I think that one of the main problems for Americans (it happens in some other countries as well but not as strongly as in America) is the promotion of American exceptionalism. This leads to the manifest destiny, the belief that there has never been a democracy like America, that Americanism (capitalism) is the only right way to see the world. Until Americans are able to unload American exceptionalism there is no hope.
I completely agree that creating liberatory educational approaches is essential to responding to our current morass. A new book by Baltimore author Elaine Weiss describes the origins of Citizenship Schools in the 1950s and 1960, which prepared tens of thousands of Black southerners to read & write, demand their rights, and vote. Weiss will be speaking in Baltimore next week and in many other cities around the country: https://calendar.prattlibrary.org/event/elanie-weiss-spell-freedom
This is something I think about in my work in public health every day:
One thing I think you are missing with this analysis is a critique of public health and medicine and how their flawed approaches have also set the stage for this mess - similar to the critique you shared of public schools and how their goal is to indoctrinate rather than support critical thinking.
Public health and medicine both run on paternalism, non transparency, and an utter lack of trust in communities or patients. There are bigger, more grotesque examples of harm and breaching trust (e.g., Tuskegee) but I also like to say, “Every time a doctor tells a woman she’s experiencing whatever symptoms ‘because she’s overweight’ an anti-vaxxer gets their wings.” If my doctor won’t listen to me, why should I listen to them? Why should I listen to anyone from the (perceived) medical establishment?
The foundation of these fields in the US is creating adversarial and paternalistic relationships with the people they aim to “help.” That’s ON TOP of the punishing effects of profit-driven medicine. People feel that, they experience it themselves, and the lack of trust becomes a community wisdom that is incredibly hard to shift, especially when not much is being done to acknowledge and redress the problems.
I am devastated by people who refuse vaccines. But let’s not pretend public health and medicine are innocent victims when they’ve helped usher in their own collapse.
“Every time a doctor tells a woman she’s experiencing whatever symptoms ‘because she’s overweight’ an anti-vaxxer gets their wings.” Thank you for this! LOL. I will definitely quote this in future discussions. It says a lot about why there is distrust and contempt for western medicine.
I went down the alternative medicine and wellness hole for over a decade because doctors were so condescending and dismissive of my very real physical discomfort. It then took a long time for me to realize that naturopathy and alternative modalities were doing more harm than good (ie. fueling disordered eating, not getting vaccinated, etc) and I circled back to respecting western medicine again. Learning about Evidence Based Practice in grad school helped me to value scientific research in combination with clinical expertise and LISTENING to patient experience. It would be good to teach EBP at the high school level, IMO.
I just spent almost a week in the hospital recovering from colon surgery and my "care team's" general insistence on treating what my symptoms *should be* and not to listen to and treat *what I was actively experiencing and describing* unless it began to approach acute level was enfuriating. I know the people on the ground are understaffed, underpaid, and overworked, but that doesn't excuse the impersonal culture of care that has developed in the US.
While I have both the knowledge and (some) free time to advocate for myself, many people do not, and it is easy to see how negative experience/interactions with the healthcare system, particularly when people are dealing with unaddressed chronic or acute pain, can lead to broad distrust of the system as a whole.
The challenge we face is that the alternative "medicine" complex that responds to and takes advantage of this distrust doesn't arise organically, it is pushed through by the ownership class both to capture spending on "wellness" by the distrustful as well as to help divide the distrusting from the remainder of the working class.
I think the biggest thing we've all been losing and that we need to fight to get back is empathy. We should have empathy for children dying of preventable disease and their parents, regardless of what we feel about the parents and their intelligence, and we should have empathy for those who are so distrustful of mainstream medicine that they refuse live-saving treatment, because that distrust didn't come from malice but from fear.
Hell yes to this comment! I was thinking the same thing. The ‘ignorance’ of people who don’t trust the medical establishment makes a lot more sense when you look at it that way.
