I doubt this is a shock to any of my regular readers, but yeah – the GOP wants to get rid of public education, or at least public education as it exists today. I could believe that they’ll find a new love for it if they take full control of the U.S. government, but I think it’s more likely that public education would become more explicitly about job training for the working class, with a real education being locked behind a paywall. Money will buy education, and if you can’t afford that, then you can always put yourself into debt peonage, to guarantee you’ll spend your life working for the benefit of those at the top.
Ever since Brown vs. Board of Education in 1955, conservatives have wanted to kill public education. They prefer “segregation academies”, where each town’s white elite can get their kids educated without having to learn that non-white people exist. Also, all fairness rules can be eliminated when Jesus helps them to segregate so “white and delightsome.”
Moses said it’s evil to eat shrimp and lobster. Unfortunately, perfect Jesus failed to clarify this when he rewrote god’s unchanging law that is our moral foundation.
Bruce at 1:
Brown v. Board of Education was a big part of it. But so was the unionization of teachers. Especially since they let everyone who is a teacher be a part of the union, not just the whites. Successful union combined with desegregation and the collective right seems to have decided that they would rather not have public schools.
There’s also a very deep strain of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism that predates the very founding of our country.
@Raging Bee; this is so true, and many since cling to it. Remember how proud Sarah Palin was that her older daughter dropped out of high school in favor of a “career” on Dancing with the Stars and selling tea that makes you poop? Her younger daughter went to “hair school”.
I was in high school when St. Ronnie Raygun decreed that in school lunches, ketchup counted as a vegetable…so you could have your greasy, undercooked tater tots, or your room-temp ketchup to cut the taste. Not both. Further cuts to other parts of education soon followed. My particular school let several teachers go, including the one who taught Senior English. All seniors had to take an English class, but there was no teacher to teach. Fun times!
People following the Republican campaign to destroy public schooling might find much of interest in Peter Greene’s blog, Curmudgucation.blogspot.com, which covers a wide range of education-related topics, including privatization and related.
A recent post is of interest:
https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2022/09/fl-endgame-in-sight-heritage-foundation.html