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Randahl Fink

The best argument for free education I have seen in my lifetime is this:

In the US where education is not free, and fewer get well educated, the country is now facing the very serious problem, that a large segment of voters do not understand why democracy is important. Instead, they follow a presidential candidate, who pitches dictatorship as an interesting new idea, and they do not possess the knowledge to instantly identify this as the worst possible idea ever suggested in American politics.

@randahl conservative christianity doesn't profit from education. I'm no fan of Marx but he was right naming religion opium for the people

@hermannus
But private/church conservative-led/owned schools DO profit, especially as they take public monies in several states like Florida.
Me: WTF are private Christian schools taking public funds away from the school system to teach kids their Bible version of evolution and earth history?
@randahl

@randahl “those who do not learn from history …”

@randahl I just watched the Netflix doc "5 Came Back" about Hollywood's role in helping Americans understand what was going on in Europe.

A sensitive story and some footage I have never seen plus some background into the moral dilemmas faced by the government of the time.

Maybe the Rambo/Marvel/Gaming culture of good always defeating evil and multiple do-overs has made it hard to understand what is actually happening.

I cannot imagine what is happening in Ukraine - when do we wake up?

@randahl Hmm.
It seems to me that many of the people who support fascism over democracy don't do so out of ignorance.
They understand the difference. They want fascism.
The cruelty (to others) is the point.
Perhaps the one thing you are right about is the key idea they fail to grasp: fascism is ultimately cruel to everyone, not just the scapegoats wielded by the dictator.
"Leopards eating people's faces party" and all that.

@randahl To be clear with you, I agree that education in the U.S. is fucked up, and indeed I posted recently about the need for us to fix broken civics education and my doubts that we can actually do what's needed.
I just don't think lack of education explains the majority of the fascism supporters.
It may, on the other hand, explain _enough_ of them that improving education will change the outcome of elections in a positive direction.

@randahl universal public education has always been a progressive, even radical project. It tends to level power and broaden prosperity.

@randahl Also, it's quite possible that the immigrants they dread are better educated than them

@randahl Education (except university) is also free in the United Kingdom. And they keep electing the Conservative Party and voted for . So the education not only needs to be free, but it also needs to be good - which means that you need to pay more than lip service to the idea of "free education" and pay teachers what they're worth, have a lot fewer than 40 pupils per class, rebuild schools that are falling down & not sell of the school land to property developers.

@marcusjenkins @randahl ALL education is free in Scotland and unless we’ve declared Independence overnight we’re still unfortunately part of the U.K. Scotland has not voted in any numbers for Conservatives since 1955. The education system in Scotland is also very different, even down to qualifications. Are you another dimwit that thinks England =UK?

@Lassielmr @randahl Yes, sorry, Scotland is definitely better than England in this regard! (And voted for neither Tories nor Brexit, mostly.)

@marcusjenkins do UK public schools really have 40 pupils per class? In Denmark we are complaining about 28 pupils in a classroom.

@randahl
In the US education up to 12th grade is free. Also, how do you explain why so much of the MAGA leadership is coming from folks who graduated from Harvard and other Ivy League schools?

This view that it’s the uneducated pushing for fascism drives a wedge between the working class and progressive politics. Unfortunately, it’s the view of many in the Democratic party in the U.S. It was largely the working class in the U.S. that saved europe from fascism the last time it came around.

@wa7iut @randahl Many of the MAGA leaders are Ivy League educated. They want power, to control the masses, and know exactly what they are doing.
The uneducated do play a big part because they often fall for the deceptions of leaders. I am not placing blame on this group, but hoping that they can get knowledge they need to make better decisions.
True that working class saved Europe in WWll. My dad was one of them. High school dropout at 16. They had FDR and Churchill to lead them in a noble cause

@wa7iut the fact that rich kids go to Ivy league schools and some of them get the idea to take advantage of the uneducated by supporting a MAGA cult really does not indicate, MAGA is a tribe of educated people… at all.

@randahl Recently saw some not terribly surprising statistics. Nearly 50% of Americans did not not read a book in the past year. That includes both physical and e books. Over half of us have a reading level below 6th grade. 20% of us are functionally illiterate.
This at least partly explains the lack of knowledge about democracy and the appeal of dictatorship.

@randahl Just a question: is pre-university education not free, as well? Because I'd consider education about history and democracy is best placed in adolescence, isn't it? :blobwizard:

@randahl The United States does, in fact, provide public education for free up to the secondary level, and used to provide post-secondary education via state universities effectively free or at nominal cost, but the Baby Boomers killed that with their greed.

@randahl something I've worried about for a while now, 'It's the education, stupid'. There are, of course, the memes of American's views of the outside world; [cofffee comes from here, socialists here etc]. However there was a recent funny but sad moment on Kimmel where multiple people were asked to pick out Iowa [I think] on a map and none of the ones who took part could do it. Their own country and they don't know the states?

@randahl I think this is a US tradition. From Spanish missions to boarding schools for Native Americans, it isn't a concept they had to think about and come up with, it was just something to continue.

That's why the Pledge of Allegiance, that's why when I was school the Latino content was 1 paragraph in the whole book, that's why the natives were described as savages (the people who survived here for at least 26k --savage), that's why it's all "America, the great" no you will not learn much world history, looking like North Korean propaganda, just consume and don't think about it.

It's a work-force-training-ground, not an individual-can-thrive training ground. That's what you get when you can afford an expensive college, and that keeps real education out of reach for most except the people who look the way they want the people who have some education to look.

@randahl I refer you to George Carlin who famously said that everyone talks about improving education but nobody does it because the "owners" don't want that.

@randahl A long time ago, someone told me that the electoral college is a good thing because voters don't make smart decisions.

And even then I knew that was not true. The correct approach is to make it so that the people voting understand what they're doing.

@randahl Education is free pre-university in the US, and civics used to be taught there as an important part of the curriculum. It got de-emphasized over the past 25 years or so as schools came to be evaluated on test scores, and civics isn't on those tests. But I'm not sure there are many countries where most voters go to university, even if it's free there.

@randahl They've been greedwashed into believing what is good for the greedy and selfish is good for them. In a dictatorship there will be no rights that they hide behind,once the Constitution is gone they will also be the minority.

@randahl Indeed, ignorance is not a virtue. Plain dangerous.

@randahl it sounds plausible that education can serve this sort of purpose. Indeed, it would be wonderful if it did.

@randahl

A successful democracy requires extensive civic education, such that all citizens understand our rights, responsibilities, duties and methods to have impact, make changes.

Americans generally seem to be
ignorant of what our government
actually does or can do
to expect our POTUS to be a god
who commands the laws and policies we must live by.
to believe our government is an all powerful creature, rather than a human made institution meant to organize our societies

@randahl

In the UK we are two prime ministers on from when the people last had the chance to vote for who they wanted to sit in Number 10 Downing Street. Is this democratic? Nope.

Do British people care about democracy? Not really.

Schools don’t teach about First Past the Post, the significance + purpose of a 2nd chamber (the Lords), or what gerrymandering is in terms of constituency boundaries unless you study A level Politics. So feudalism continues…

@randahl
That's a good point. I've not looked at it from that view. I can see that we have an expensive and overall lazy education system. But we are a large country with a pretty large population, so we produce enough quality and educated people to compete.

But ... the social and thus political damage caused by the proportionally poorly educated citizens could be getting us in real trouble.