Even those who aren’t surprised by the simple fact of Donald Trump’s assault on America’s universities must be shocked by the full frontal magnitude of it all, belated attempts to walk back parts of it, notwithstanding. (Harvard is putting up a courageous, clever, and effective defense.)
The last election results have shown that we’re already very stupid and don’t need the assistance.
Trying? They succeeded, that’s why we’re here now. You wanna know what the state of education is now? An entire generation that went to high school through No Child Left Behind is now teaching kids. Many of them do not have a Masters in education, because hiring standards have needed to be lowered in many districts just to get any teachers at all. Hell for some schools, I’ve heard of recent exceptional high school graduates getting asked to come back and teach the classes they just finished.
Education in America died decades ago. The Trump administration is just burying the body.
“I love the poorly educated”- Trump, 2016
Republicans have literally been attacking public education for the entire 3+ decades of my life.
5+ decades of my life.
It was the inciting incident for the “moral majority.” The integration of schools really triggered the reactionaries.
Of course, having to teach science instead of their myth really upsets them too.
Also, showing kids different perspectives on history other than the manifest destiny of white men really offends them.
Oh, and treating every student with dignity really lights them up.
Turns out there’s a lot of reasons why reactionaries hate education, and they mostly reduce down to the fact that education makes one far less likely to be a backwards antisocial goon.
Of course, having to teach science instead of their myth really upsets them too.
In my experience, it was in addition to. My high school biology teacher was a creationist who “taught the controversy”.
I wish we had a country where that resulted in your ass getting fired for cause. Teachers have a right to their personal belief systems, but that needs to stay out of the classroom.
In middle school our new science textbooks were recalled the first week of school. The textbooks discussed (horrors!) the big bang theory without also talking about the theistic theory. The books were returned with those pages rubber cemented together. The teachers were upset (upset enough that middle-school me noticed), but it was by order of the superintendent.
My parents got me a copy of A Brief History of Time in response. Also, rubber cement is fairly easy to pry apart.
biology teacher was a creationist
A very rare breed indeed
Depending on the state, getting teaching credentials is not challenging at all.
All 5 of mine too.
Republicans have literally been attacking
publiceducation for the entire3+ decades of mylife.I mean Republicans were the party of federally funded higher education, just … under Lincoln.
Texas is about to defund public schools
They need everyone to be sick, stupid, and scared.
A healthy and broadly educated population which feels safe and secure is incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They’ve been attacking universities for a while. Or see the insanity of the University of Austin.
Chasing people out of STEM is a well documented current phenomenon - they’ve been doing it to history departments for a while…
This is nothing new for the GOP. The Texas GOP accidentally said the quiet part out loud in 2012.
From the Texas 2012 GOP Platform
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
This is why educational outcomes in red states are so bad, particularly in the south where the GOP often controls legislative and executive branches. People are scared of things they don’t understand so undermining education makes people easier to scare. Why do they want to scare people, you might ask? Because scared people tend to vote conservative.
Over the past few years, a number of experiments have begun to shed light on the relationship between emotion and political inclinations. “There’s empirical research that suggests that when people are primed with images of mortality—graveyards, hospitals, the elderly—this can move them to the right,” said John Hibbing, who directs the political physiology lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Some studies suggest that people who are already conservative may be extra-sensitive to these images.
That over-active amygdala.
Turns out “thought police” was just another projection of the GQP
Oh they always appropriate the language and people from the other side (after they are gone). In addition to projecting everything they want to do (cancel others, enact a strict political correctness on everything from how those they perceive as enemies behave when a song is played a piece of cloth is present to how consenting adults express their love, etc…), that is.
They tried to claim that MLK is one of theirs (lol) even as they called him Communist (and far worse, of course, given they are filled to the brim with overt racists).
They even try to claim Orwell as one of theirs…WTAF? Orwell was a socialist, FFS. You have to be some kind of extreme dumbass or into brazen lying to spout such nonsense, but it turns out the qons are into both things - being incredibly ignorant and/or top-tier lying.
So when it comes to things like “thought crime” - Marco Rubio has already expressed that he thinks the government has the right to kidnap people they think don’t have the right thoughts.
The way I see is that the left is not for thought control but rather for not being an asshole or spreading assholery.
If one wants to think certain people are not people, whatever. Thoughts don’t hurt people and they aren’t contagious. It’s the moment one speaks or acts on their thoughts there is a problem.
It’s been the goal of the oligarchs and their pet politicians to dismantle any attempt to educate and maintain the system of indoctrination that exists. The system was designed to produce obedient factory workers who do what they are told. Once the Robber Barons were gone the new generation of oligarchs did not see a reason to replace the system. As it obviously benefited them to keep a mindless populace around. Colleges and universities have had to deprogram students to be able to think for themselves. Now that so many people are getting college and university degrees, the oligarchs want to dismantle the system so that it goes back to only being a privileged few are able to see what is actually happening.
It has always been the oligarchs fault for how shit our education system has been. We have always been an oligarchic third world country that has been draped in a disguise of being better than it was.
Now that so many people are getting college and university degrees, the oligarchs want to dismantle the system so that it goes back to only being a privileged few are able to see what is actually happening.
What’s bizarre is that even with so many degrees, the qons were still mostly getting what they wanted, and even a great deal of people, including not just the rabid right wing, were/are advocating for college as being ONLY a path to getting a job.
So a whole lot of people seem to come out of college thinking nearly the exact same things they thought going in. Many college graduates still seem unable to do sound critical thinking and many still seem unable to spot glaring logical fallacies that are employed in the everyday. You can enter college being a radical right winger, and sail through college without really having any of that seriously challenged. If it’s only treated like a job training program, that is almost the inevitable result, I guess. This seems especially egregious in areas like engineering, at least in my view.
And it’s not even just in areas of political thought and philosophy, but somehow you can have people coming out with a bachelors in engineering and yet still be “skeptics” (not really skeptics) about things like climate change and evolution, which is a tragic failure in education. You cannot just kind of wave it away as, “oh, well, their degree was in a soft science so that’s why they are ignorant on this”.
They want public education to be North Korea style and private education to be only for the wealthy.
Feel bad for my friends who have kids not yet at the age of reason.
Dad said colleges ruined his relationship with his kids… no dumbass your kids dont like you because you are a child and college gave them chance to be independent
They pretend education is dogmatic indoctrination when it’s really learning scientific and philosophical methods and methodologies to think critically and evaluate arguments and evidence for yourself, and pretend their childhood religious dogma indoctrination with an unquestionable clergy authority isn’t damaging their ability to evaluate truth by lowering the bar of evidence to faith and personal experience when they deny those same garbage methods for every other religion but their own.
It’s all about damn control.
Does this mean I won’t have to get higher education to get that high paying job that requires a degree? Oh man this is awesome. /s
I’ve been fighting for the liberation of knowledge from these people for twenty years.
Letting anti intellectual creeps have a say in knowledge, education, research is like the Catholic church being led by atheists.
People might know this if their education didn’t trick them to think otherwise.
But if a world can’t rally around the one positive segment of society and let it be ruined by the worst, what can we expect?
