To me, the main problem with America right now is the disregard for truth. There is no point in arguing for a better America, in holding Trump and the Republicans (or the Democrats for that matter) to the truth with a strong media, if half the country isn’t going to believe anything they say regardless of the veracity of their statements.
If we want to stop the rise of falsehood in America, we need to tackle it at its source. We can never stop those who preach falsehoods, but we can ensure that children learn the skills to at least have the ability to question “facts” that are fed to them. And the first step in this fight will be denying ANY and ALL movements towards privatized education.
Trump has made it clear that his policy on education will be privatization, so we need to consider what this means for truth in America. Trump said today that, “Our reform plan includes eliminating Common Core, bringing education local, and providing school choice,” which means enabling, “every child to be able to attend the public, private, charter, magnet or religious school that is right for them.”
This means that instead of receiving an education that enables them to critically interpret the world, American students will be going to a school that agrees with whatever version of “truth” their parents believe in. Want to see what “local control” looks like? Check out the history textbooks that Texas uses. This is what gave rise to the post-truth reality we find ourselves in today, and if we don’t want it to become the norm for generations, we need to stop it here.
If school privatization succeeds, the next generation of American school children will go to schools where “education” will consists of learning history absent any “liberal viewpoints” (i.e. inconvenient facts) and “unproven theories” like evolution and climate change. Schools that receive federal funding will literally be teaching creationism and intelligent design instead of evolution. If we lose the fight here, it may too late to ever change, because a whole generation of Americans will come out of school with an education that never teaches them the skill set to challenge “facts” that are fed to them. The worst part is that we, as taxpayers, will be paying for it.
Conservatives have for years moved their children to private schools where they can be shielded from the “theory” of evolution, and be taught history that isn’t tainted by “liberal viewpoints” (i.e. facts), and we are seeing the results of that already. The fact that the incoming Trump administration looks set to expand the privatization of public education to unseen levels, and allow more and more Americans to make this move is truly frightening.
I feel that there is a large portion of the United States that feels that although they may not exactly agree with the Republican solution, they won’t fight it that hard because in the end, something does need to be done with our schools. While this is true, we need to stand firm and say that privatization is not the answer.
As my teachers always told me, the only valuable thing that an education will give you is the ability to think for yourself and to make your own assumptions about what you see by critically looking at it and not just taking what you are told to be true. We may never be able to get someone to agree completely with us, but we can at least guarantee that they have the skill set to understand that not everything they are told is true. I can tell you that this is not a skill taught in many religious schools today.
I think Isaac Asimov said it best in 1980, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’”.
We need to fight against this cult and realize that handing the reigns of education over the Republicans without a fight will mean supporting this cult and endorsing the message that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.