One of my dreams is to create a school for children that does what I was able to do for my children homeschooling them (not for religious nut reasons): I taught them to question authority, that education is a lifelong endeavor, that a day in which one learns nothing new is a day wasted. They are creative, intelligent adults who follow their passions, and make a positive difference in the world, and are more successful than myself. I taught them how to debate properly, and seek out primary sources. I would love to take that to a larger number of people, adults included. We need independent thinkers more than ever.
Keeping your kids out of the system saves their creative intelligence. This means they maintain their creative genius. This is what saves people when things go sideways. We have made creative genius into a fantasy. But studies show us 98% of children possess creative genius when they enter school. But education destroys our creativity so thoroughly that only, those with the most extreme version of it, 2% of the population maintain it.
I grew up in a non-political family, went to school in a very conservative rural area and (mostly) loved it. Nevertheless by the time I was 15 I was a hard-out Marxist and still value & use the analytic tools I learned then (not in school though- reading mainly initially). Am I one of your 2%, or are you just whistling dixie for the middle-ages?
I’ve thought the union movement needs to go hand in hand w/an education movement. I think concepts like monopoly/monopsony power coupled with the way that unions function as monopolies on the supply-side of the supply/demand labor dynamic- has the potential to be powerful. I work in the healthcare field and you can map the consolidation of this industry that has taken place in the 21st century to a change in law in 1998 that allowed non-profit companies to have controlling interest in for-profit companies. Compare the consolidation of the industry over the last 25 years w/the stagnancy/decline in unions- and it is easy to see that working people in the healthcare field have lost power as the markets have become less competitive through consolidation. It becomes obvious that the only way we go up against monopsony power is through the creation of powerful healthcare unions. I actually designed a power-point presentation to teach these concepts- it can be pretty powerful to give people in healthcare a blueprint by which to understand “why has it become so bad in our hospitals” and then a tool for how to make it better.
I couldn’t agree with you more. And I also think unions themselves need to be engaged in the political education of their members. Some are getting back into doing that but scaling it up right now is crucial.
How do we get our unions to be less myopically focused on short-term gains for their members (obviously a core purpose of a union, not disparaging that) and to invest more time and energy into the broader struggle of the working class against the owner class?
I fear our current unions, or at least their leadership, are content with working within the current system rather than abolishing it for a worker-controlled one.
And also I think this is a really great article. There’s so much contempt coming from liberal and progressive circles towards our fellow working people who support Trump, and it’s so misguided and harmful. I really appreciate any piece that works to hold working people in higher esteem, and to point the finger of responsibility for our present moment to a system that requires cutting off the wings of so many people so that they never have an opportunity to flourish. Thank you for this thoughtful piece
Good work. I'm a former high school teacher and currently adjunct at the college. I see first hand every day this vicious cycle we're in where the kids don't know anything, aren't curious, and won't go above and beyond while the teachers throw their hands up and say they don't want to learn. The system we've created ensures this result, and leads to an increasingly numbed and aquiescent electorate. Today, Education isn't even in the Top 5 of what Americans think Trump should prioritize.
I don't know what else to do except the best job I can, even though it's feeling more and more trivial every day.
The core of thinking critically is a thirst for knowledge and endless curiosity. It isn't WHAT you teach a person to think, it's HOW you teach a person to think. And for God's sake READING IS FUNDAMENTAL.
This is a great and nuanced discussion of the dynamic. As a prior commenter mentioned, the “anti” movement didn’t form in a vacuum, nor is it wholly a creation of the down-dumbers. The bureaucratization of public health has left a lot of people behind but of course that doesn’t mean we have to resort to leeches and herbs brewed by hedge witches. Communities of care exist and can be strengthened.
Do you have links to current “freedom schools?” I love the term, but I don’t know if it’s used as a catch-all for alternative schooling or a specific thing with a defined pedagogy
I’ve been thinking about Issac Asimov’s article “A Cult of Ignorance” quite a bit lately. Although it’s not radical in its presentation it shows how long the value of ignorance has been present in American society. To some degree it also points towards the future post-truth understanding of reality which we largely inhabit.
