Where do movements like the Tea Party or The Wildrose Party find so many people who buy into such simplistic solutions? Why is it so easy for the hate mongers to blame scapegoats and get away with it? How does the greedocracy convince so many folks to continue supporting a system that grossly enriches the few while at the same time impoverishing everyone and everything else?The list of questions could go on and on but the answers would all be the same. The elites learned decades ago that the only way to keep control was to not allow the rabble to see that the emporer wore no clothes. In the US Barry Goldwater tried in '64 to run on a neo-conservative platform but was beaten handily by Lyndon Johnson. After his defeat the Goldwater Republicans regrouped and began their campaigns to gut school spending by cutting off the funding of education by whatever means available. The most successful means was cutting taxes for the rich in the US and Canada.
The far right reasoned correctly that an informed and well educated electorate would be far harder to control. The results are obvious. Education today barely touches on the great thinkers and ideas of history instead it focuses on training cogs for the corporate wheel.
Chris Hedges' The Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle is an excellant resource for looking into where we've come to in the non-education of our children. Today's story from Boston below is another. We stand on the edge of darkness, ignorance of history's lessons through poor education closes the curtain, severs our future from our past and creates the conditions where fear fosters folly.
"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression.
In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains
seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we
must be aware of change in the air, however slight,
lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
