Education is not elitist

Those who were my contemporaries during the years that I taught will recognize my belief that in order to get votes to get elected many candidates, with no evidence to support it, claimed public education was failing and only they could supply the remedy.

Of course they could because the failure was in their imagination and at a certain point they could declare that they had delivered on their promise, and without anything actually changing could move on having conquered the windmills of their own creation.

Teachers knew that as society was evolving and growing in areas such as science and technology and that what had been effective in the atomic age was being replaced by the realities of the computer age changes would have to be made in how education was approached, but their voices were ignored.

As I got more involved in politics I began to see the less people knew the better for those who wanted power, so true education needed to be limited.

Part of learning Civics was developing critical thinking, a dangerous weapon and a threat to those who prefer people who are easily led.

The scam which is No Child Left Behind was the result of establishing a way to give the appearance that those who claimed the system was failing had come up with solutions that actually abandoned the students’ learning and thinking in favor of gathering statistics that would make it look like the politicians who had made baseless decisions were productive.

For most of the last 18 years, it was more Important that students spit back information in the form of bubbling in the correct answers on multiple choice test papers with number 2 pencils than to understand a concept and discuss and evaluate it. A student could do well answering all the questions asked about terms used in and by Shakespeare without ever having seen a whole or even a part of a Shakespeare play.

Student learning  was no longer the aim of school, but the students were the means to the end of proving that the methods sold to school districts at exorbitant cost were a good thing. Test scores were good PR for those in charge while the new methodologies designed by people no where near the classroom were bought to help get the statistics that in turn meant more profits for those who sold them.

Slowly, instead of the population becoming more knowledgeable  and raising the national IQ, the intelligence level over all has gone down. It has become a case of stepping into the gutter to raise someone out, but, instead, staying in it with them.

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We now hear the word “elite” getting attached more and more to the word “education”, a ploy that sets up a false division by having people think negatively about those deemed “educated” and seeing them as the enemy that looks down on them, while those educated people are not turning their noses up at those who feel they are less educated so that resentment toward something that is non-existent is created while fooling people into rejecting education and critical thinking in favor of just accepting what they are told to think.

Not only are people denied a real education, they are being convinced to reject one.

Conservative media has focused heavily on campus protests, free-speech clashes, and multiculturalism, presenting these as being against family, religion, and the working class which, contrary to what they espouse, contains educated people, many of whom attended the evil universities and colleges  presented as the spawning ground of elites.

In 2012, Rick Santorum with his B.A. from Penn State, M.B.A from Pitt and J.D. from Dickinson Law said President Barack Obama was a “snob” for trying to expand access to education. Trump, in his campaign, promised the forgotten blue-collar workers that their jobs in mills, factories, and especially coal mines were going to come back, while announcing after some wins in the primaries,

“We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”

Numbers showed this resulted in an increased number of votes from the poorly educated.

Trump and his minions, including conservative media, promote the myth that the “educated elites” are dangerous, and this results in his supporters ranting against evolution, global warming, and non-religious based ideas about the origin of the universe and of life, which the elites accept, because these contradict the Bible, and because scientists insist that science trumps myth and religion.

With an anti-educated attitude planted, fed, and watered by those who need them to reject critical thinking, votes are easier to get based on the promise to protect the believers from the enemy that looks down on them and wants to oppress them.

Trump and friends benefit from having people reject education.

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