After listening to the Sold a Story podcast, I realized how big of a literacy problem there is! So many things at work to lead to places where a cult of personality is high and lack of expertise and empathy are swept under the rug… I think we lose so much nuance if there isn’t more knowledge to build on, not knowing where to self serve
the author u cite in beginning, if they actually have kids they should know critical thinking is an adult faculty pre-developmental frontal cortexii (1st use of this plural!)
kids can discern but it is necessary to instill structure & order, period
we do not permit child inmates run the asylum
education is not about indoctrination, that is about the people who focus only on it
education is to foster standardized knowledge & skills so a functioning society can rely on a productive stream of participants
it's a coming of age to graduate but only then see & understand there's so much called the rest of everything we're only beginning at
freedom schools a very suitable approach!
educators have it hard enough they don't need to have six rear-view mirrors yoke their attention off their core mission & goals, sheparding...
so bias is able to dilute ur throughput, i'd suppose not hitching this wagon too closely to that author is but only 1 aspect 2 consider
There is an element of misunderstanding here, especially when claiming anyone with a different view is just stupid.
Science is a belief system, just like any other. It isn't that firmly established, having been the mostly dominant one for a few hundred years, far less than many other belief systems. And as with any belief system that achieves dominance and becomes part of official discourse and education, it leads to many people believing it without understanding the basics or its assumptions, or flaws, or even recognising it as a belief system (in the same way that bigots and racists say "keep politics out of entertainment" when they actually mean everything should be full of politics but only those matching their privileged world view, and therefore invisible to them).
When materialists say that anyone with another belief system is stupid "because of the evidence they don't understand", it is a huge mistake. The "evidence" is always from within the belief system. If science is not my world view, then you're not going to persuade me of some element of it using science, any more than you can convert me to fundamental Christianity by quoting the bible and how it tells us the world was created in seven days, or that I was descended from Adam and Eve. To think arguments from within a belief system apply to people outside of it is, itself, a lack of comprehension.
I'm not anti-vaccination; I am against any system of enforced vaccination. The only law that applies, which underlies every injustice, is that living beings have autonomy over their own bodies. That is absolute. No rape, no murder, no torture, no violence, no kidnap, no forced procedures: our bodies are the only thing we ever truly own. We all know a large element of the medical industry is about profit, me-too pharmaceuticals, patents, legal pressure and so on. It's why you can't sue a company if a vaccination injures or kills you (or someone you love, in the latter case), even if you didn't consent to it, even if it was harmful. It's why so much money is spent persuading people to adopt a system that is an endless (and growing) source of revenue. It's a system connected to many injustices, including speciesism and vivisection.
I've never had any kind of vaccination, for a variety of personal reasons. I don't think it is lack of intelligence or understanding, though. I studied the philosophy of science and astrophysics as an undergraduate (first class honours). I went on to get an MSc (Master of Science) postgrad degree. I worked within science. But the more I knew, the more I realised it wasn't my belief system, just something I'd been pushed towards. I began to question the assumptions on which the belief system is based.
Hand-wringing about "how can we make these stupid people understand the basics of our belief system?" is beginning from a point of error, and an attempt to create binary divisions (us/them) while applying favourable characteristics to the group you belong to and denigrating people whose culture is different (smart/stupid; considered/stubborn). It's the same flaw in humanity which leads to every injustice, that has led to thousands of years of aggression, violence, lack of consideration, victimisation, and so on.
When you meet someone whose starting point is "I am right, you are wrong" that does not foster engagement, that fosters resistance. If they add "And we are dominant so can enforce our beliefs on you" it escalates to another level. To then complain that more and more people disagree, and question that approach, is to have a mote in one's eye.
This is one of the best and most insightful pieces I have ever read, and I want to thank you for it. This help me put the pieces together between several lines of our current dysfunction in a way nothing else I've read ever has.
