For decades the Right has waged a war against education. The consequences have hurt not only the system and educators, but the very people they've duped. 1/
Because Republicans have drained the educational system of funds, it's kept talented people from entering into the teaching profession, which has harmed students around the country. 2/
God knows how many amazing teachers have been scared away from changing people's lives simply because this is a profession that doesn't pay well and it has been turned into a position of scorn. 3/
For all the rhetoric that Republicans love education, their tactics have been to starve schools and teachers. This doesn't just harm unions, it doesn't just harm tenured teachers, it hurts the students and drastically alters their lives for the worse. 4/
The impetus is to warn against an education that develops free-thinking students who might question the order of things. The Right is looking to produce a world in which students accept the status quo and their messaging, and to create consumers. 5/
As a result, students who could possibly think outside the box and confront many of our huge challenges are instead kept from creative thinking that might benefit everyone. 6/
This is a large part of why we still have so many of our major issues that have never been addressed, including reliance on fossil fuels and climate change. The corporations that should be paying taxes to educate the future are starving the system and paying people to maintain 7/
To that point, colleges have been so vilified that the information they're churning out has been largely ignored, and listen, there is some really important stuff happening at campuses around the country. 8/
When you start diving into research in any field you realize there's a secret world of knowledge that would drastically make the world better - but because we've been taught to hate colleges and people who work there we're actually kept from that knowledge. 9/
I'm around some of the most brilliant people in the world and they're producing groundshaking research. The problem? No one reads it because it's considered untouchable or snobbish. 10/
There's revolutionary stuff in every campus in this country, but the professors and even students have been positioned as enemies via political rhetoric. It literally harms the progress of our society. 11/
And what's more, that vilification of higher education keeps people from getting educated, and if you want to get on a personal level, it greatly hurts their earning power. The rhetoric sets them up to fail, all because the Right is at war with higher learning. 12/
That doesn't mean there aren't problems in the educational system. There are many of them. Any educator will admit this freely. But the blanket criticism and vilification has done unimaginable damage and has literally ruined lives, if not generations of lives. 13/
The rhetoric to counteract this has to take all of this into account. Education can transform the world. That's not hyperbole. The question people need to ask is: Why do so many people work actively to sabotage education? 14/
The answer is manipulation of worldview and to maintain profit of corporations that would happily bankroll education if it meant producing consumers and terrified employees. 15/
The goal of the Republican Party and affiliated interests is to maintain status quo, and the goal of education is to continue improving. There are vested interests which have no interest in making things better for society, but to continue their own dominance. 16/16
