I feel like there is a lot more to say here to make these two statements have any conclusion. Are we assuming that people, in general, care for their parents and grandparents but that people, in general, don’t care about children unless they are their own children? Is there a reason to make that assumption?
Homo economicus would turn out their own parents at the first opportunity. Continuing to put things more and more in terms of an economist’s idea of self interest isn’t going to get us out of this situation. We’re in a hole and we need to stop digging.
To be fair, a big reason for this was to inculcate them into “proper” American values, such as the protestant work ethic. There was a huge struggle between ethnic Europeans of Eastern and Southern European extract (who were often Catholic and Jewish, also, you have to include a wave of Irish as well), who wanted to keep kids in schools that taught them their faith and mother tongue, and progressives who saw the concentration of ethnic groups has being part and parcel of the violence of that period. It was assumed that doing social work and public education would make the children of immigrants less likely to join unions or be involved in radical politics, and to become protestants.
Conservatives and Libertarians delude themselves that it doesn’t. If they’re affluent they can afford to send their kids to private schools or make “voluntary” contributions to make up for school budget shortfalls or exceed them. If they’re not affluent, well, they’re Real Americans™ who don’t want their kids going to college and getting corrupted by those “postmodern neo-Marxists” the nice folks on Fox News are always talking about.
If one is judging by how children are actually treated by the state en masse, how the entire subject of education is approached, and by the quality of health care that’s readily available to even the poorest children, I’d say there quite a lot of reasons to make that presumption.
Too many people just don’t seem to give a damn about anyone but themselves; that’s not an accident.
An educated work force should be enough of a motivation. Because we don’t live in bubbles where we never interact with others. There is decades of evidence to prove that a public education system is a net positive for all of us, whether we have children or not.
That is a right wing partisan think tank dedicated to curbing most especially nonwhite immigration into this country. Try finding a less biased source to back up your claims.
Also, bilingual education is a great thing for people to give their kids. It’s so great that people of means will pay extra to send their kids to schools where they can learn more than one language through immersion:
No doubt. Those intentions aside, though, the children of first generation immigrants often became capitalist powerhouses (while maintaining their ethnic heritage, which is why even when they became successful they were still barred from country clubs and residential developments).
The American economy would be a lot less dynamic and prosperous without the estwhile societal value of a quality public education for the children of immigrants as a public good. Even then, we have to wonder what was lost because native-born PoC were not included in that programme.
I guess I should say I’m not questioning the idea that people behave this way, but I do want to push back against the idea that it is somehow human nature rather than Reagan/Thatcher era zeitgeist. I think we need to break out of that era, not figure out how to justify public education within it (since the whole idea was designed to attack things like public education).
I don’t know about that… that generation certainly became far more American primarily through their consumption of mass culture (Lizabeth Cohen makes that argument), but other than becoming a key part of the consumer economy, there’s not much economic mobility in this period. That really doesn’t kick in until the Cold War era.
What I find is that they are ensnared by different memes* than those infecting the left. For example, “that money’s already been taxed” is a right-wing meme that justifies avoiding taxation - spend time at a nursing home and you’ll see that one a lot. “Throwing money at schools does not improve them” is another.
The culture war is fought with words that shape perceptions. It seems to me that Senator Sanders and Representative Ocasio-OrtizOcasio-Cortez are among the few that realize the left wing’s been losing that war by fighting on the rights’ chosen ground and reinforcing right wing meme complexes.
* a meme is not a picture with text on it, although stupid people calling such things memes is clearly a meme.
I completely agree; this antisocial, apathetic “fuck you, I got mine!” mentality that pervades so much of our society these days is not natural to us, it’s learned.
That’s the era I’m mainly talking about: people who are now or would be in their 70s, 80s, 90s or around 100, the children of first-generation immigrants who went to well-funded public schools, and broke through as business owners, licensed professionals, cultural figures during the post-war period. The alumni rolls of some of those schools, which were in poor or working-class urban neighbourhoods, are like a Who’s Who of American prosperity starting in the mid-1950s through the 1970s.
Dude. It’s 6.9% of the population. Get over it. It’s not a national emergency, whatever Trump and his racist ilk may say. Additionally, that’s a pretty short, almost fact free article on an incredibly complex phenomenon…
Whether or not they are documented, immigrants are still here, making economic contributes to our economy. Maybe, instead of having a tizzy over brown people, we should maybe make the immigration process smoother, easier, and quicker, giving people an incentive to come here legally. It would also help protect those same people from the routine exploitation they experience working under the table.
Sure, but the wave of immigrants that I was mainly focusing on really was in the late 19th and early 20th century, the first major wave of industrial wage labor.
Everyone loves finding a villain to punch, but alas I’m not the one opposing public school funding due to the stat. I’m a parent with two kids in public school and all about getting more funding for it. I’m trying to explain why many people oppose providing that funding as a means of discussing how we can effect a change in society rather than merely crying about it. Hopefully you can understand that a person who can explain a problem is not necessarily the same as the person who causes that problem.
Then you need to be addressing a number of issues, that include racism against people of color. It was not a demand issue, ever. It was and continues to be in part a white flight issue. You can not explain the down turn in public education funding unless that aspect is considered. At some point, white people are very much going to have to face up to their very real contributions to the racists structures that were built for their benefit and they’re going to have to help tear them down. We get no where blaming some magical forces like “demand” and the like.
Memes that use dogwhistles and code about the “undeserving” to cover the same old bigotries and to justify selfishness. You may hear what seem to be memes about economic issues, but listen more closely and you’ll hear Lee Atwater and his heirs like Frank Luntz underneath.
What they both realise, despite the difference in their ages, is that the future belongs to the young rather than to the old and are focusing their attention on and tailoring their memes to them. Establishment Third-Way Democrats (not “the left” by any serious terms) are still catering to Boomers and older people, which is why you correctly perceive them as continuing to fight on the conservative’s preferred territory as they have since the 1990s.
