>>  There’s a campaign under way to essentially destroy the public education system, the system which is based on the principle that you care if some other child who you don’t know gets an education. That’s the public education system. There’s an attempt to destroy that, along with every aspect of human life and attitudes and thought that involve social solidarity. It’s being done in all sorts of ways. One is simply by underfunding. So if you can make the public schools really rotten, people will look for an alternative.

Any service that’s going to be privatized, the first thing you do is make it malfunction so people can say, We want to get rid of it. It’s not running. Let’s give it to Lockheed. So first you make a system malfunction. Then you get popular support for handing it over to the corporate sector.

So public education is being very seriously malfunded. Teachers aren’t paid enough.
Resources are bad. In general there’s a serious decline in funding for infrastructure.

Our schools aren’t working. We can’t compete.

It was taken apart by specialists and it was shown pretty quickly that it was mostly fakery. But the point is to make people afraid that there’s an educational crisis coming.
The second thing is, Make that crisis come by underfunding, Not enough school construction, low salaries and so on. Then propose alternatives, which sound at the beginning like good ideas: charter schools, magnet schools, vouchers, who could be against that? You gradually chip away, making the public system less and less functional, less and less popular because it’s nonfunctional, producing propaganda about how awful it is, offering alternatives which begin small and end up where the big investment firms are expecting it to. < <

Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian  (2001) Propaganda and the public mind
ISBN: 978-1-60846-444-9

 

 

 

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The End of Citizenship and Our Current Cultural Crisis — A Conversation with Victor Davis Hanson    6 apr. 2022

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> >   In 1987–1988 students who enrolled in public four-year higher education institutions on average paid $3,190 for tuition adjusted to 2017 dollars. Yet in 2017–2018, three decades later, the average cost for tuition had soared to $9,970—a real increase of some 213 percent.
Mostly progressive private colleges and universities stepped up their real tuition costs by 129 percent over this same three-decade period. The huge increases were largely a result of administrative bloat, nonacademic auxiliary programs, gender and diversity regulations, and compliance costs.

[T]oo often the universities saw themselves no longer as teachers of the inductive method and the elements of foundational knowledge. Instead, they were activists. They became intent on shaping young minds to adopt a politicized agenda, whether defined as unquestioned embrace of climate change activism, identity politics, or redistributive economics.
Deductivism—picking and choosing examples to conform to a preconceived result—was a recalibration that proved far more costly, and ultimately toxic, for the student than the prior commitment to traditional education that had emphasized a set body of knowledge, an inductive method of accessing it, and the training of an inquisitive mind.  < <

Victor Davis Hanson (2021) The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America             ISBNs: 978-1-5416-4753-4