Steven Singer has dreamed up a way to win Trump’s support for education: Declare a war on ignorance!
If Trump can be persuaded that education is part of national defense, he reasons, it will be amply funded.
“Here’s the plan: Trump wants to increase military spending by $54 billion. So we reclassify education as a branch of the military.
“Defense spending already tops $600 billion a year. Federal education spending is only about $70 billion.
“We could combine them and call it an increase in the military!
“I know what you’re thinking. If we do that, the armed forces are going to gobble up school funding. Not necessarily.
“They can’t spend all the money they get now! The waste, fraud and abuse in the military is legendary. Piles of money – literally piles of cash – simply go missing and no one knows where they went or is held responsible.
“But you’re right. We need a reason to prioritize some of that military spending for school kids.
“And there’s a simple solution: disaster capitalism.
“It’s the same way testing corporations and book publishers got the Bush and Obama administrations to invest in high stakes testing and Common Core. We simply make up a problem and then offer a solution that requires all this federal spending.
“I propose we start the following: A WAR ON IGNORANCE!
“Think of it.
“Our country is under attack from ignorance. We can’t let our children get left behind so we need to invest in the Education Forces. We need an army of teachers equipped with brand new military bases (formerly schools) that will protect us from foreign illiteracy. ISIS hates our science and math. Russia is jealous of our reading comprehension and historical acumen. China despises us for our creativity and scholarship.”
A cute satire, but it has already been done. In 1958, the Eisenhower administration used the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite the previous year to call for federal aid for math and science, foreign aid, and school construction. It was called the National Defense Education Act.
It always takes threats of a disaster to get education funding. In 1983, the National Commission of Excellence in Education warned that we were losing a war for global. economic supremacy because of a rising tide of mediocrity. But that didn’t produce new money, money, just new demands and standards.
In 2012, Joel Klein and Condaleeza Rice came up with a new twist on the disaster narrative. They claimed that public schools were so dreadful that they were a threat to national security. They said the way to save the nation was was with vouchers, charters, and the Common Core. For real!
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/07/do-our-public-schools-threaten-national-security/
Thomas Jefferson long ago declared that we should proclaim a “crusade against ignorance.”
Educated people will listen without false alarms. We need more of them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“A War on Ignorance?”
There never will be war
On ignorance per se
Because elite want more
Not less of that today
In the late 60s, students were refusing to go to classes in opposition to the Vietnam war, especially after Cambodia. I remember declaring that Nixon would love to keep us ignorant and running a counter movement to attend classes and use our free time to send post cards to fill senators’ mailboxes. Ignorance and fear are powerful tools for the dark side.
Nevertheless, this article makes a very valid point in an entertaining format that might get through to some pro privatizers.
Funny.
I’ve given up on “support” for public schools from DC. I think the best we can hope for is they grudgingly allow public schools to continue to exist. In a very real way they’re becoming increasingly irrelevant to public schools as they move more and more to an exclusive focus on privatization efforts. 90% of what they work on simply doesn’t apply to 90% of schools.
I read a lot on the ed reform side. It’s not an exaggeration to say nearly the only mention of public schools is “accountability”- testing schemes of some form or another.
They’ve completely abandoned the Common Core. Once the tests were in place they moved on to voucher promotion. It’s exactly what happened with NCLB. Public school parents were told there would be “support” for the Common Core and that it was “much, much more” than another testing scheme. Nope. It’s a testing scheme. They dumped it on public schools and moved on to the next craze.
And If Trump Troops Bought This Hook, Line & Sinker, I Would Respond…
How about we STOP declaring WAR on anyone or anything?
Same old language, same old thinking.
Which most frequently concludes with a Dead Head.
Quite literally Dead.
There is no creative energy in death, only expiration.
That is not what education is about.
Oh, it may look that way at present, in school after charter after reform initiative, where youth are barked at, marched about, fed zero nutrition food and drilled to the point of spirit-killing on the ever present tests.
But it only looks that way.
Because inside the nightmare, are ALIVE human beings who refuse to digest what is being forced down their throats, and that includes students, teachers and parents.
Be advised, we are now initiating a new vocabulary, with a fresh set of underlying democratic concepts and not a re-invigoration of your ashen, autocratic machine.
“Which most frequently concludes with a Dead Head”
Hey now been a Deadhead from the first time I heard them. In college when I delivered the Sunday morning weekend paper-starting at midnight on Saturday and into early Sunday morning, this was my go to eight track:
And you are the Sweet, Flowering and Flowing “Dead Heads”.
American Beauties for sure!
From the Dead to Bill Monroe. Listening to one of my all time bluegrass favorites that just came on my Pandora-“Jerusalem Ridge”. That’s some fiddlin!
Jerusalem Ridge. Listening right now. Really has a lot of Good Energy!
Bill Monroe’s memory of a childhood fox-hunting haven.
Speaking of fox hunting of a little different sort:
Bluegrass as it should be-acoustic, simple, one mic. Interesting, though that this song was originally a rock song by the Manfred Mann band. Didn’t know that until yesterday, always thought it was a bluegrass standard. One of my favorites!
Like video.
You are too much! Fox On The Run. A guy from Liverpool England wrote this song?! And then Bill Emerson the banjo player brought it into the bluegrass fold. Wow!
