greetings americans, it an honest question.
Outside of america i constantly see, especially recently as your elections are coming up that…well, it looks like a clownshow?
Your recent two contenders where a hugely dept orange clown who can barely keep a coherent thought advertising a product in the whitehows, who had to have his name constantly mention when being talked to or he will be disinterested.
The other one was a senile old fossil who couldnt even say a single sentence without his dementia kicking in.
Now you have trump again as a runner up and he seems so openly incompetently corrupt its almost funny, than we have the senile man who (to my extremely limited knowledge) got replaced by this kamala woman because he was too old, said woman seems to be at least present in mind and appears to see trump as what he really is, a manchild (the famous clip of her basically laguhing at him)
Like, are outside views are just so vehemently skewed by news, people and the like? Or am i just grossly misinformed?
it is as batshit as it appears.
But for us at least, it is quite sinister as well, since Trump it quite literally attempting to instill himself as a dictator to avoid prison, and this is being facilitated by white nationalists, religious zealots, tech billionaires, and an easily decieved under-educated populace that are acting against their own interests.
this election is definitely moving “fund public schools” up on my priority list of things I care about. It’s now barely second to Climate Change quite possibly the top thing, because these idiots vote and we need the votes to deal with climate change.
20+ years ago, George Carlin discussed public education.
“Just think of the average american voter. These are some dumb motherfuckers right here. Some dumb motherfuckers. And as dumb as the average one is…HALF OF THEM ARE EVEN DUMBER THAN THAT!!! Some dumb mother fuckers in this country. Some dumb mother fuckers…”
And in case you were hoping he had a positive ending to that set, he didn’t. His overall point was that our government is not being held back by the voters. There is no secret set of competent politicians who could just fix things if they got voted in. This is what we voted in, because this was whats available. Don’t look for it to get better. This is what our election system produces from the pool of candidates it has available.
Garbage in, garbage out. It’s just that simple.
So, while I DO agree that a HARD focus needs to be placed on education, it’s not going to help the voting process. It’s not a issue of dumb voters voting for dumb people. It’s an issue of trash candidates being our only options…and at this point, it’s getting to a point of intentional facism.
Like I said. Trash in, trash out.
A better education will, at least partially, solve the problem… in the long run, of course… but the long run is like 20, 30 years from now. Things might get a lot worse by then and beyond fixing.
Things perpetuate and there is no fixing this. The real issue is capitalism and money. You can’t have an incentive to care about the people and how they are raised and educated if the only true incentive in this system is money. There is money in education, of course, but there is so much more from taking advantage of stupid people, regardless who does it (big tech, politicians, fast food chains…).
I disagree.
It’s not that public education makes people progressive, though.
It’s that there’s now tons of poorly educated people who completely lack critical thinking skills.
You can see that in the resurgence of conspiracy theories like Flat Earth, and some of the antivax theories. (Microchips that can’t be found?)
Conservatives believe the shit people tell them because they’re too stupid to be critical of it. Like when trump tells them immigrants are eating pets, or that a wall is going to solve all the immigration problems; or that the economy some how suffers and it’s all their fault.
They’re uncritical and unable to reason out how self-evident his lies are.
We need that back. It won’t solve our problems, no. But if we’re going to solve them, we need people that are capable of discourse beyond macros.
I don’t know how yu do this when so much school funding is local. I’ve always lived in areas that valued education agiin and we’re willing to pay for it. However no matter how much my taxes increase, it won’t help those kids in places with less money or not willing to invest in it.
It’s a much bigger ask to turn school funding into a national thing.
In Vermont, they passed legislation that distributed school funding equally across the entire state, so that impoverished areas would have just as good of an education as the wealthy ones. People bitched about their taxes going up, but otherwise have been no downsides.
I’m not entirely sure how i feel about that: spending the same on educating all students is surely a good thing and I’m sure this benefitted more than it hurt. However, the punishment for deciding to spend even more seems inappropriate. If I disagree that we’re spending enough on education and can get my neighbors to agree, but not the state, why shouldn’t we be able to spend more on our kids, until the rest of the state is persuaded.
It’s not just about fairly allocating spending per student and fairly shouldering the tax burden, but politics. Some towns want to spend more on education
If you and your neighbors have the means, then you could opt for private tutoring if you feel your public school is not adequate.