Exclusive: American Education, Fear And Why You Should Be Worried

Oct 17, 2011 by James

In an increasingly volatile global environment, the desire to secure America’s future has never been more important, yet the decline of the education system has become an overlooked and seriously damaging trend with no end in sight. It is recognised that a good quality universal education system is paramount to a country’s ability to grow and remain competitive in the international arena as well as benefiting wider society. The stagnating education system has been hijacked by political and commercial interests. Modern educators now contend with a myriad of obstacles in their daily work that includes anything from inadequate pay, lack of resources and inattentive students to dealing with anti-intellectual politicians and corporations looking to ensnare young people into being future consumers. It is the influence of fear on education that has proven to be the most pernicious.

If one thing is clear it is that the United States of America is no longer the king of education and hasn’t been for sometime. That lengthy period of continually weaker education has had tremendous effects upon the country but one aspect that is seemingly overlooked is the relation between that lack of education and fear.

In 2010 the United States lost its top education rating and is now listed as “average”. That may sound OK but the U.S. is rated 14 out of 34 countries by the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, and it is just barely above Mexico in the number of 15 year olds enrolled in school. According to the survey if scores for reading, math and science improved by 25 points over the next 20 years it would result in a gain of 41 trillion dollars for the United States economy over the lifetime of the generation born in 2010, the OECD said. However the trend for America since the 1970′s has been gradual decline and we haven’t seen any consolidated effort to revitalize education as of yet.

How does declining education relate to fear?

An educated populous(one without religious or political bias) is able to understand and influence policies and the complexities of politics but the uneducated or poorly educated often aren’t able to fully grasp the reality of the situations and succumb easier to fear mongering. An advantage of a good education is that it enables free-minded enquiry which is in turn integral to things like advancements in sciences and being able to vote intelligently. The use of powerful emotions to manipulate a population is a blatant attempt to prevent people from doing the civic duty of holding governments accountable by attacking their ability to think critically.

What makes fear so powerful is that it relates to our basic human desire for security. Being under its influence causes an individual to act in the interests of survival; fear makes us turn away from things that are different to us and to cling to that which makes us feel safe. It is in this state of vulnerability that leaves us open to those who assume a position of strength and aggression. There are many examples of emotional manipulation of which the most relevant can be seen in the actions of the Bush administration during the aftermath of 9/11, leading up to events like the invasion of Iraq and the implementation of the Patriotic Act.

Going back even further, it was during the 1950′s that Americans last experienced the effects of a government that used fear as a weapon against them. Easily beaten down by the “Red Scare” ordinary people often accused and were accused by each other of being Communists without knowledge of whether they were guilty or not. Out of fear, no question other than “Are you a Communist?” was asked. Everyone from politicians to car salesmen was on the McCarthy bandwagon simply because they were scared and had been whipped into a frenzy by an over inflated sense of threat.

Oddly enough, it was the Communists that spurred America to heavily invest in science and education. America quickly rose to the top of the education standards, even became the standard, and the result you see is a populous who is able to understand and question government. Following the Cold War era, there rose a generation that was first seen to embrace progressive values that led to movements that changed the entire world. The same generation young people that actively demonstrating against the Vietnam War in the 1970′s was also the one that campaigned for civil rights in the 60s.

The government spiel was the same in Vietnam as it was for Korea “Communism is bad so we have to invade” but this time the people weren’t so easily distracted and inundated with fear. While Vietnam was highly televised and gory images were often on the nightly news many protestors and veterans believed that Communist Vietnam wasn’t a threat to American interests, something that wasn’t as readily stated about the Korean war. The younger generations questioned the government and eventually the government had to relent to the peoples demands to end the war. Could it be from the increase in education, focus on advanced levels of thought and the introduction of raw news information?

Since the end of the Vietnam war, which made the U.S government look terrible, education has been on the downward slide while fear has been on the rise. Perhaps the governments relationship with the people was so changed by Vietnam that the government decided to utilize an array of weaponry to prevent another Vietnam like reaction and to control public opinion better? The complete sanitation of media coverage of wars since then has been sanitized in comparison while fear and paranoia take center stage on the nightly news. Instead of being furious at the government for sending young men to die, people are now more focused on sensationalized news and it is no surprise that fear is seeping into American education.

Big business’ role in education

I’m no conspiracy theorist but I have noticed that the quality of education has definitely declined and not only are young people constantly distracted by confusing messages in the media, they are also enthralled by consumerism. A Bloggity Blog Reader

The first step towards helping the United States climb back up the education rankings to the top of the class would be to convince Americans “to make the choices needed to show that (they) value education more than other areas of national interest,” the OCED report said.This point raised is that Americans are being so distracted by consumerism that they don’t know or don’t care that themselves and generations after them won’t have decent education. They also haven’t grasped that a substandard education is one of the reasons America is in the mess that it is currently in. Now is also a good time to point out that the same corporations that are distracting today’s youth are also making large contributions to politicians. I’m sure a few of you have heard of the Koch brothers by now and they own a huge conglomerate of corporations that they use to fund all sorts of things including the Tea Party. They’re also using their vast sums of cash to destroy public education (Additional sources: Huffington Post, PFAW) in an effort to privatize it and cash in even more.

In relation to education, some businesses have even taken to directly targeting children in schools via sponsorship, free toys, learning materials and special events. This is an overlooked and very damaging trend. There is hardly anywhere a child can go to escape marketing messages. If education is commercialised to this extent, how can we expect to have the quality of citizenry that we need to vote intelligently and be discerning about what they see on the news? A Bloggity Blog Reader

In college education, the United States slipped from second to 13th between 1995 and 2008

The poor state of education does not mean that American people are stupid but it does make a strong contribution to an existing culture of ignorance in our society. While many are currently protesting on Wall Street it lacks a core purpose and therefore won’t achieve anything except making us look stupid. In fact it makes us look stupid now because the bailouts were how long ago? Why were they not protested then? Where is the focus and the drive to achieve something? While education isn’t the sole problem of the United States it has its tentacles in all of them and it seems that the upper levels of government have realized that but they haven’t acted. If Americans want to protest they should be protesting for a better education system because it will give them everything they want in the future. Fear is one of the symptoms of declining education, other than low literacy rates, however the more education declines the more fear becomes the key cause. Having the best education system in the world leads to an effective government, jobs for the people, and the ability to realize when the government is pulling the bag over your head.

Source: Guardian UK Source: AFP Source: Seattle PI Source: Media Awareness Network Source: Florida Courier Source: Medical News Today