CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS #4
Why Doesn’t US Public Education Tell the Truth About Warming?
Harry Vandergriff,
when he was Superintendent of the Fayetteville Public Schools, wrote a letter
to the parents informing them of the dismissal of classes for Business
Education Day. The event was sponsored
by that great institution for critical thinking, the Public Schools/Chamber of
Commerce complex. “The purpose of
Business Education Day is to give the teaching staff of the schools a better
understanding of the business community.
They will visit with various business and industrial plants…and receive
information concerning the operation….This visit should increase the teachers’
knowledge of and concern for the various companies of this community and assist
them in the teaching of their students.”
I’d like to give
two citizens a crack at the public schools’ chumminess with the ruling economic
system (the early twentieth-century syntax can’t hurt but just might cause us
to pause and think).
First, Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America.
“The
place in men’s esteem once filled by church and state is now held by pecuniary
traffic, business enterprise. So that
the graver issues of academic policy which now tax the discretion of the
directive powers, reduce themselves, In the main, to a question between the claims
of science and scholarship on the one hand and those of business principles and
pecuniary gain on the other.”
Next Jack
London, writing about “the capitalistic bias of the universities and common
schools” in The Iron Heel.
“It was
a logical and crushing indictment of the whole system of education that
developed in the minds of the students only such ideas as were favorable to the
capitalistic regime, to the exclusion of all ideas that were inimical and
subversive.”
How do
Veblen and London relate to the climate calamity and the Green New Deal?
For the past
40 years we have witnessed the decline of the New Deal and the rise by 2016 of
the now far-right Republican Party to control the White House, Congress, and
the Supreme Court. What else has been
happening during this time period as the direct result of the neo-liberal
economic system exalted by that Party? Military
spending has continued to increase while taxes have continued to decrease for
the wealthy. And the planet’s atmosphere has heated and absorbed moisture so much that
our civilization is imperiled, yet the temperature continues to rise.
TAKE ACTION
Be active politically.
Support candidates for office who meaningfully oppose the continued rise
in global temperature. Check out the Green New Deal.
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