They want us uneducated

And by "they" I mean the folks we've been discussing here since May

Before we jump in this week, I wanted to let you know I’m back at school and will probably be a little less prolific after the election. I’m always open to substack memberships to help support my nerdiness habit. This year I’m getting ready for my qualifying exams in June, so positive energy is also enthusiastically accepted. (And everyone who bought me back to school supplies last August, I think of you every time I use them, and they continue to serve me well!)

Barriers to education today

This month’s theme is “They want us,” and today it’s about how they want us as uneducated as possible.

You’ve probably heard about the ways conservatives are trying to eliminate a “liberal agenda” from education. I wanted to share an article from Time in October 2023 that begins, “New College of Florida, the small liberal arts college historically ranked among U.S. News and World Report’s top 75 institutions, has fallen 24 places. Now it risks dropping out of the top-100 category entirely.” The article goes on to talk about all of the changes the Florida governor imposed on the school, including changing its board and president and administrators and eliminating 1/3 of the faculty. The thing is, this agenda of saving higher education from its liberal bias is actually resulting in inferior education. And I think it matters that we have access to good education that cultivates critical thinking and the ability to wrestle with complexity. And by appointing people based on politics instead of gifts for education or passion for students thriving, this conservative agenda in practice has become an anti-education agenda. I wanted to make sure that was on your radar.

Barriers to education in our history

So we know that today, extremists are trying to limit higher education because they call it indoctrination. It turns out that almost exactly the same thing happened almost 100 years ago, and its legacy remains with us today.

Back in the 1930s, as the Nazi party gained power in Germany, many German scholars, especially ones developing what’s called critical theory, and many of whom were Jewish, fled Germany. Many of them were welcomed at ivy league universities in the US. This FREAKED OUT corporate businessmen, because critical theory said “corporations shouldn’t exploit you; government shouldn’t control your beliefs; maybe Christianity isn’t the only belief system that should be treated with respect.” Business leaders were not fans. They talked about these ideas as “foreign” and set up their own “educational nonprofits” like the American Enterprise Institute, or the AEI. Believe it or not, the AEI remains in existence today, and it pushes the same political agenda in very influential circles of lawmakers.

So if this attack on higher education feels like it’s coming out of nowhere, no, it has a long history that goes back to people with money not liking it when we learn that hoarding and corruption and poverty and suffering aren’t the way it has to be. Whenever we learn enough to look for alternatives, the attacks on higher education seem to emerge. Knowing this history can keep our eye on the ball even when they try to distract us. The more you know!

(As an aside, in June I had a substack for paid subscribers about Critical Race Theory, which emerged from the Critical Theory the Nazis hated all the way back in the 1930s.)

Forebears who fought for the right to education!

I usually remind us of ancestors who fought for what we’re fighting for, but today I want to talk about some folks still alive today. I want to talk about the students who fought for ethnic studies classes.

A lot of us don’t learn about our own history in school, and we don’t learn about each other’s histories either. It was a time when public education was under attack: the governor of California claimed it was too expensive to keep fees so low because he couldn’t say he resented so many students of color attending California colleges. Students of color didn’t shift into defense mode; they formed the Third World Liberation Front so that Asian American and Indigenous and Black and Latinx students could support each other’s efforts to establish programs honoring their histories as important in the world of higher education.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had the privilege of taking a class or two that resulted from those efforts, and they have been a real gift in my work of seeking to build bridges across culture. I’m grateful for the Third World Liberation Front for taking on the people who didn’t want them there in the first place and saying “actually, we don’t just have things to learn; our histories have things you also need to learn.”

If you’d like to learn more, here’s a great piece from KQED radio on the subject.

This photo is from one of many protests by the Third World Liberation Front in the late 60s.

And one more thing…

A few years back, Stephen Colbert popularized the phrase “the truth has a liberal bias.” Here’s the verification for that: when social media sites tried to establish fact-checking processes after the misinformation campaigns of the 2016 election, all of the existing organizations were deemed too liberal by conservatives, so Facebook added the Weekly Standard as a fact-checker even though they often misreport facts. When asked why they needed to be a part of the fact-checking process, the Weekly Standard themselves said “Surveys done by the University of Minnesota and George Mason University have shown that the supposedly impartial “fact checking” news organization rates Republican claims as false three times as often as Democratic claims and twice as much, respectively.”

I mean…

note: Paul Krugman had a great piece in the New York Times on this exact issue in 2017, and he also used the “the truth has a liberal bias” line, which is how I found the article!