private tutoring can still alter career-vectors, but removing the need for that helps fix things ).
The US system does the opposite:
Poor regions get the worst schools, in order to prevent poor kids from ever competing equally with rich-regions kids…
( evil, that, and that convict/felon/inmate “Jesus” Yehoshua benJoseph would have had no tolerance for it, his being obviously socialist, & providing both free healthcare & free food to people, while stating bluntly that you could more-easily get a twisted-rope through a needle than you could get an oligarch/rich into heavan )
The US education-system is actually a well-engineered class-segregation system, not an education system.
This guy was a NY State Teacher Of The Year award winner, who trashed his employability in education by telling people the truth.
Institutions require the breaking & dependency-on-approval of kids.
Among other truths…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
Anyways, once you realize that competing interests work to either make education work, or not-work in specific ways, and the not-work enforcers have been winning all along.
John Taylor Gatto discovered that the original US education system was paid-for by the coal-industry, etc…
Why?
To prevent any more people like Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln ( both mostly self-educated ) from ever occuring again:
what were required were limited workers.
So, they based the US education system on the lower caste education of India.
Elegant, isn’t that …
Anyways, once you earn “compound interest” on deliberately damaging kids ability to do considered-reasoning, generation on generation, then the lashing-out-against-considered-reasoning people are going to gain enough dominance in order to take exclusive totalitarian possession of the country.
Which is exactly what you see happening.
Mao, in China, destroyed both education & the educated.
The Repubs in the US are going to do what Mao did, their own way.
Because they hate/can’t-stand considered-reasoning or objectivity.
So, they’re fighting it to the death.
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