As a teacher (currently in a working class private school where I have far more flexibility than in public school, formerly in a large urban public school district) the one addition/clarification I would add to this is that by and large classroom teachers have little control over this and are often doing our best to fight against the tide on this. The standardized testing movement may not have been originally intended to dumb us down (although considering Ross Perot and GW Bush were at the forefront in 80s/90s Texas, it may have been), but the net result has been a process intentionally designed to fail: the texts on standardized reading tests are often 2 grade levels above the tested grade (see Mimi Swartz in 2019 Texas Monthly and the related academic research on that) so teachers face a massive uphill battle. Curricula have replaced analyzing books with short passages and multiple choice questions based on sleights of language and not on making connections across literature. Social studies books are written so far above grade level that most students can't understand them so they never learn history. And all of that curriculum and test prep is being shilled by massive for-profits like Pearson, while teachers are threatened with job loss if their students fail to make "adequate progress" on tests.
We've had political parties outright oppose the teaching of higher-order thinking skills in their platforms, and people in this ideological lane control the Texas Board of Education, which adopts standards and textbooks for the state and which has a disproportionate influence on other states' course materials due to the volume of material purchase in Texas.
Educators know the importance of critical thinking and do the best we can against this stacked deck. But it can be overwhelming and we aren't able to fully develop these skills in every student given the resources we are given (try teaching 6 25 student classes with one 45 minute prep period per day).
And we can't lose sight of the fact that all of this is by design. The people designing our education standards and materials want to profit off of our struggles, and the people determining which politicians win *want* our graduates to be unable to put the pieces together about why our society is so incredibly dysfunctional.
As educators we're doing the best we can, but we can't do it alone, and we can't do it with even less resources than we have now. We need support.
I think that one of the main problems for Americans (it happens in some other countries as well but not as strongly as in America) is the promotion of American exceptionalism. This leads to the manifest destiny, the belief that there has never been a democracy like America, that Americanism (capitalism) is the only right way to see the world. Until Americans are able to unload American exceptionalism there is no hope.
I completely agree that creating liberatory educational approaches is essential to responding to our current morass. A new book by Baltimore author Elaine Weiss describes the origins of Citizenship Schools in the 1950s and 1960, which prepared tens of thousands of Black southerners to read & write, demand their rights, and vote. Weiss will be speaking in Baltimore next week and in many other cities around the country: https://calendar.prattlibrary.org/event/elanie-weiss-spell-freedom
This is something I think about in my work in public health every day:
One thing I think you are missing with this analysis is a critique of public health and medicine and how their flawed approaches have also set the stage for this mess - similar to the critique you shared of public schools and how their goal is to indoctrinate rather than support critical thinking.
Public health and medicine both run on paternalism, non transparency, and an utter lack of trust in communities or patients. There are bigger, more grotesque examples of harm and breaching trust (e.g., Tuskegee) but I also like to say, “Every time a doctor tells a woman she’s experiencing whatever symptoms ‘because she’s overweight’ an anti-vaxxer gets their wings.” If my doctor won’t listen to me, why should I listen to them? Why should I listen to anyone from the (perceived) medical establishment?
The foundation of these fields in the US is creating adversarial and paternalistic relationships with the people they aim to “help.” That’s ON TOP of the punishing effects of profit-driven medicine. People feel that, they experience it themselves, and the lack of trust becomes a community wisdom that is incredibly hard to shift, especially when not much is being done to acknowledge and redress the problems.
I am devastated by people who refuse vaccines. But let’s not pretend public health and medicine are innocent victims when they’ve helped usher in their own collapse.
“Every time a doctor tells a woman she’s experiencing whatever symptoms ‘because she’s overweight’ an anti-vaxxer gets their wings.” Thank you for this! LOL. I will definitely quote this in future discussions. It says a lot about why there is distrust and contempt for western medicine.
