You mean like how have every child in every classroom at the beginning of every day put their hand over their heart and declare the Pledge of Allegiance?
I’m not being sarcastic. That nationalist indoctrination stuff weirds me out.
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Still less creepy than places where people are supposed to swear allegiance to an individual ruler. I’m much more comfortable with the idea of swearing allegiance to a republic than, say, a queen who might turn out to be batshit crazy.
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This was going through my mind as well, and evidently exited through one of my ear canals before I’d finished writing that post.
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most of us just get bored with the whole thing and mumble through it. oh whee the pledge again and again and again.
Of course. Even the pledges and songs sung at my local caucus felt archaic.
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My parents were super religious and didn’t like that it seemed too prayerful and seemed to invoke the favor of god on an earthly nation. They insisted I skip it, but when I told my teachers that I wasn’t allowed, they always gave me a hard time in the first day of class until my parents wrote them a note. I was always forced to do it that first day, too. I don’t understand it from a patriotic perspective. “I pledge allegiance to the flag.”
I pledge my allegiance to a symbol first, and then the Republic for which it stands? Why? So we all look in the same direction when we engage in the pointless groupthink? Personally I think Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land is more reverent of both this country and our collective intellects. Shit, if you wanna drag god into it, sing Battle Hymn of the Republic. It has some interesting ideas about how to secure “liberty and justice for all.”
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I pledge allegiance
To the ideals
Of the United States of America
And whether it falls
Or whether it stands
I will stand up
Willing to fall
In the name of liberty
And justice
For all.
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I’m saying that the public education system became much more centrally controlled when Carter implemented the federal Office of Education. Although that was in the 70’s, it was somewhat later that the system became more of a place where the powers-that-be could indoctrinate children to their way of thinking. This includes becoming more consumer-driven and becoming focused on such artificial concerns as fashion and celebrity worship.
Okay, but whether or not Education is a form of indoctrination is not really the thrust of the thread.
The point is that there are some public services that almost every American accepts can be provided effectively by the government. If you don’t like the particular example of education, take Interstate Highways, or the US Postal Service. These are services that benefit everyone, to which everyone has equal access.
Most of the rest of the developed world works on the basis that it’s OK to have a state-run centralised healthcare system which provides healthy workers to the rest of society, in the same way that public roads let workers get to work, public mail lets businesses send documents and parcels, etc. The argument is that it’s worthwhile to bypass the free market in some limited areas (road building, mail service) because doing so stimulates more growth across the whole of society than would take place if the free market alone.
In the rest of the developed world, there’s still room for the free market to provide the specific drugs and medical consumables, hospital capital equipment, etc. but the health insurance aspect of providing money for treatment is taken out of the free market and run by the state on a non-profit basis.
The question is, why are many Americans ideologically opposed to adopting this proven system?
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[quote=“danegeld, post:111, topic:67731”]The question is, why are many Americans ideologically opposed to adopting this proven system?
[/quote]
Most of 'em aren’t:
The American ruling class, OTOH…
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Many aren’t, but this is a capitalist society. In capitalism, you vote with your dollars. The healthcare industry has more than enough to outvote everyone, and uses it in political lobbying.
There are those who actually are opposed, however, and not entirely without reason. Many government services are extraordinarily inconvenient (only available on odd numbered Tuesdays between 1:00 and 4:00 pm at a location an hour’s drive away from you) and require, for example, filling out 40 pages of forms in triplicate and sitting in a waiting room for 3 hours in order to get something done that takes at most 5 minutes. People don’t want healthcare to be as bad as those under-budgeted government services. (Although sometimes it’s already kind of like that.) And they don’t want some government bureaucrat determining what health care they can or can’t have. (Although HMOs already do that.)
Most likely, it’s just that most Americans have never seen a good functional healthcare system and many have reason to believe that the government couldn’t handle such a thing effectively.
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There’s a simple explanation for why many Americans distrust public health care - they’re authoritarian followers, and their nominated authorities tell them to distrust it.
If they had more than four neurons each to rub together they’d see the irony of ‘trust’ being the reason to take a service from the public sector (which above all, in theory at least, should be accountable) to put it in the skeezy private sector where the only oversight performed is about how effectively the ‘service’ is screwing profit out of people.
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No, @Daaksyde pretty much nailed it. I would only add that American culture conflates individualism with anti-collectivism. This conflation is one reason why so many Americans prefer, all other things being equal, a privatized solution rather than a socialized one.
What they’re apparently blind to, of course, is that they’re still at the mercy of an authority. Worse, that authority has a profit motive, is democratic only in the eyes of its shareholders, and is concentrated in the hands of far fewer people. Yet most Americans accept this because they see private enterprise as an extension of their own individualism.
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Yes, I remember well going to college in the 90s and taking my first class on keeping up with fashion trends, and that freshman course on the personal lives of all the stars of Friends. Hitting the People magazine collection in the Uni. library to learn about Jen’s latest hairstyles was my first real research assignment.
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I know, right?
Hasn’t the real trend been that a larger percentage of students go into only those majors they believe will give them a good chance at finding a job once graduated? Treating college as an apprenticeship program rather than an educational one.
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I get grade 11 students at admissions fairs asking me about the salaries of graduates and “what job will I get” - seriously, its kind of terrifying, they’re terrified of the future, and I’m terrified of them.
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The trend’s been heavily towards higher education as extended vocational training from all I’ve seen. The idea that Carter’s Federal overreach turned colleges into national indoctrination centers is absurd, given the reality that they’re more and more turning into corporate training centers.
But that position fits into the problem of and increasingly insular conservative worldview since Reagan that’s more and more build on an explicit rejection of reality. Once you’ve accepted that worldview, seeing people discussing objective facts is threatening and a mythology of universities as indoctrination centers and a “liberal media” is part of the epistemic closure to deal with that cognitive dissonance when facts intrude. The idea that the education system indoctrinates celeb. worship’s a new one to me, though.
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Have you read about Betsy Devos - Trump’s pick for Education Secretary? I’ve only read a bit about her (Slate has an article) but it seems like she disagrees with the premise of your question
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Yeah we have different ideas on things like Jesus, homosexuality and grizzlies.
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Absolutely yes. What I’ve seen tons of (both thru friends & family members who teach and from having young nephews) is that most young people don’t see college as an inevitable next step in their education, where they might just be a Liberal Arts major or change majors a few times to figure out what path to take; they see college as something they might be able to afford after a few years of working retail or odd jobs, and they’d go there specifically to learn how to do one specific thing (“I want to build robots” or “I want to be an animator” or “I want to program video games”).
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