One of the things the Trump regime is doing that I mentioned on Friday (First Destroy – March 21) was their attack on education.
In the March 22 “Koffee Klatch” Robert Reich and Heather
Lofthouse discussed Trump’s attacks on education. It’s happening on several
levels:
·
The arrest of the pro-Palestinian
protest leader Mahmoud Khalil from Columbia University
·
The gutting of, and plans to close, the
federal Department of Education
·
The extortionist withholding of
hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to Columbia and other universities
to force them to crack down on protesters, revise their hiring and student
admissions regulations, and change some of their programs and curricula
·
Cutting funding for libraries and
museums
·
Whitewashing public school
curriculums to remove reference to slavery in America or any mention of
non-white heroes
Reich explained that this
attack on education is typical tyrant tactics. Every tyrant in history has
tried to get rid of learning. Nazis burned books. Slaveholders didn’t allow
their slaves to become literate.
Why
do tyrants want people to be ignorant? Because they know that an educated
population is the enemy of tyranny. This is why since the beginning in America,
education has been so important. Free universal public education. It was well
understood that democracy needs education.
Heather Lofthouse described the Trump attack on education as a “dismantling of democracy tactic”.
Education affects voting trends. Someone once observed
that the % of the American population that voted for Trump is about the same as
the % that can’t read above a grade 5 level. The correlation isn’t quite that
dramatic but there is some truth to it. The difference in voting between
college educated and non-college educated voters is significant, especially for
men. This chart shows the difference in Trump voters between college-educated
and non-college-educated men and women.
The Inside Higher Ed article (link below) that provided the above data on voting trends explained how Republicans and others on the Right explain this phenomenon:
“… colleges
and universities are bastions of liberal ideology where students
are indoctrinated into left-wing thinking and punished for expressing
differing opinions. (Conservative students do report feeling less comfortable sharing their political opinions with classmates, and
right-wing speakers are more likely to get shouted down on
campuses…)”
Robert Reich mentioned this last point also and said that universities
have been guilty of suppressing other opinions. And I must agree. I recall an
incident some years ago when a Canadian university professor was reprimanded
(and almost fired I think) for showing a video of Jordan Peterson in her class.
There should absolutely have been no problem for doing so, especially as she
was using it as an example of how not to think.
Reich went on to explain that
“education
is not just getting information but also thinking critically about that
information and deliberating with others. … The best way of learning is to seek
out people who disagree with you and find out why they disagree. Talk to them.
Test what your opinions are against what theirs are. That’s what learning is
all about. It’s about provocation, dissenting voices, a diversity of voices.
This is what tyrants really fear and through history have tried to subdue.”
Robert and Heather both agreed
that, unfortunately, in the present situation the two sides have become too
polarized for this kind of discussion to occur in a productive civil manner.
Sources:
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/giving-trump-shit-the-coffee-klatch
Related to the above table is the statistic that voters without a college degree outnumber those with by 57 to 43. So it pays to cater to the uneducated.
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