Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Elecshuns Have Conzekwences


Betsy deVos is going to be the the new Education Secretary.  Her qualifications for the job are money, money, money, Christian fundamentalist beliefs in the superiority of Christian madrassas, money, money, money, her beliefs in free markets for even primary education*, and money, money and money:

The 51-to-50 vote elevates Ms. DeVos — a wealthy donor from Michigan who has devoted much of her life to expanding educational choice through charter schools and vouchers, but has limited experience with the public school system — to be steward of the nation’s schools.

Okay.  I very slightly exaggerate in the above paragraph.  But I have searched, and I can't find the formal qualifications deVos would have for this job.   In the hearings she was unable to answer the simplest questions having to do with the laws which govern education or the basic concepts the experts use to evaluate the quality of education children receive.  So she has a lot of studying ahead of her, and, no, the answers are not in the Bible.

Wanna hear my tinfoil hat conspiracy theory?

The conservatives, and especially the white supremacist so-called Alt Right men, don't want to educate the peasants.  They want real education to be reserved for the children of the wealthy (whites). 

The rest should get biiig doses of hierarchical religion, messages about obedience, guilt messages to women (Eve's daughters), general brainwashing (achieved by something akin to the memorization of the social rules that prevailed 2000 years ago in a nomadic shepherding community) and the most basic skills required to be a good lower-level worker.

But absolutely no critical thinking skills.

That pretty much this system of education has created tremendous problems in some Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia doesn't worry people like deVos.  She thinks she can get away with supporting just Christian madrassas.

And what about the spelling in the title of this post?  I want to fit in with the new post-factual era.  More about that in a later post.

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*  Aka as the vouchers.  The problems with the vouchers are many, but a basic theoretical problem is the fact that most parents cannot judge the quality of education for their children without having the child experience it for a fairly long time, and then it will be too late to completely eradicate any negative effects.  Proper market competition requires the very kind of information parents do not have, and that is the major reason why almost all formal education is based on not-for-profit institutions and the avoidance of incentive systems where the administrators can take more money home if they cheat more parents.