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My perspective on this comes out of a few things: 1) I’m an educator, 2) my high school was a fundamentalist Christian private school, 3) my elementary school was two trailers parked in a church parking lot, with two teachers for all 8 grades (this was ~1995-2002, btw) https://twitter.com/danlistensto/status/1285270160442634244
As an educator, I see every day how fundamentally off-kilter this system is. I won’t even use the word ‘broken,’ because in a lot of ways, it’s doing exactly what it was built to do:
it’s pretending to be an all-purpose education, preparing kids for anything, while actually enormously narrowing their possibilities and ways of thinking, taking away from them the possibility of really grokking any form of life other than this one.
Examples include my kiddos Model UN, Debate Club, Business Class, student TED talks, Student Council... the purpose isn’t for them to be great governors or find solutions to hard problems: it’s to make them embody the roles that our System wants them to see as legitimate.
I’m obviously teaching at a wealthier school, and other schools have even more serious issues, but these are the ones that I face every day: the education system is the mind-killer par excellence, in many cases.
So I agree with the premise that it has to go before we can really make new leaps as a society. But the question of “what comes after?” Is extremely non-trivial for me, given my rural fundamentalist upbringing (which is far more common than a lot of my liberal friends realize).
A lot of answers in my corner of twitter might look like “what comes next? More localized education, community-based, not a one-size-fits-all corporatist nonsense.” To that, I’d say “be very fucking careful.”
My early education was very much local and community based. We had field trips to each other’s family farms, parents were often in the classroom helping out, our curricula were open to critique and alteration. My high school had boarders, daily chapel, bible & doctrine classes...
You’ve probably guessed this, but: that localization of our education had a lot of negative effects. The racism, the sexism, anti-science attitudes (we were told to just ignore the numbers in our science textbooks), in-group reinforcement, dehumanization of non-christians...
I was beaten by my principal for consistently asking too many questions. The girls were taught by their female teachers to be subservient to men. A lot of teen pregnancies resulted from no sex ed.
Most of my classmates never got out of the indoctrination, and those who did, we’ve spent decades trying to root out all that shit.
All of which is to say: if the current school system collapses, and education is defaulted back to local and community-based mini-systems, there WILL be absolute carnage wreaked on the minds of a generation of kids whose education includes QAnon, militia training, antivax, [...]
...religious dogma, young earth creationism— all the stuff you’d expect if you grew up where I did. But now there are ever more fractal rabbit holes for this to go through.
Some kids will go to schools where the teaching is strongly inflected with all sorts of things from flat earth to Game B to Redpill to Leninism to Buddhist modernism to simulationism to anything else you can imagine.
If you think that wouldn’t happen, all I can say is that idealogues have a STRONG first-mover advantage. While the rest of us are dwelling on what might be positive or negative, True Believers just go all in right away.
Whatever you think of any individual idea I listed above, you can probably agree that having pockets of the full variety all across the US would lead to an even more shattered sense of reality than we’ve got going now.
So where does that leave me? I’m pretty sure the current system must go, and I’m pretty sure that what replaces it is likely to be even more traumatizing to a lot of kids, and even more fracturing for the world at large. I have no idea where to go from here, except for
A vague hope that Chaos has some kind of divine intelligence, and will turn this mess into a way forward. Because clearly leaning too hard on Order has not yielded great results.
To;dr: I have no ideas, but everything is bad.