I went down the alternative medicine and wellness hole for over a decade because doctors were so condescending and dismissive of my very real physical discomfort. It then took a long time for me to realize that naturopathy and alternative modalities were doing more harm than good (ie. fueling disordered eating, not getting vaccinated, etc) and I circled back to respecting western medicine again. Learning about Evidence Based Practice in grad school helped me to value scientific research in combination with clinical expertise and LISTENING to patient experience. It would be good to teach EBP at the high school level, IMO.
I just spent almost a week in the hospital recovering from colon surgery and my "care team's" general insistence on treating what my symptoms *should be* and not to listen to and treat *what I was actively experiencing and describing* unless it began to approach acute level was enfuriating. I know the people on the ground are understaffed, underpaid, and overworked, but that doesn't excuse the impersonal culture of care that has developed in the US.
While I have both the knowledge and (some) free time to advocate for myself, many people do not, and it is easy to see how negative experience/interactions with the healthcare system, particularly when people are dealing with unaddressed chronic or acute pain, can lead to broad distrust of the system as a whole.
The challenge we face is that the alternative "medicine" complex that responds to and takes advantage of this distrust doesn't arise organically, it is pushed through by the ownership class both to capture spending on "wellness" by the distrustful as well as to help divide the distrusting from the remainder of the working class.
I think the biggest thing we've all been losing and that we need to fight to get back is empathy. We should have empathy for children dying of preventable disease and their parents, regardless of what we feel about the parents and their intelligence, and we should have empathy for those who are so distrustful of mainstream medicine that they refuse live-saving treatment, because that distrust didn't come from malice but from fear.
Hell yes to this comment! I was thinking the same thing. The ‘ignorance’ of people who don’t trust the medical establishment makes a lot more sense when you look at it that way.
One of my dreams is to create a school for children that does what I was able to do for my children homeschooling them (not for religious nut reasons): I taught them to question authority, that education is a lifelong endeavor, that a day in which one learns nothing new is a day wasted. They are creative, intelligent adults who follow their passions, and make a positive difference in the world, and are more successful than myself. I taught them how to debate properly, and seek out primary sources. I would love to take that to a larger number of people, adults included. We need independent thinkers more than ever.
Keeping your kids out of the system saves their creative intelligence. This means they maintain their creative genius. This is what saves people when things go sideways. We have made creative genius into a fantasy. But studies show us 98% of children possess creative genius when they enter school. But education destroys our creativity so thoroughly that only, those with the most extreme version of it, 2% of the population maintain it.
I grew up in a non-political family, went to school in a very conservative rural area and (mostly) loved it. Nevertheless by the time I was 15 I was a hard-out Marxist and still value & use the analytic tools I learned then (not in school though- reading mainly initially). Am I one of your 2%, or are you just whistling dixie for the middle-ages?
You are not one of the 2% You just seem like an average dick.
I’ve thought the union movement needs to go hand in hand w/an education movement. I think concepts like monopoly/monopsony power coupled with the way that unions function as monopolies on the supply-side of the supply/demand labor dynamic- has the potential to be powerful. I work in the healthcare field and you can map the consolidation of this industry that has taken place in the 21st century to a change in law in 1998 that allowed non-profit companies to have controlling interest in for-profit companies. Compare the consolidation of the industry over the last 25 years w/the stagnancy/decline in unions- and it is easy to see that working people in the healthcare field have lost power as the markets have become less competitive through consolidation. It becomes obvious that the only way we go up against monopsony power is through the creation of powerful healthcare unions. I actually designed a power-point presentation to teach these concepts- it can be pretty powerful to give people in healthcare a blueprint by which to understand “why has it become so bad in our hospitals” and then a tool for how to make it better.
I couldn’t agree with you more. And I also think unions themselves need to be engaged in the political education of their members. Some are getting back into doing that but scaling it up right now is crucial.
👏
How do we get our unions to be less myopically focused on short-term gains for their members (obviously a core purpose of a union, not disparaging that) and to invest more time and energy into the broader struggle of the working class against the owner class?
I fear our current unions, or at least their leadership, are content with working within the current system rather than abolishing it for a worker-controlled one.
