Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/12/sucks-to-be-you.html
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The default situation under Trump and his FerenGOP: corporations can and will have carte blanche to totally rip you and your family off. Prepare for it. This is the Ayn Rand dystopia they’ve been craving, where corporations have all the power and the people have none.
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The solution is to be more careful about choosing a school that’s legitimate. [edit: /sarcasm] The problem is, if Trump and his cronies get their way, they’ll all be scams…
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Does anyone have an explainer where the roots of the conservative hate of education comes from?
For as long as I remember teachers have been bad guys.
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It started in the 80’s as I recall, and it’s intimately tied to their hatred of unions. They see teacher’s unions as one of the most powerful lobbying blocks, and one that was generally aligned with the Democrats. So they began denigrating the powerful teacher’s lobbies first. As we moved into the 90’s and debates about teaching evolution and other sciences instead of psuedo-mythologies like creationism were being held, they began attacking the education system in general for “indoctrinating” young minds into the liberal hellfires we progressives promote by teaching kids to think rationally and think for themselves.Since they couldn’t get their religious views taught in public schools, they decided to attack the institution itself for being controlled by the liberal elite. Thirty years later, you’d hardly know that we once thought of all teachers as a basic bedrock of our society, to be cherished and supported.
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Last I heard, Ms. DeVos was proving to be too incompetent to do anything too damaging. I guess not.
(I wish I could find where I read that.)
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Christ, what a president.
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A.ka. “anarcho-capitalism”, which is about as anarchistic as feudalism.
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Public education endeavors to promote things like critical thinking, free thinking, having an informed view, a wider world view where you learn people in other countries do things in different ways and it is okay, etc. Public education promotes things like science that don’t support conservative notions like young earth creation or invisible space boss. Public educations teaches things like math that don’t support their fiscal plans. Public education tries to be equal to different classes, races, and genders (doesn’t always succeed). Public education promotes upward mobility. Public education tries to remain neutral and separate from religion.
The things they don’t like about education is countless.
When you shift things to be about “opinions and sides” rather than “facts and information” you can divide and control people. When you aren’t accountable to pesky facts you can get away with misleading people and all sorts of nasty shenanigans.
Basically it is a hinderance to the consolidation of power and the controlling of the population, in other words, education is very important.
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I also see this as stemming from right wing conservative evangelicals who believe all education to be slanted heavily toward liberal bias… and of course that makes them the talking heads of Satan. Then there is unions, gotta hate on the unions.
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Integration and Madeline Murray O’Hare.
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That’s not a “solution” for people who have been defrauded.
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See, that is the thing: the narrative of population control sounds very conspiracy theoryish. Voter suppression, we periodically see people with hot mics getting caught saying what we all know, but unless I missed it, we haven’t seen it spoken so plainly. Not even by defectors from the right wing. For me at least, it makes something as large and organized and sinister as what you say seem unlikely to be the majority of it.
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conspiracy of interest, not conspiracy of collusion.
the former happens all the time, the latter is tinfoil hat land for sure.
for example, the ultra wealthy don’t have secret meetings to agree on plans to keep the poors poor. they simply act in their own respective best interests, which is them keeping more money than others. they don’t require collusion for the majority of them to be against wealth redistribution.
what i describe is a broad surface of reasons that lead to a common shared interest against education, not the agenda of some unified group. they don’t have to work together or collude, the effects are the same, and just as damaging.
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IANAL
But isn’t it basic contract law that you’re not responsible for payment when the other party to your contract has acted fraudulently?
The situation of student debt complicates the situation because the person who was paying money for the bogus education payed for it with borrowed funds.
I don’t know the legalities of this, but is there not a way the student can just point the lender at the bogus educational institution and say “you guys work it out, I’m done with this.” 
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I.e., class. Not a very fashionable concept these days, what with it being all Marxist and stuff, but still real enough. (Marx seems to have spoken quite a lot of sense; just a pity about that “using the apparatus of the state to bring about anarchism” stuff, but to be fair that might have been the Leninists more than him.)
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Yes, this. As someone who was in the middle of the conservative/evangelical circles at the time, they really believe that:
- It’s a felony to pray in a public school, and
- God is going to kill us all because, see #1
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What’s interesting is the Southern Baptist Convention’s turn on school prayer over the decades. In the wake of the Supreme Court decisions circa 1962 ending public school prayer, the Convention applauded the removal of prayer in public schools and affirmed its commitment to church/state separation as a public good. Of course their position was motivated largely by anti-Catholic paranoia. But they were on the side of the angels nonetheless. It wasn’t until the late 70s and 80s that the SBC began to take doctrinal positions that school prayer should be reintroduced, not commenting on their previous support.
They had a similar delayed reaction to abortion. The Convention was at least agnostic on Roe v. Wade for years. Arguments in support of abortion access could found without looking too hard. But something happened in the late 70s and 80s that the church again turned nearly 180 degrees.
I know there’s been work on the influence of theologians like Francis Shaeffer on conservative Protestant denominations in moving them to oppose abortion, but these turns also seem a product of cynical political opportunism as the Reagan coalition forms at the same time. A unified ideology comes out that coalition that joins poisonous strains that had always been present in the South that include religiously grounded anti-science, anti-education, anti-LGBTQ, with the new anti-abortion movement. Throw this in the already present hyper-militarist, hyper-capitalist elements on top of the solid racism and xenophobia that weren’t sufficiently extinguished by the 60s and 70s reform governments and a very toxic but attractively holistic world view comes to the South.
My feeling is that white southerners, outside of some large cities and some university towns, are less politically and ideologically diverse now than they ever have been.
typos edited
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