The Deadly Dumbing Down
Reversing the deliberate effort to curtail the American mind
There are several links to resources about political education, reading groups, book clubs and more at the end of this piece that I hope you find helpful.
This week saw the first U.S. measles death in ten years, and it didn’t have to happen. A young child was taken by this entirely preventable disease simply because their parents chose not to vaccinate them. Another 123 cases, mostly children, have been reported across nine counties in Texas. Each and every case could have been avoided by vaccination, as evidenced by the eradication of the disease after the vaccine was introduced:
From half a million cases a year to zero. Elimination was declared in 2000, but that was before the anti-vax movement came along. It’s a tragic movement, with a growing number of people believing that the crowning achievement of public health is a secret plot to give their children autism, or microchip them, or whatever the latest story is. People are exposing their kids to measles and risking their lives all because of the rantings of an influencer, or some website like alternativehealings4u, or the growing culture of mistrust and manufactured ignorance.
We should be clear that anti-vax beliefs don’t stand alone. They require the anti-fluoride campaign, the silly fight against seed oils, the entire broader culture of misinformation and deliberate dumbing down. No one conspiracy thrives in isolation. To survive, the anti-vax belief needs a host who has come to distrust everything they read on any mainstream source, anything published in a science journal, or anything said by a conventionally reputable person. It needs an ecosystem of ignorance.
It’s tempting, here, to dismiss millions of people as dumbasses and keep it moving. Some folks do that, but it gets us nowhere. In fact, our inability to deal with the proliferation of conspiracy has landed us somewhere worse than nowhere. It’s brought us to a place where RFK Jr. is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and now he’s ending transparency rules, killing vaccine programs, and even calling this highly abnormal and deadly measles outbreak in Texas “not unusual.”
So dismissing millions as stupid won’t cut it. Not only because their beliefs saturate the halls of power, not only because it’s a losing strategy, but also because it’s wrong. People believe some extra-ignorant things right now, but insulting their intelligence does nothing to get us closer to the real reason our country has reached this point. It does nothing to build critical thinkers, nothing to address the legitimate reasons that people don’t trust most politicians, the government, and a lot of corporate media, nothing to rebuild trust. Most importantly, it does nothing to address our deliberate dumbing down.
The limiting of the American mind has been a lengthy process. From the start, public education was meant to stunt critical thinking. As Agustina Paglayan explains, “What’s the goal of education? It’s not to improve living standards. It’s to teach obedience, to teach submissiveness to the state’s authority.” In a discussion of her book Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education she goes on:
“The expansion of primary education in the West was driven not by democratic ideals but by the state’s desire to control citizens and to control them by targeting children at an age when they are very young and susceptible to external influence, and to teach them at that young age that it’s good to respect rules, that it’s good to respect authority—with the idea in mind that if you learn to respect rules and authority from that young age, you’re going to continue doing so for the rest of your life, and that’s going to lead to political and social stability and, in particular, the stability of the status quo.”
Paglayan says that indoctrination was the goal of educating the masses, and by that she means “teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.” This process is less about what exactly is being taught, and more about producing students who accept the structures of authority, accept the systems of the status quo, and who are not engaged critically with power.
This approach is a problem. Not prioritizing critical thinking is more than a disservice, it renders schools, in part, oppressive institutions. Where education should be liberatory, emancipatory, should open us up to our own potential, to new ways of thinking, to methods of understanding the complexities of the world and solving problems, the dominant model of public education has been largely regressive. At the same time, public schools are one of the most important institutions in this country. They might never have been bastions of liberation, but they’ve provided opportunity to millions and millions of people and have shifted the societal role of children from young workers to students. All of this can be, and is, true at once.
And one of the many things we’re seeing now is what happens when the products of these public schools, these students, need the critical thinking skills they weren’t given. At this point only about 20% of U.S. adults trust the government. That number has been low for decades, but it’s even lower now. Trust in universities, media, and other institutions that were long-time pillars of this country has also declined. So now we have millions of people who weren’t trained to think critically in a world where they don’t trust conventional sources of knowledge. And the people they do trust relentlessly attack media, higher education, and public schools. It’s no wonder folks are eating up conspiracies — they’re victims of a war on public education and public trust.
This war on education, launched largely because of the money to be made in the privatization business, manifests in voucher schemes, the defunding of public colleges and school districts, attempts to take down teachers’ unions and more. It’s all part of the conservative oligarch push to roll back everything won in the progressive era of the early 20th century and the New Deal. From child labor law to Trump’s reported plan to demolish the Department of Education, capitalists are waging a class war against all of us. It’s an attempt to tear the fabric that holds society together, it’s an attempt to dumb us down, and it’s an attempt to disempower us. And, at the moment, it’s working.
