Keep Calm and Carry On

The phrase and its cognates, ironic and otherwise, embody essentially what thinking parents, educators, and concerned citizens must do now that rightwing conservatives have enlarged their stranglehold on the body politic: Keep calm and carry on. This is not the time to slacken efforts to educate not only students in school but also the general public. Centrists and left-leaning liberals have been failing on both counts, and the failure cannot be laid entirely at the feet of the right. Public education is being co-opted, but those who believe in public education as a cornerstone of American democracy have yet to mount a successful resistance.

Beginning in the 1980s the right has consistently coupled denigration of public education with the promotion of nothing less than an ideology of ignorance. As I have suggested in earlier writing, the denigration had its foundation in falsehood, the vastly flawed and deceptive A Nation At Risk report, which set forth a wholly misleading notion that the public schools were—and are—failing. This label of failure has stuck, largely because of repetition in the face of evidence to the contrary. Lies repeated often enough begin to sound like truth, regardless how preposterous. A great many educators, parents, and members of the public, including elected officials, who ought to know better have been lured into the lie and subsequent actions to "fix" the public schools, all of which have resulted in the current state of chaos.

Maintenance of democracy depends on an educated public, and so it follows that it is necessary in order to move the United States toward its current governance status as a corporate oligarchy that the right, those duped by or in the pay of the oligarchs, must foster an ideology of ignorance. Rejection of science—climate change, evolution—is a manifestation. Mass propaganda, often touted as legitimate news, lifts a page from the playbook of every anti-democratic movement in history. Lie to people using words they want to hear and they will do the oligarchs' bidding, no matter how contrary it may be to their self-interest. 

The goal of the ideology of ignorance ultimately is to destroy public education, to sufficiently undermine the people's faith in the people's schools that they will eagerly embrace a balkanized system that resegregates the schools and ensures that socioeconomic status will continue to be the basic determinant of educational success or failure. Increasing wealth disparity in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is maintained in part by ensuring that schools continue to sort rather than educate, a process that is strengthened by the overuse and misuse of standardized tests. Such testing does not, and never will, improve education. It does, however, strengthen a class system of haves and have nots in which "have not" means "never will have."

What to do? Keep calm and carry on is a start, but it's not enough. Here are a couple of ideas. First, let's stop teaching to the test. It merely creates students who are good at taking tests but haven't really learned anything except to hate school. Everyone is better served by a rich curriculum from which satisfactory test scores are a natural outcome. Teaching a rich curriculum is even more essential in the face of limited resources caused by politicians siphoning off public funds to line the corporate pockets of test purveyors and charter school managers, both of which have demonstrably abused the public trust.

Second, let's work harder to educate our citizenry about the necessity for public education that raises people up rather than keeping them down. Public schools should strive to equalize opportunity, not merely provide a source of cheap labor for the corporate grist mills. The absence of this truly public education effort perpetuates the ideology of ignorance and ensures the dominance of the corporate oligarchy as effectively as gerrymandering, voter suppression, and big-money political campaigns.

It's all well and good to sit back with the view that the oligarchs have sown the seeds of their own destruction, and eventually the downtrodden will rise up, a la the French Revolution, and start whacking off a few of the economic aristocrats' heads. (Ironically, the right has ensured through lax gun laws that the downtrodden will be well armed.) But I for one would rather we prove that education, which we claim can be a powerful force for democracy, actually can be used to that end.