On a more serious note, I agree with your comments on using the term war as we do. But then again being at war and the concurrent malaise of intellect go hand in hand. As I wrote as I shared the following on facebook:
If you are a true American patriot, you will understand this analysis. If you are a true American Nationalist you will probably want to kill me for sharing this criticism of the modern moral swamp in which this country currently (and for all of my lifetime) resides.
“The nationalist,” George Orwell wrote in 1945, “not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/03/notes-on-empire-and-spiritual-death-a-recent-episode/
I’d be more comfortable shutting down the department of education. There are states intelligent enough to manage their education policies, and there are states which are not. The competition could cause a war on stupidity, which is almost as good as a war on ignorance.
Stupidity and war go hand in hand!
not sure I can finesse that into an optimistic thing….the level of stupidity would cause self destruction…..more likely just up the denial of reality.
Been there, done that, no need to remind everybody Energy Secretary James Watkins made it a National Security issue . Too bad he found the problem was not inside the schools but out.
“An(other) Inconvenient Truth” . So what is more likely, is that we see what we have just seen with environmental research. If you cut the budget to the NASA Earth Science program than the satellites that measure global warming go away and so does the problem
See how simple that is .
We can do the same with the Department of Labor. No more pesky unemployment numbers.,inflation , “who are you going to believe me or your own eyes”
Education we will claim great, great, success the biggest success ever seen, biggly once we eliminate NAEP
The leader will tell you all you have to know .
Joel, you just gave us an interesting idea: let’s eliminate the US military, and perhaps all the problems with fighting in the world may go away.
“Defense spending already tops $600 billion a year.”
which is more than 1/3 of the combined military budget of the whole world.
The $50 billion added on top of this would be just the beginning. Our enemies would increase, and by the end of the 4th year, it would be more like $100 billion.
“In 1958, the Eisenhower administration used the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite the previous year to call for federal aid for math and science, foreign aid, and school construction. It was called the National Defense Education Act.”
Yeah, art imitates life. 🙂
I have always been amazed that we have not “found” and declared war on Aliens.
The kind from outer space, not Mexico.
Given how advanced Aliens would have to be to reach earth and given the potential ramifications if Aliens ever took over earth, a War on Aliens would be an excuse for a perpetual defense budget that exceeded our current one by an order of magnitude or more.
In the 1951 The Day The Earth Stood Still, we did declare war on Advanced Outer Space Aliens and they melted our bloated military budgeted weapons with Robot Gort’s laser beam.
Long Live Professor Jacob Barnhardt.
We would not stand a chance against even bumbling Gilligan’s Island type aliens in their SS Minnow spaceship because the first thing they would easily knock out would be the very first thing they would encounter: our communications satellites on which our entire defense system depends.
The irony is that the more dependent we become on technology, the less safe we become, even from enemies here on earth.
And I thought, you are not seriously worried about aliens…
I beg to differ, poet: what did Reagan prepare us for with his Star Wars?
“Star Wars”
Ronny’s Raygun, SDI
Blasted missiles from the sky
In the world of Disneyland
Ronald had the upper hand
Isn’t it time to reframe “defense spending” as “attack spending”?
If Trump launched a war on Ignorance, he’d be declaring war on himself and most of his cabinet.
Excellent Point! They could, and really should, charter a fleet of very uncomfortable buses and have themselves delivered to….
Well, there are so many detention destinations that would deeply deserve this delivery.
And marmalade mussolini’s winning the war means, he committed suicide.
I know this is (at least partly) satire (I hope) but we really shouldn’t give them any ideas.
Indeed, they already adopted this idea back in the days of ANAR, but the consequences are not good at all. It leads to what I have called the Defense Industry Model (DIM) of funding education, a system ruled by major money contractors who buy politicians like so many minions, leveraging their investments for many times over kickbacks of public funds, all negotiated in hush-hush national security secret back rooms, with nothing but token and totally meaningless pretense of accountability to the People who pay and pay and pay the bill.
DIM has already been adopted (by Bush and Obama) for education: normally referred to as the charter industry model for progress (CHIMP)
Leaving all sarcasm aside: I believe sincerely, that education is a national and economic security issue. We must live with the results of our educational system. I work in high-tech, and there are not enough American engineers and other STEM professionals seeking work in the USA. Corporations must hire foreigners, through the H1-B visa program. I once worked a telecom project, and I was the only American on the project. The other engineers, were Indians, Turks, Filipinos. etc.
Our nation should be stressing STEM for our youth, and stop churning out so many graduates with degrees in Recreation and Italian Literature.
Looking back to history, we did not have enough trained Americans to build the atomic bomb. We had to get Fermi (Italian), Einstein (German), Szilard (Hungarian), and Edward Teller,etc. to assemble the team of engineering talent.
Our economic and military security will depend on an educated, talented work force for the work of the 21st Century.
If we fail to teach and train our youth, in the proper skills of the new economy, all of us will suffer.
I was not aware of a glut of degrees in Recreation (a huge industry, by the way) and Italian Literature. Professor Hal Saltzman of Rutgers University has written often that there is no shortage of STEM graduates. This is a myth perpetrated by industry to excise outsourcing to countries where STEM labor is cheap
And don’t forget the space program. Without Germany’s Werner Von Braun, and the other German scientists, we would not have made it to the moon.