The Worsening Education CRISIS!
We only thought it was bad before
Remember the pandemic? The home-schooling where students lost years of learning that was never really addressed or made up? Well home-schooling is making a comeback – BUT this time it’s all going to be better because instead of those woke, selfish, union-controlled teachers being in charge of it, all teaching will be done by our miracle savior – AI!!!!
The program has already been revealed. The website is listed here, available for your perusal. The descriptions are glowing, the promises amazing – and SO much better than public education; which if you haven’t noticed is being ushered out by the simple expedient of removing the funding. After all even though AI is a lot cheaper than actual teachers, it is not free! And the very best part is the AI education program CAN be paid with your voucher money! This is the ‘better education’ all the vouchers proponents have been promising would be yours if you just voted for those who support YOUR right to choose your child’s education!
You may think I’m being alarmist; certainly this isn’t really happening. Well if you haven’t read Project 2025 and what it says about education, it’s all laid out in plain language right there. If you think 45 was telling the truth when he said Project 2025 wasn’t what he REALLY planned to do, you didn’t count how many times his name appears in it nor do you understand how much he loves reading his name in print. The plan is a litany of how much money we’re ‘wasting’ on teachers; on transportation of students who could be taught at home; on mental health professionals for the children suffering from a lack of anyone who cares; on special education students who – let’s face it – are incredibly expensive to teach. The cure for all of this is privatization.
If this doesn’t scare the shit out of you your lack of understanding of the nuts and bolts of education is showing and probably won’t be revealed to you until you’re saying “How the hell did this happen?”; by which time there will be no viable answers.
Virtually the entirety of my working life has been spent as an educator, in several different forms: Public education, private education and coaching. The truth that I have gained is educating another human being is an incredibly complex and confusing task; and there is NO substitute for human involvement. When I read the glowing statements and promises of those who claim AI is the cure for what ails us it proves that the snake-oil salesmen are alive and well, updating their spiel for the modern world and proving again P. T. Barnum’s ‘there’s a fool born every minute’.
In these United States we are quite fond of trumpeting the wisdom of our founding fathers, and it would be difficult to argue with the differences and positives brought into the world by the idea that the purpose of government is to provide the opportunity for ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’. While some would focus on the many ways we have fallen short of this lofty goal, it has made America the envy of the world – even as many take pains to point out our failures. It is important to note that these founding fathers – to a man – agreed on the importance of education to make the ideal of a working democracy both possible and lasting.
When I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, much was made of the evils of communism, and their primary tool was to ‘brainwash’ their citizens. After 70+ years observing the world it has become obvious that the indoctrination referred to as ‘brainwashing’ is – and has always been – the single most important tool of ALL autocrats. Today we are seeing that autocrats have realized that communism is not a necessary prerequisite to ‘brainwashing’, in fact the only prerequisite needed is control of access to information. In my youth the ‘free American press’ was lauded as the savior of democracy, and I believe that is true. Unfortunately the coming of billionaires and the growth of social media as the primary source of information for the majority of the populace has meant that the press is no longer free, but fettered to the bottom line of corporations whose sole god is profit – for the billionaire owners. The new autocrats are no longer governmental leaders, but the corporate billionaires (yes, these are too often one and the same!). The hard lesson we are in the midst of learning is that ‘brainwashing’ is imminently doable here in the good old USA – or anywhere: It is just very expensive.
Is there any way to fight this? YES! It is education! The billionaire autocrats recognize this, and thus their opposition to educating anyone but their own chosen becomes not just understandable, but frightening. The founding fathers also recognized this, thus their championing of public education. THIS is what makes the current state of the crisis in education not just scary, downright horrifying.
The planned destruction of public education has been personally observed for the last 40 years. It began with Ronald Reagan’s efforts stemming from “A Nation at Risk” whose basic premise was that since education was failing the only course was to get government out of the education business entirely. This privatization of education has the decided advantage of making the education of children – which every parent desires – a powerful political weapon as well as a means of personal profit for those in control of the privatized education. While Reagan’s party has lauded his ideas and worked hard for this privatization ever since, the Democrats have by no means been blameless. The No Child Left Behind act was a very bi-partisan move that ushered in the era of the Big Standardized Test whose primary effect was to highlight the failure of education that it created. As proof I challenge you to find an ‘expert’ who thinks these tests are useful who has spent even one day in front of a classroom full of students trying to teach a concept; and/or find a practicing teacher who thinks these tests help them do their job – in the slightest!
Vouchers and privatized education are already showing themselves to be cost-prohibitive and a colossal failure to achieve any improvement – and this will become ever more apparent in coming years. The educational CRISIS is indeed getting much worse. The only benefactors will be the wealthy who never used public education in the first place, who are receiving a nice little tax rebate for an expense they were more than willing to undertake in the first place. Private education – which has always been expensive – will become dramatically more expensive as the alternatives get progressively worse. This is music to the ears of autocrats as an ignorant populace is a necessity for any autocracy. The winners will be those whose sole purpose from the beginning was to skim some money from that spent to ‘save’ education – key the AI-led home-school saviors.
https://2hourlearning.com/