Instead of critical thinking, instead of public education, a significant thrust of the attack on our ability to think is having as many people as possible receive their thoughts from far-right influencers and conspiracists. On Zuckerberg’s Facebook, there are three times more right-leaning political influencers than there are left-leaning ones. I don’t need to explain how the same thing has happened over on Musk’s Twitter, and then some. With Zuckerberg also in control at Instagram and TikTok in cahoots with Trump, the outlook is bleak as its ever been on every major platform.
It can feel hard to do anything about all this. We know the far-right and the ruling class are finding far too much success in dumbing us down. The attacks on public education, the billionaire promotion of conspiratorial thinking, and the fascist assault on any sense of shared reality have done damage. And yet, we can act. We must act. We have our work cut out for us when it comes to building critical thinkers and repairing the fabric of society, but it’s vital work that cannot go undone.
It won’t be easy; we’re up against a tidal wave propelled by billions of dollars. But that’s the case for every facet of the push for liberation, and we forge ahead nonetheless. We remember that while the right has the money, we have the people. And although millions may have succumbed to ignorance, millions also crave knowledge, freedom, a different world and the skills and information to make that dream a reality.
There are, thankfully, countless ways to empower our communities. One is freedom schools. These are ambitious projects, liberatory schools often run in part or in whole by volunteers who conduct political education and work to give people the knowledge and tools that they can in turn use to pursue freedom. The goal here is education to understand, to change, to transform. It’s a fundamentally different objective than the conventional model that attempts to instill compliance. It’s a model and method that can help us create the radical change so desperately needed in this world. And it, too, isn't new. This model was used in the Freedom Schools of the civil rights movement, with 1964 providing the most famous example.
In the spring of 1964, SNCC created the Freedom School curriculum, which was rooted in the lives of young Black Mississippians. In August of that year delegates from all 41 Freedom Schools came together for a statewide convention. As Staughton Lynd writes of the curriculum presented there: “Essentially it was a series of questions, beginning with the students' most immediate experience of housing, employment and education.” This approach mirrors that which can be found in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which presents a vision for education that empowers rather than one that turns students into memorizing machines.
After the summer of ‘64, Lynd described some of the results. At the final convention, “The young people took over. They became the administrators.” And the political program they presented was, “not only executed by the youngsters, but initiated by them.” The SNCC description of the conference reads, “Participants drafted their own political platform [which] covered everything from segregated public accommodations and housing to the educational and economic opportunities for young Black people. At the end of the convention, the delegation laid down the foundation for the Mississippi Student Union (MSU) to continue coordinated action against segregated schools and public accommodations.”
The effort those freedom schools, their teachers, and their students made in Mississippi that summer to help empower young people worked. Nothing was won overnight, but in a few months students grew into their agency, their confidence, and their desire to change their conditions, and the world. They were, in a short time, able to develop a platform and a plan of action. They were able to move from student observers to active participants both in their education and in society.
None of this is easy. The Mississippi freedom schools collectively required hundreds of volunteers. But we can start where we are. We can start with book clubs, political education, and making our organizing spaces learning spaces. Ultimately, we must build and gain the power to transform the way we do education and the way we run society. But coming together to build critical thinkers, to learn and unlearn together, to gain a knowledge of political theory and practice that we were never taught in school is a great place to start. As the folks at the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction in Philadelphia (who are doing amazing work in this vein) write, “Through participatory and collective study of political economy, the history of global resistance movements, and the theoretical and practical aspects of social change, we aim to teach a new generation of organic intellectuals not only how to understand the world, but more importantly, how to change it.”
We’re here to make change. We’re here to move ourselves and others from passive absorbers of information and events to people capable of discernment and of acting with agency in this world. None of that can be done alone. But, together, we can build one another up, enlighten one another, and push back against the forces that want us demoralized, docile, and defeated. We aren’t stupid, we’ve been deliberately dumbed down, and educating and empowering each other will take our own deliberate, consistent effort. This work isn’t easy, but it is necessary, and each of us are called to take up this mantle wherever and however we can.
Links for a wide range of tools and resources for political education below.
Political Education Overview: https://criticalresistance.org/popular-education-overview/
Political Education in a Time of Rebellion: https://criticalresistance.org/popular-education-overview/
Reading Group Resources: https://mdcdsa.org/reading-group-resources/
Toolkit for "No School Like Freedom School": https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/spring-2013/toolkit-for-no-school-like-freedom-school
The W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction: https://abolitionschool.org/
Freedom School Curriculum (MS Freedom Summer, 1964): http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCpdf/CurrTextOnlyPart1.pdf
How To Start A Socialist Book Club: https://www.ajplus.net/stories/how-to-start-a-socialist-book-club
How To Run a Socialist Reading Group: https://www.dsausa.org/organize/socialist_reading_group/
Pedagogy of the Oppressed: https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf
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