The Dionysian Manipulation of Public Attitudes Towards Education

The Cynical War on Teachers and Public Schools

Teaching: The Vanguard Against Ignorance

In an era where the forces of plutocracy and oligarchic authoritarianism wage a cynical war on public education, it is teachers who stand as the vanguards of enlightenment. From Socrates, the condemned "corruptor of youth", to Hypatia, the martyred champion of classical knowledge, to John Dewey, prophet of progressive pedagogy, educators have always been freedom's frontline troops against the darkness of ignorance.

Today's culture warriors like the Kochs, Betsy DeVos and Eva Moskowitz cloak their privatization crusade in plaudits of "reform" while defaming teachers as incompetent, unworthy leeches on the public dole. Pauline Lipman, Henry Giroux and Jonathan Kozol compellingly counter such calumnies, rebuking the corporate cannibalization of learning communities.

Paulo Freire and bell hooks remind us teaching is an inherently political act - one that can uplift the oppressed or indoctrinate the masses in dominant narratives. W.E.B. Du Bois, Jane Elliott and Howard Zinn carried that emancipatory flame. So too didTeachers like James Loewen, Rethinking Schools pioneers, who courageously overhauled curricula to prioritize justice over jingoism.

In their roles as cultivators of critical thinking, fighters of dogma, and denouncers of pseudoscience, educators stand as twenty-first century iterations of Enlightenment luminaries like Diderot, Voltaire and Condorcet. Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson and the NCSE's Eugenie Scott exemplify this crucial work.

Truly, from the ancient paideia of Greeks like Isocrates to the village educators of figures like Wangari Maathai, teachers represent humanity's best bulwark against the obfuscating forces of oppression, orthodoxy and manufactured ignorance. It is they, the guardians of reason, inquiry and debate, who must be championed if we are to avoid civilizational rot and regress.

By any fair assessment, teachers are among the most undervalued and disrespected professionals in our society. For decades now, they have been the whipping boys for every huckster, demagogue and budding authoritarian tyrant who wishes to lay the blame for society's ills at their door. The unending sneers, condescension and outright vilification heaped upon those tasked with educating our youth would be shocking if it weren't so sickeningly predictable.

One doesn't need the benefit of much imagination to theorize as to who the prime movers are behind this protracted campaign of denigration aimed at our public school teachers. The usual suspects are the feudal plutocrats and rapacious oligarchs who style themselves as education "reformers" but who are in reality class warriors bent on privatizing one of the remaining citadels of the public good. Their motives are as transparent as they are repellent - a contempt for democracy and egalitarianism which manifests in a zeal to gut public institutions that empower the masses.

Make no mistake, these enemies of a free and equitable society hve not the slightest interest in improving education standards or elevating the teaching profession. Quite the opposite - by eroding public confidence in teachers and schools through a ceaseless barrage of propaganda, they cynically create a self-fulfilling cycle of failure which they then utilize to demand more privitization and corporate curricula. All of which simply enriches the grifters and profiteers while decimating the very concept of the common good.

Their modus operandi takes its cue less from the Apollonian realm of logic and reason than the Dionysian lexicon of emotional manipulation and demagoguery. Like the peddlers of Brexit's false promises, these hucksters exploit the public's fears and anxieties through canards about failing schools and incompetent teachers writ large. Nevermind that such broadsides are bereft of nuance or counter-evidence - they are purpose-built Molotov cocktails intended to spark widescale arson against the very institutions a democratic society relies upon.

And for what? So a cabal of aristocratic misanthropes can amass more wealth and power at the expense of an educated, empowered population? So our children can be indoctrinated into a perverted value system that exalts greed, markets and profits over knowledge, equality and human thriving? It is a monstrous prospect, and one we must martial every faculty to resist.

We must unapologetically defend and celebrate our public school teachers as the unsung heroes they are. It is they, often overworked and underpaid, who labor thanklessly to nurture the minds that will shape our future. They deserve not our disdain, but our eternal gratitude and respect. For in valorizing them, we sustain the promise of an enlightened, progressed society borne of universal education - a vision that predatory plutocrats and their useful idiots will always seek to crush beneath their bootheels.

This is the struggle we are embroiled in, make no mistake. A righteous battle for the soul of knowledge and democracy itself. Win it we must, lest future generations succeed only in completing our dissent into ignorance and subjugation.