When mechanized industry began to replace agriculture, the United States adopted a policy no other country on the planet had considered: mandatory high school.
The results were profound. Industry in the United States had a pool of skilled labor that made our nation THE place to get shit done. My home nation handled this transition so spectacularly well that we became a world power. Other nations insulated the working class from access to education, and paid the economic price.
Up to now, there has been in this nation a general belief that school is good. Sure, there are the special schools accessible only to the wealthy, that don’t actually teach anything special but allow the wealthy to form their own elitist clubs and stack the Supreme Court, but in this country, and ONLY in this country, there are high-quality schools for everyone else.
Name any discipline, and eight of the top ten universities in the world will be in the United States. Seven of those will be state-sponsored universities.
Kids around the world dream of studying in an American university. It is so easy for us to take for granted that we have a sprawling complex of high-quality state schools, that when our current government moves to undermine them that it slips aside. We don’t protest because what is proposed is so absurd we must not have heard it right. Only an idiot would undermine this massive advantage.
That executive order hamstringing the NIH is about a government agency, and not about our schools, right? You know the answer. Defunding science is defunding our future.
MAGA hates education. We haven’t reached “shoot anyone with glasses” yet, and won’t for a while, but we must recognize that the current regime is actively anti-education, actively anti-knowledge, and actively anti-thought. Actively anti-American.
Education was a big part of what made America great. It is hard for people like you and me to understand why so many of our electorate now resent people who have been to school. But that resentment is real, and we have to deal with it. The obvious answer is to increase access to school for everyone. Not necessarily college, but technical or trade or just the skills to run a small business. Anyone who can’t find a job should be able to learn a new job.
School should be available to everyone in this country, without regard to age or history. Schools should be a center for meaningful research. Schools should now be exercising their voices to protest their own emasculation.
So here’s me shouting. I’m shouting for the people who don’t have skills to get a good job, who are tipping the political scales because they don’t. They are not stupid, or lazy. But they have been taught to resent the intellectuals, and therefore to shun any action they might make that might make them an intellectual in the eyes of their neighbors.
More school for everyone. More free school for everyone. Let’s remember what really made America great.
I am going to disagree, as I am wont to do, and try to do so respectfully.
Our public education system is a travesty. My local school committee has approved a 67.5 million dollar budget, for 3 towns with a total population of 25 or 27k people. The notion that every piece of land will spend annually for this is, in a word, nuts. We just built $110m in new schools, in a district with empty schools because enrollment is declining., leaving 2 properties (with continued debt service) shuttered while we figure out what to do with them. Hint, there was nothing wrong with the bricks.
I’ve been running a technology business in Massachusetts, the state regarded as having the best education infrastructure in the nation, for over 40 years. I am a product of that education system, from a ~80th percentile example, but with a twist – I had 1.33 years in a private school, the ephemeral boarding school of yarns (again, prolly 80th percentile). Mind you, I was a nerd in a jock school, explainging the 1.33 years, but still…
As there were no relevant degrees or certificates for my particular discipline, I have spent my career hiring and deploying people from the lauded Massachusetts system. These people can cut it, in situations where reading, writing, and math aren’t the core competencies needed. Period, full stop, end of story. Sorry, chief. Useless as teats on a bull.
The endless funding has produced endless good intentions. It is a sinkhole. Bringing up a daughter who excelled in the public school setting, I saw that what she was writing was gibberish, even though she was well read. I discussed this with her 8th grade English teacher at some length. The root cause turns out to be the cornerstone rubrics designed for the capstone test required for graduation – the same metric I had looked for as an employer. Fuck me running.
Long story short, she had run out of school – so, off to private school for her, which worked swimmingly, although that left me paying for $8k/yr of public school (which I continue to pay, despite not having a kid in the schools) PLUS $25k/yr for the actually attended school.
My position would appear to be the exact opposite of yours – government has no business in education. The local catholic school does a great job, at $5k/year, and will even talk about Darwin, but there are others that won’t. We have evolved to allowing our government to be the arbiter of how our children are educated. This is a misplaced trust – sell the schools, pay down the debt, toss out the unions and let the parents choose in the market. This way the fixed income seniors may be able to stay in their homes and the kids can be educated as the parents see fit. At least here, that could head off gender confusion ingrained before sex is understood, and literacy can actually happen. Charity run by government cannot help but be corrupted, while charity chosen by parents can actually align with their values – if they are interested enough to pay attention rather than “let the government do it:”.
Sorry, not sorry,
– Jeff
(in this format I cannot re-read, but hope the gist comes through)
that asshole Yankee cousin