Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
—Nelson Mandela
Defend and support your local schools, teachers, colleges, students.
Winning the long-term battle of securing the future.
A well-educated public would never have elected Trump in the first place. A public able to tell the difference between lies and truth, between fact and fake news, would never have allowed themselves to be taken in by such openly corrupt politicians. Education is the safeguard of a democracy, because it is the only thing that gives people the tools they need to defend themselves from the seductive bullshit of a demagogue.
Education takes work, both from students and teachers, but also the public at large. I was a high school science teacher, and I know how much of a struggle it can be to get kids interested in learning. Sometimes you have to juggle, tap dance, and set something on fire just to keep a classroom’s attention. But the thing is, humans like to learn once we overcome that initial laziness. It’s fun.
Defending, and strengthening, education is the key to throwing off the shackles of the bullshit artist. That is why Trump picked Betsy DeVos, every public school teacher’s worst nightmare, to head the nation’s education program. She is also the nightmare of any student who has student loans. She reversed a ban Obama put in place on exorbitantly high fees for defaulted student loans, and she is against student loan forgiveness. DeVos has no experience as an educator, instead she has experience as an anti–public school lobbyist, and being the sibling of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater.
This disastrous reality-show administration is built upon a pyramid scheme of lies. That’s really all they got. It is essentially the BS of Fox News taken to its logical endpoint. A society that no longer can tell the difference between fact and fiction will always choose the fiction that pleases it the most, no matter how ridiculous and dangerous that fiction is. The antidote is media literacy. The prescription is critical thinking. The cure is a well-funded public education.
How about affordable education, for everybody? From first grade through college. Imagine an America where all public colleges and universities are free. There is no reason that can’t be the case. It’s absurd that people act like free tuition for college in America is a totally radical idea. College is free in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Kenya, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Morocco, Norway, Panama, Poland, Scotland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and Uruguay. There is no good reason America shouldn’t be on this list.
What we need is a populace of Americans that knows how to read, a population of Americans that knows how to reason, how to think straight, how to understand science, how to read books, write books, how to debate, and how to tell when someone is feeding them a lie. How can anyone disagree with that?
None of this should even be a partisan issue! A nation of smart, critical thinkers should include conservatives and progressives, Democrats and Republicans, traditionalists and Marxists, and socialists, and anarchists, and evangelicals, whatever, every kind of -ism and -ist, all should be allowed to debate, but it should be an educated debate.