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It’s taken more than a hundred years for these two plots to play out to their current climax: a barely-literate lunatic in the Oval Office, supported by self-centered billionaires and empowered by corruption in the other two branches of federal government.
“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. this is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
The apparently sudden and rapid decline of civilization that we are currently seeing in the United States is in reality not sudden at all. Rather, it is the inevitable climax of two century-long plots, storylines of American life which set the stage for Ronald Reagan, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdock, Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Mitch McConnell, George W. Bush, the Republican tea party, Donald Trump, MAGA supporters, the Heritage Foundation, and various other actors to put us in the straits we are in now.
The first of those storylines is the failure of both our public and private education institutions to truly educate children and young men and women. Most Americans come out of their schooling with a poor understanding of basic concepts and principles of science, mathematics, economics, and government. This is because our schools do not as a rule develop conceptual understanding of the topics and subjects that are covered, and they suppress, rather than foster, the ability to reason and to evaluate information and ideas.
That this happens is not at all the fault of teachers, who are mostly heroes. It is the consequence of the assembly-line approach to education which was adopted in the early part of the 20th century[2]. Once that fundamental error was made, every institution of education that went along with it—which is very nearly all of them—was put on the path towards failure, dragging teachers and students along.
It is a truism among education researchers that interventions (attempts to make improvement) in classroom settings never have a substantial impact on outcomes—the impacts are quite small, no matter then intervention. But few have drawn the obvious conclusion: the setting itself is the problem.
This basic flaw has never been corrected because it’s a problem that generates substantial income for just about everyone involved in education (except teachers). That includes educational publishing companies, ed tech companies, universities with their research grants, consultants, and administrators at district, state, and federal level. All are heavily invested in the assembly line model. These are not bad people, in general, they are just trapped in a bad system.
Still, the failure of America’s educational institutions does not itself drive the decline of democracy in America, it only sets the stage for that by making people, well, poorly educated (no offense, this isn’t the students’ fault, either). The actors on that stage have effectively taken advantage of a second fundamental flaw of American culture: the worship of capitalism.
There are lots of definitions of capitalism, and we’d like to add these two[3]: “That system of economics which enables individuals that already have a substantial amount of money to turn it into huge sums through financial manipulation rather than the production of valuable goods and services”, and “A business environment that favors corporations who put short-term profits senior to all other objectives, and punishes corporations who do not.”
The consequences of unfettered capitalism (it had been fettered by Roosevelt, Reagan provided the “un”) are many, but two of them are fatal: disintegration of the middle class as the bulk of wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very small percentage of the population; and destruction of the ecosystem and disastrous changes of cimate as fossil-fuel companies, plastics manufacturers, pesticide producers, and other polluters take the most direct route to profits, with no consideration given to the other consequences of their actions.
It’s taken more than a hundred years for these two plots to play out to their current climax: a barely-literate lunatic in the Oval Office, supported by self-centered billionaires and empowered by corruption in the other two branches of federal government.
These problems will not be fixed overnight or in an election, and it’s fair to ask whether they can be fixed at all. But there is a power that might be equal to the task, something we have seen over the past few decades radically transform other aspects of American life (though in many cases not for the better): the power of technology-driven disruption.
What if the bright minds and entrepreneurial companies who are currently building the mechanisms of such disruptions chose to focus on two objectives: 1) the effective education of individuals as individuals to the end of their conceptual understanding of science, mathematics, economics, and government, and the ability to reason and evaluate information, and 2) the restoration of America’s middle class and redistribution of wealth through cooperative endeavor in which all players win?
Solving the first problem would require making broadly available the only educational approach proven to be consistently effective in developing mastery of a subject: one-on-one tutoring[4]. The tutors would need to be both subject matter expects and teaching experts, but they could be trained on the same platforms that would serve students. Think “Uber for education.”
Solving the second problem would require the development of a marketplace for investment that cannot be manipulated and focuses on the cultivation of successful small businesses who produce goods and services that improve peoples’ lives, bypassing existing stock exchanges and large corporations.
Difficult to do? Absolutely. Possible? Maybe, maybe not. But it would be fun to find out, and just might rehabilitate what used to be the world’s most powerful advocate for enlightened democracy and the decent treatment of human beings.
Facts inspire us. In fact, after the past four years we love facts even more and the founders of this site are inspired by the idea that the curation and nurturing of facts will actually contribute to the improvement of society and the lives of all of us.
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