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.

2

Sweet!

Thanks!