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We need to start having large, important, and honest conversations about how education isn't just about job and career training but is a necessary component of preparing people to distinguish between what is real and what is fake in order to make informed political decisions. 1/
The debate about education has been largely framed in regard to "student success" which is a malleable code word that has little to do with student success and everything to do with the business-ification of education. But there's something much, much more important here. 2/
We talk constantly about the fake news crisis. The fake new crisis isn't about media, it's about education. It's about the lack of preparation people have for looking at sources and documents and determining their authority. 3/
This is critical thinking and the shift in education to job training and career training, particularly the undermining of things other than STEM education, has led to a crisis in informed citizenry. This is how we get to 2016 - it isn't just the Internet/news, it's education. 4/
Conservatives are wholly obsessed with bringing education under heel and draining from it any critical thought or competency. The more that they push this the more the informed citizenry is going to suffer. It's simultaneously completely intentional and a byproduct. 5/
This is a means to an end, it enables the Republican Party to cement its power based on ignorance, but the consequence is that we can't have an honest and intellectual conversation. It actively hurts our democratic principles and hobbles the government and society. 6/
We put the blame on Fox News. We put the blame on Facebook. We put the blame everywhere while divorcing it from its root cause and the solution. We have to start taking education seriously because we're killing ourselves and our futures. 7/
The issue has to stop being framed as economic and career success. We have to change education from a customer-based model to what it's supposed to be. Life training, expansion of the mind. We don't have to indoctrinate people, but we have to give them a fighting chance. 8/
I'm a professor and I can tell you the impulse of universities is to squeeze as many "customers" in a room as possible. "Student success" hides this. It's a conveyor belt, an assembly line, and what we're losing in the process is an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing 9/
This entire situation, Donald Trump, fake news, the splintering of reality, finds its core in the wrong being perpetrated against education. The argument has to be changed. This isn't about careers, this is about survival of society and survival of progress. 10/
The more we talk about test scores and budgets the more we distance this thing from what it's actually about. Preparing the United States of America for a better future. We're supposed to be fighting ignorance and promoting personal ability to distinguish and succeed. 11/
The answer to fake news, to Fox News, to all of it, isn't Facebook algorithms. The people who created this problem aren't going to solve it. It's empowering the American citizen to decide for themselves what is real and what it isn't, what is important and what is fake. 12/12
