Douglas Roberts wrote:
That, and a hopelessly corrupted US-wide educational system which
provided an environment that was prone to caving in to the demands of
the "Moral Majority".
Another dimension of the Republican world view is found in trickle-down
economics.
In this view, there are people that create wealth (business owners) and
those that depend on that wealth (workers). Those that create wealth
are a subset of society, and are identified in the natural process of
their participation in the economy. (Presumably they are exceptionally
hard working and smart.) Of course, those that create or have wealth do
also depend on the workers, so it does not seem surprising to me that
they aren't bothered by the possibility of rigid schooling and
indoctrination. After all, they want the workers out in the work force
as soon as possible and don't want a lot of trouble.
I'm not worried about rigid indoctrination, I'm worried about the
blurring of education and indoctrination. In a free society, I think
rigid indoctrination soon leads to new generation of independent
thinkers. Such an educational system will self-correct sooner or
later. What will take longer to correct is a situation where education
further devolves into two different colors of teachers and curriculums,
each pushing different agendas.
A deeper problem, it seems to me, is there is little faith in people to
learn, and little effort made to create the conditions where it can
occur in an unrestrained way. In the U.S., most people very strongly
expect education to be completed in the 20s and for that learning to be
conducted by an institution ensuring certain specific results (skill
sets). It is this set of expectations, and the many institutions that
are invested in them, as much as religious organizations, that inhibit
intrinsic motivation and independent thought.
Happily, in this nation and others, there is so much money in technology
that competition forces the development of novel technical skills.
This even occurs independently from traditional educational
organizations (e.g. the software industry).
Marcus
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