Quote:
Originally Posted by DudeImBetter
DV if there's one thing I've taken away from your summaries on what animates the GOP base it's that we absolutely must rethink public education and emphasize the **** out of critical thinking in high school (among many, many other things).
Not so sure. That may help on the fringes but the Baby Boomer whites and others fueling the Trump movement are not universally uneducated and relative to the past, they're far more educated than white Americans of prior generations who were in many ways far less openly hostile to blacks or at least weren't manifesting so much paranoia, resentment and anger and then acting on it politically.
I've said my piece on this but I think so long as we continue to live segregated and the growth of income inequality persists without a large accompanying economic boom, I'm not confident even small growth or education or critical thinking or anything like that is going to solve this.
I've also said my piece on the parallels between the transition from rural agrarianism to industrialized manufacturing economy and the transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era in the late 18th/early 19th century is very much like our own times with significant upheaval in the labor market and accompanying social and cultural changes, but one key, critical difference is that urbanization in the early 20th century promoted a certain form of white integration but Jim Crow persisted to keep blacks an underclass, and the Great Migration of blacks out of the south didn't come until later.
So a lot of the social factors that produced the Progressive Era which lead to meaningful changes in policies that satisfied populists and leftists alike, and solved the gridlock and extreme partisanship and strife of the late 19th/early 20th century (in some ways which were very exceptional and unique to America) don't look like they're on the immediate horizon for us.
So while I wish we could just school right-wingers into submission, I'm skeptical that in and of itself is the quick solution. I've also remarked at length numerous times is that angry whites are totally hip to that and they've often made schools the #1 battleground to maintain their segregated, special advantage in American society and so schooling alone without meaningful integration and addressing problems with wealth inequality might perpetuate the problem, not solve it. White parents fight hard over schools so simply trying to dump money into education and incentive more education may just result in endless supply of more literate vDare bloggers with far better syntax, command of the language, coherence and literary references but just as much anger and paranoia and dislike of outsiders that they never interact with or live near. Like just as a simple and obvious political example, Africakaners in South Africa improved their education levels along with the rest of the west during the middle 20th century AND instituted more segregation and deeper forms of apartheid.
Last edited by DVaut1; 03-14-2017 at 11:13 AM.