VetOfTheSeasDown with gym class!
voidsignalsigh… how can one be so dumb?
DagwoodIIIRealistically, schools were designed to provide a trainable workforce that could read well enough to learn new tasks and do enough math to make sure the factory machines were properly maintained.
Many people these days don’t read a single book after they get out of school. The AIs are just making things happen faster.
From a broader perspective “school” has been a thing since before Socrates and humanity pendulums between “a broad education is the foundation for a strong populace” and “we need a giant pool of disposable labor”.
And the US public education philosophy is similarly inconsistent. At the earliest it was Puritans who wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible for themselves and so pushed for literacy. At times it has been guided specifically by the business economy but it’s inaccurate to say that schools were designed to produce factory workers.
Yeah, hell modern universal public education was partly a result of the working class fighting like hell for it
On the other hand, a lot of good ideas ended up getting co-opted to serve the State.
I don’t think the IWW was planning on ahving kids learn the Pledge of Allegiance.
Nor did the inventor of the pledge expect it to be used for anti communism.
But ultimately I don’t want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the public education system goes away the proletariat will suffer for it. Fascists are attempting to move the Overton window towards that. The solution as I see it is re-examining, reimagining, and reforming public education to serve the masses. But a big part of that is reconvincing the proletariat that education is valuable in its own right rather than just as job training.
Hear, hear!