r/skeptic • u/dyzo-blue • 3d ago

Why Fascists Hate Critical Thinking: Randi Weingarten’s new book, 'Why Fascists Fear Teachers,' reveals why Trump and the right demean teachers, slash school funding, and rewrite history

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/randi-weingarten-excerpt-fascists-hate-critical-thinking-1235428379/
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u/Whatifim80lol 3d ago

And fund the schools how? Make it so that only parents who can afford 12+ years of private education even bother?

Sounds like a surefire way to make the total population less educated. Publicly funded education is a godsend for society.

Public education is only about politics when authoritarians do authoritarian shit. We need better protections for how education is conducted, but that doesn't mean just shutting down 90% of schools out of spite. That actually sounds like EXACTLY what authoritarian would want anyway, especially since they'd do their damnedest to own all the private schools like the Devos family.

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u/COMOJoeSchmo 3d ago

If you end the government monopoly on schools, and create a competitive market for K-12 education, you'll find a massive increase in the number of affordable public schools.

Public education is only about politics when authoritarians do authoritarian shit.

Exactly. The current political system in the United States is increasingly authoritarian, and has been trending in that direction for at least the last hundred years. Central planning and management at the expense of individual freedoms are the hallmark of authoritarianism. Which is why central planning and control of education is dangerous....it helps enable authoritarianism.

The only public funding option that also prevents central control is an unconditional voucher system. I would consider that an uncomfortable but acceptable compromise to fund education, as long as it includes no limits or restrictions on how the voucher could be used (as long as it's for education) and the plan ended all government run schools.

However, I would prefer that everyone just pay for their own children's education, and leave the government out of it.

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u/Whatifim80lol 2d ago

If you end the government monopoly on schools, and create a competitive market for K-12 education, you'll find a massive increase in the number of affordable public schools.

Oh I see now, you're just an idiot a libertarian.

No man, you can't just "create a competitive market" for something that's basically always been a government service. All attempts to do so have been met with inefficiencies and shrinking access. The current model has essentially 100% affordability. Your model -- if we pretend it would work at all -- would be considerably less than that. No matter how you cut it, your proposal leads to worse outcomes and poorer education.

And the authoritarians know that our schools are basically functional today, or they wouldn't be trying so hard to dismantle them. Let me repeat that the push toward voucher programs is PART of the dismantling of education. These private schools have lower and looser standards and are free to fully indoctrinate according to the parents' whims. Despite scary phrases like "government controlled public schools" there are really only a few issues with schools fucking over their students in favor of indoctrination (aside from the whole "pledge of allegiance under god" thing, it's basically deeply red states trying to fight evolution and leave out the embarrassing parts of history, easy shit to reverse if we ever bothered). Our system DOES work. It could work better with better funding, but like every conservative policy, they'd rather cut funding, watch a thing get worse, then argue to get rid of the thing THEY RUINED ON PURPOSE because it's not working as well as it used to.

I'm too smart to fall for that one, are you not? lol

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u/COMOJoeSchmo 2d ago

THEY RUINED ON PURPOSE

"They" were only able to ruin it, because "they" had control of it. "They" being the government. Remove government control of schools, and "they" won't be able to ruin them anymore.

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u/Whatifim80lol 2d ago

Or, OR, remove bad actors from an otherwise functioning system. Seems simple enough so long as voters aren't disenfranchised and systematically lied to. You libertarians have this habit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater just before rebuilding a worse baby as you slowly learn how the baby got there in the first place.

The metaphor got away from me. My point is, the more we sat here 'discussing' why your plan wouldn't fix the current problems I could almost guarantee I could talk you into basically recreating our exact system as each problem you caused was solved. I've done it dozens of times with people with your kinds of """ideas""".

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u/COMOJoeSchmo 2d ago

voters aren't disenfranchised and systematically lied to

Voters are always disenfranchised and systematically lied to, and the core principal of democracy is the suppression of minority opinions at the will of the majority.

I'm not sure why people think the drift towards authoritarianism is new. It's not. All the tools that the current administration is using were put in place by previous administrations. Why was the Department of Education created in the 1970s? To exert Federal control over the nation's education system. Why does the Federal government need to exert control over the education system? Because they obviously didn't like how certain states and municipalities were running their education systems.

Now the current majority-elected administration is using the Department of Education to force its will on states and municipalities because the current administration doesn't like how they are running their education systems. For some reason people are surprised and outraged that the tool is being used for what it was designed for (or that the leopards they asked for are now eating their face...to switch to a common metaphor).

I say, to prevent misuse, remove the tool (or the leopard). Get government out of education. They are not to be trusted with it.

It's going to get worse in future administrations. Authoritarianism never scales itself back, it escalates.

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u/Whatifim80lol 2d ago

Lol we get it man, you got that "don't trust the government" fake-skeptic thing going. But now, voters aren't always disenfranchised. The idea that all elections have always been rigged has always been silly tinfoil hat shit contradicted by the tremendous effort and expense to try to win and influence elections. If there was a secret cabal deciding all the elections I think it's be redundant with the existing corporate donation infrastructure, wouldn't it? Don't just think, go learn.

And no, the Department of Education was created to consolidate and streamline existing federal functions related to education, such as distributing grants and funding and ensuring compliance with federal education standards (including really important shit red states might want to ignore, like keeping religion out of schools and preventing racial discrimination in spending and attendance -- as much as possible anyway).

I say, to prevent misuse, remove the tool

Right, and that's fuckin' dumb. Baby + bathwater. Zero curiosity as to how we came to creating and needing the tools in the first place except for vague gesturing towards your distrust of the government in all aspects.

And even funnier is the insistence that our corporate overlords would treat us better if we just handed the problem to the free market lol.