If you're fortunate enough to have avoided the testing purgatory of the American public education system in recent decades, allow me to illuminate the Dickensian hellscape it has become. Our purported schools are no longer institutions of learning, but indoctrination camps designed to produce an army of undereducated, demoralized citizens - putty to be molded by the oligarchical forces that truly run this country.
At the core of this rot is the systematic defunding and sabotage of special education and at-risk programs for underachieving students. The neediest young minds, those most requiring skilled nurturing and support, are instead cast into an arena not unlike a perverse Hunger Games. The adults tasked with their instruction are often the most unqualified, treated as little more than fodder themselves by a system designed to grind them down through neglect and unsustainable workloads.
Meanwhile, in the general population classrooms, a different insidious force is at work - the unholy marriage of tech utopianism and anti-teacher ideology. Unaccountable edtech charlatans have foisted an unhealthy over-reliance on computers on our youth under the flimsy guise of keeping them "engaged." But their true motives are cost-cutting and surveillance - having fired the educators, they lock children into laboratorial boxes, datamining their minds in pursuit of pliable future consumer-drones.
The teachers that remain are openly sabotaged. Principals and administrators, who in a sane world would collaborate with and support them, instead work tirelessly to undermine any possibility of a coherent, student-first agenda emerging. Educators are isolated into voiceless silos - one-legged chairs bound to collapse under the weight of bureaucracy's disdain.
It is perhaps the grandest sleight-of-hand that these disgraces are branded as "reforms." Newspeak of the highest order, calculated to obscure the raw plutocratic grasping at the heart of it all. For let us be clear - there is a vile, conscious effort among the corporate and billionaire elite to produce precisely the servile, undereducated populace we are seeing birthed from these desiccated schools.
So as scholars like myself lament the death of the Enlightenment values that once guided education, raise a beverage to a grim truth: this is not an accidental decay, but a malign, multi-decade campaign by America's bastardized oligarchy to produce a populace just dumb enough to remain quiescent. The school-to-underclass pipeline is not a bug, but a feature - a cynical rebirth of Huxley's Brave New World, but with none of the writer's talent for social commentary.
At the core of this rot is the systematic defunding and sabotage of special education and at-risk programs for underachieving students. The neediest young minds, those most requiring skilled nurturing and support, are instead cast into an arena not unlike a perverse Hunger Games. The adults tasked with their instruction are often the most unqualified, treated as little more than fodder themselves by a system designed to grind them down through neglect and unsustainable workloads.
Meanwhile, in the general population classrooms, a different insidious force is at work - the unholy marriage of tech utopianism and anti-teacher ideology. Unaccountable edtech charlatans have foisted an unhealthy over-reliance on computers on our youth under the flimsy guise of keeping them "engaged." But their true motives are cost-cutting and surveillance - having fired the educators, they lock children into laboratorial boxes, datamining their minds in pursuit of pliable future consumer-drones.
The teachers that remain are openly sabotaged. Principals and administrators, who in a sane world would collaborate with and support them, instead work tirelessly to undermine any possibility of a coherent, student-first agenda emerging. Educators are isolated into voiceless silos - one-legged chairs bound to collapse under the weight of bureaucracy's disdain.
It is perhaps the grandest sleight-of-hand that these disgraces are branded as "reforms." Newspeak of the highest order, calculated to obscure the raw plutocratic grasping at the heart of it all. For let us be clear - there is a vile, conscious effort among the corporate and billionaire elite to produce precisely the servile, undereducated populace we are seeing birthed from these desiccated schools.
So as scholars like myself lament the death of the Enlightenment values that once guided education, raise a beverage to a grim truth: this is not an accidental decay, but a malign, multi-decade campaign by America's bastardized oligarchy to produce a populace just dumb enough to remain quiescent. The school-to-underclass pipeline is not a bug, but a feature - a cynical rebirth of Huxley's Brave New World, but with none of the writer's talent for social commentary.
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