"I Love the Poorly-Educated!" We're Seeing Why
I blame the lack of emphasis on education.
I know it's not exactly insightful or original to say that a poor public educational system gives us people like Donald Trump and other right wing assclowns in our government. But with minimal effort, one can draw a direct line between public education and the quality of our elected officials.
My family and I moved to East Meadow on Long Island exactly 50 years ago today. It was the day before my 16th birthday and, while I wasn't aware of it at the time, by 1975, the school or the district stopped teaching things like Civics, Logic, History, Critical Thinking Skills and several other disciplines that were standard in high schools back when my parents were young. What little we got in the way of History and Civics we had to learn through the various curricula of Social Studies teachers because, by then, everything having to do with Civics, American history, etc was folded into what used to be known as Social Studies.
I was lucky in that I had a very good Social Studies teacher in senior year named Edwin Lemkin, a former Navy chief who really knew his stuff (I wrote a post about him many years ago on this blog). While he didn't run a Civics class but a catch-all Social Studies class, in those nine short months he was our 8th period Social Studies teacher, he gave us a pretty good basic grounding of how government worked. Through him, we learned that Congress has the power of the purse strings, checks and balances, etc.
But not all students were as lucky as we in Mr. Lemkin's class. There was a gradual erosion of the quality of the education that kids were getting both in my time and after.
Fast forward about 25 years later. I may have told this story before but, still, I'll tell it again. My then girlfriend and I were at a parent teacher's conference in the local high school. We had two boys in that school so we had a lot of teachers to talk to that night. During the down time in the hallways, I noticed several students were fanning out and talking to the parents waiting to talk to teachers. It quickly became obvious that the students were doing a project for their Social Studies class.
Their teacher sent them out to ask parents what were the five rights given to American citizens in the First Amendment. Granted, I didn't hear all the answers but of the ones I had, not one parent could answer that question At most they could identify two or three rights. The full answer, of course, was freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom to petition and the freedom of religion.
And that parent teacher conference was a real wake up call for me and showed me how pitifully ignorant my generation was about basic Constitutional law. It was one of the experiences that led me to become a political blogger a few years later.
Compare the typical curriculum in the public school system to what it was like in the 19th century. Children, say, in the PS school system in 1800s New York City were grounded in ancient Greek, Latin, sophisticated mathematics, history, rhetoric and critical thinking skills. Today's students, and especially their hapless parents, would have no chance of passing such a curriculum.
And Republicans have been gunning for the Department of Education since Carter created it in the 70s. Because Republicans love the idea of ignorant, low information voters who will believe anything they're told by a guy in a suit and a perfect set of teeth. It doesn't matter to these right wing nut jobs that the Department of Education funds only 8% of the public school system and that the other 92% is funded at the municipal and state level. This is why they want to replace public schools with charter schools that have a political or religious axe to grind. Indoctrination, in other words.
Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud when he said in 2016, "I love the poorly-educated!" Trump may be incipiently demented but he still knows his victim profile like any good con artist. He knows the idiots who vote for him are rubes and marks and has no qualms about turning on them the minute he gets their votes.
When you keep the people ignorant and poorly-educated, you get low information voters. And when you have a nation of poorly-educated voters, you get crooks, liars and thieves in government.
God knows throughout American history, we'd elected mendacious scumbags into our government but they were still men who knew how to do the job. Senators and congressmen sounded like senators and congressmen. Now, we have abject morons like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and, until recently, Matt Gaetz and George Santos, and Tommy Tuberville and Rand Paul in the US Senate.
Ans you have lack of education to thank for these idiots getting elected to the government and other idiots getting appointed to high positions. Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison must be spinning in their graves fast enough to power the western hemisphere.
1 Comments:
Happy (slightly belated) Birthday, (I think - if my calculations are correct)
UU
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