The people who constantly say things like "We need education" in response to problems of the world make me want to stab someone. Probably them.
My dude, look at the fucking people running the planet. How educated are they? Very. They have gone through a number of "prestigious" schools and programs. What the fuck are they doing?
Please, stop just going WE NEED EDUCATION to every problem. No, we don't. We know shit's wrong, and we're still not giving a shit. This is not an education problem.
Tangentially, I'm also tired of the whole "The fascists have taken the wrong lesson from dystopian fiction!" people. For the love of all of our mental healths, THEY DO NOT CARE.
It's aesthetics to them. They do not give a single solitary shit that they don't understand the themes and morals of dystopian novels. Hell, we know they don't understand what they read; Elon Musk made a great display of entirely misunderstanding the point of Hitchhiker's Guide. He doesn't care that he doesn't know what it means; to him, it means what he says it means. It means what he forces it to mean.
That is how he sees it.
That is also not an education problem. That is a problem of how self-interested fascists (same thing) behave and believe the world to work. No amount of education is going to fix that.
A lot of people just refuse to see fascists and conservatives as anything other than naive, instead of actors with their own horrifying logic, motives and ethical framework. Which to be honest just shows more about their unexamined assumptions about "intelligence" (assumptions deeply rooted in white supremacy...), than anything else.
For them it is more about making a liberal hierarchy of thought, then to engage with how the logic of fascism functions, how to take it apart, and how to destroy it... cause that would mean also having to engage with how they profit from these things.
It is so frigging disheartening...
Well, bigotry was deliberately transformed into things like "ignorance" and "-phobia" in the 90s.
In turns, this infantilizes fascism and medicalizes hate. The former effect helps people discount "ignorance" as a fault of the "uneducated hoi polloi" ("we are not fascist, because fascism requires a lack of education, therefor our enemies are uneducated"), and the latter...
... helps people release themselves from the obligations they have to their communities to address bigotry; if it's a medical problem, only doctors should handle it.
"Education" is an ineffective solution that actually doubles as a flashpoint in the culture wars, which is a win-win for a political class intent on preventing solidarity and community power from ever coalescing in a way that can threaten their fascist project or their owner/operators' interests.
There is an extraordinary irony, btw, in the Democratic party wing of the ruling class emphasizing education as the solution to our problems and people actually embracing that and creating a series of generations (millennials and then gen z) who are so well educated about media, technology, the history of racism, and US politics that they were catapulted en masse out of the capitalist fog of war that Democrats rely on to hide their bad faith, militarism, + imperialism.
nerd teacher 🦇
AuriBlackCat Collective
John