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...
Do you know that Sinclair quote? 'It is difficult to get a person to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it'?
elilla&'s Collorary to Sinclair's Law: It is difficult to make people see the enemy, when the conclusion is we are morally obliged to arm ourselves and fight.
capitalism doesn't coopt people just with salaries, or tech gadgets or other petty luxuries. the purpose of a monopoly of violence by the State isn't just to depower opposition to the State. the purpose is to create false security; a sense that anything to do with the sphere of violence is Somebody Else's Problem. it is very difficult to make people break away from the bubble of false security. it is the same process of the classroom watching a bully beat a nerd—nobody likes it and the bully wouldn't be able to fight half the classroom, but he would hurt the first few who tried, so everybody looks away and tries to think of something else.
George Orwell: "When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist — after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct." That's the only way fascism has ever been stopped. The question is how far will the fascists push until people who are not fascists finally recognise they will keep doing more and more atrocities until the rest of us take this step. Given that the USA now has multiple active concentration camps and ICE stormtroopers remain distinctly unmurdered, I'm pessimistic about how far.
I think we have here several different definitions of education in the room.
values are education.
growing up and learning from your community is education.
Learning to not kill bugs for fun, beat little siblings or set the house on fire is also education.
But yes, transfer of knowledge is also education. And here I agree totally with you, that formal education without the integration of critical thinking, ethics and empathy is just producing smarter raw material that can be captured easily by fascist ideologies to (re-)produce and maintain the planet crushing machine.
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.
@enby_of_the_apocalypse Oh, it pisses me off for those reasons, too. They always do that, though; they take things that have messages antithetical to their very existence, claim they love them (or I guess they do in the way an abuser can love the people they abuse—it's not the same, but the parallels are there... since they also happen to be abusers, too), and try to ruin them for the rest of us.
But when I have to listen to people go "But that's not what it means!" at them, I'm just like... They don't care. They will never care. They want to ruin everything for the rest of us. That's part of their goal. (And there's one sure-fire way to stop a fascist from doing it, and a lot of the people who do this very thing? Also keep telling me we shouldn't do it because we have "rise above." Ugh.)
It's an education problem in the sense that they have too much fucking education. Education that teaches them ideologies that are tools for oppressing the rest of us. Education that prepares them to take their places in the global system of capitalist control, just as the education they force us and our children to accept to prepare us to be controlled and to take our subordinate roles in that same system.
Indeed: “My moral system doesn’t require me to care about others” is not a problem of knowledge, information, or understanding.
@whatanerd 🔥 🔥
been well argued that educational progressives' focus on "fixing" education has always been a distraction from acknowledging and addressing root issues of inequality, etc..; too much insistence on conflating educational reform as societal reform
so true!! if you've a reference for your parenthetical, i'd really be interested in that! much of my studies so far have focused on capitalism's drive for school reform, but i've not read enough of the colonial/imperial import into schooling
The book is also available on Anna's.
https://annas-archive.gl/md5/809527bc3b73349928a843b06fad920f#
thanks 🔥
@whatanerd I think it maybe as simple as start caring, then act upon the things you see are wrong.
Also, solving problems is a creative skill not necessarily taught in school. Classically, the scientific paradigm is analytic: pick the problem space apart.
The solution space is something entirely different, and can be accessed through creative endeavours such as art and impro.
Yes, and.. and failing forward are excellent methods, typically dismissed by classic science thinking.
@whatanerd in a classic science approach, there's always more research needed. Well, guess what? We know enough. We are ruled by a bunch of self servin, money and resources grabbing toddlers. It's time we tell them NO in a way there's no two ways about it.
STOP IT!
We, the rest of us, are dying, or will be shortly.
Talk time is over.
@plantfeest I wouldn't equate them to toddlers, as that demeans toddlers (and being a toddler shouldn't be an insult). They are self-serving, greedy adult men who have been allowed to behave like this with no repercussions.
And it is time that the consequences came with interest.
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