We used to have this- it was called the W.E.A. It still exists, but has become something of virtue-circle for left academics.
And also I think this is a really great article. There’s so much contempt coming from liberal and progressive circles towards our fellow working people who support Trump, and it’s so misguided and harmful. I really appreciate any piece that works to hold working people in higher esteem, and to point the finger of responsibility for our present moment to a system that requires cutting off the wings of so many people so that they never have an opportunity to flourish. Thank you for this thoughtful piece
Well said! I just posted a link to this article on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/kevinhing.bsky.social
And it’s getting a lot of likes on Bluesky!
Good work. I'm a former high school teacher and currently adjunct at the college. I see first hand every day this vicious cycle we're in where the kids don't know anything, aren't curious, and won't go above and beyond while the teachers throw their hands up and say they don't want to learn. The system we've created ensures this result, and leads to an increasingly numbed and aquiescent electorate. Today, Education isn't even in the Top 5 of what Americans think Trump should prioritize.
I don't know what else to do except the best job I can, even though it's feeling more and more trivial every day.
The core of thinking critically is a thirst for knowledge and endless curiosity. It isn't WHAT you teach a person to think, it's HOW you teach a person to think. And for God's sake READING IS FUNDAMENTAL.
https://www.jphilll.com/p/the-deadly-dumbing-down/comment/97749109
This is a great and nuanced discussion of the dynamic. As a prior commenter mentioned, the “anti” movement didn’t form in a vacuum, nor is it wholly a creation of the down-dumbers. The bureaucratization of public health has left a lot of people behind but of course that doesn’t mean we have to resort to leeches and herbs brewed by hedge witches. Communities of care exist and can be strengthened.
Do you have links to current “freedom schools?” I love the term, but I don’t know if it’s used as a catch-all for alternative schooling or a specific thing with a defined pedagogy
I’ve been thinking about Issac Asimov’s article “A Cult of Ignorance” quite a bit lately. Although it’s not radical in its presentation it shows how long the value of ignorance has been present in American society. To some degree it also points towards the future post-truth understanding of reality which we largely inhabit.
https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf
thank u for this
some should make an Asimov substack featuring curated articles & content like this & his many other works
presented from view of his persona
it'd be contemporary as s***!
After listening to the Sold a Story podcast, I realized how big of a literacy problem there is! So many things at work to lead to places where a cult of personality is high and lack of expertise and empathy are swept under the rug… I think we lose so much nuance if there isn’t more knowledge to build on, not knowing where to self serve
there is a bias u may need 2 overcome;
the author u cite in beginning, if they actually have kids they should know critical thinking is an adult faculty pre-developmental frontal cortexii (1st use of this plural!)
kids can discern but it is necessary to instill structure & order, period
we do not permit child inmates run the asylum
education is not about indoctrination, that is about the people who focus only on it
education is to foster standardized knowledge & skills so a functioning society can rely on a productive stream of participants
it's a coming of age to graduate but only then see & understand there's so much called the rest of everything we're only beginning at
freedom schools a very suitable approach!
educators have it hard enough they don't need to have six rear-view mirrors yoke their attention off their core mission & goals, sheparding...
so bias is able to dilute ur throughput, i'd suppose not hitching this wagon too closely to that author is but only 1 aspect 2 consider
ones who vaccinate are the ultimate dumbasses
There is an element of misunderstanding here, especially when claiming anyone with a different view is just stupid.
Science is a belief system, just like any other. It isn't that firmly established, having been the mostly dominant one for a few hundred years, far less than many other belief systems. And as with any belief system that achieves dominance and becomes part of official discourse and education, it leads to many people believing it without understanding the basics or its assumptions, or flaws, or even recognising it as a belief system (in the same way that bigots and racists say "keep politics out of entertainment" when they actually mean everything should be full of politics but only those matching their privileged world view, and therefore invisible to them).
When materialists say that anyone with another belief system is stupid "because of the evidence they don't understand", it is a huge mistake. The "evidence" is always from within the belief system. If science is not my world view, then you're not going to persuade me of some element of it using science, any more than you can convert me to fundamental Christianity by quoting the bible and how it tells us the world was created in seven days, or that I was descended from Adam and Eve. To think arguments from within a belief system apply to people outside of it is, itself, a lack of comprehension.
I'm not anti-vaccination; I am against any system of enforced vaccination. The only law that applies, which underlies every injustice, is that living beings have autonomy over their own bodies. That is absolute. No rape, no murder, no torture, no violence, no kidnap, no forced procedures: our bodies are the only thing we ever truly own. We all know a large element of the medical industry is about profit, me-too pharmaceuticals, patents, legal pressure and so on. It's why you can't sue a company if a vaccination injures or kills you (or someone you love, in the latter case), even if you didn't consent to it, even if it was harmful. It's why so much money is spent persuading people to adopt a system that is an endless (and growing) source of revenue. It's a system connected to many injustices, including speciesism and vivisection.
I've never had any kind of vaccination, for a variety of personal reasons. I don't think it is lack of intelligence or understanding, though. I studied the philosophy of science and astrophysics as an undergraduate (first class honours). I went on to get an MSc (Master of Science) postgrad degree. I worked within science. But the more I knew, the more I realised it wasn't my belief system, just something I'd been pushed towards. I began to question the assumptions on which the belief system is based.
Hand-wringing about "how can we make these stupid people understand the basics of our belief system?" is beginning from a point of error, and an attempt to create binary divisions (us/them) while applying favourable characteristics to the group you belong to and denigrating people whose culture is different (smart/stupid; considered/stubborn). It's the same flaw in humanity which leads to every injustice, that has led to thousands of years of aggression, violence, lack of consideration, victimisation, and so on.
When you meet someone whose starting point is "I am right, you are wrong" that does not foster engagement, that fosters resistance. If they add "And we are dominant so can enforce our beliefs on you" it escalates to another level. To then complain that more and more people disagree, and question that approach, is to have a mote in one's eye.
That's all I wanted to say.
This is one of the best and most insightful pieces I have ever read, and I want to thank you for it. This help me put the pieces together between several lines of our current dysfunction in a way nothing else I've read ever has.
As a teacher (currently in a working class private school where I have far more flexibility than in public school, formerly in a large urban public school district) the one addition/clarification I would add to this is that by and large classroom teachers have little control over this and are often doing our best to fight against the tide on this. The standardized testing movement may not have been originally intended to dumb us down (although considering Ross Perot and GW Bush were at the forefront in 80s/90s Texas, it may have been), but the net result has been a process intentionally designed to fail: the texts on standardized reading tests are often 2 grade levels above the tested grade (see Mimi Swartz in 2019 Texas Monthly and the related academic research on that) so teachers face a massive uphill battle. Curricula have replaced analyzing books with short passages and multiple choice questions based on sleights of language and not on making connections across literature. Social studies books are written so far above grade level that most students can't understand them so they never learn history. And all of that curriculum and test prep is being shilled by massive for-profits like Pearson, while teachers are threatened with job loss if their students fail to make "adequate progress" on tests.
We've had political parties outright oppose the teaching of higher-order thinking skills in their platforms, and people in this ideological lane control the Texas Board of Education, which adopts standards and textbooks for the state and which has a disproportionate influence on other states' course materials due to the volume of material purchase in Texas.
Educators know the importance of critical thinking and do the best we can against this stacked deck. But it can be overwhelming and we aren't able to fully develop these skills in every student given the resources we are given (try teaching 6 25 student classes with one 45 minute prep period per day).
And we can't lose sight of the fact that all of this is by design. The people designing our education standards and materials want to profit off of our struggles, and the people determining which politicians win *want* our graduates to be unable to put the pieces together about why our society is so incredibly dysfunctional.
As educators we're doing the best we can, but we can't do it alone, and we can't do it with even less resources than we have now. We need support.