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Friday, July 23, 2010

The plan to dumb down America is proceeding swimmingly
Posted by Jill | 5:22 AM
The plan to eliminate the middle class is proceeding nicely:

Adding to a drumbeat of concern about the nation’s dismal college-completion rates, the College Board warned Thursday that the growing gap between the United States and other countries threatens to undermine American economic competitiveness.

The United States used to lead the world in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. Now it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.

“The growing education deficit is no less a threat to our nation’s long-term well-being than the current fiscal crisis,” Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, warned at a meeting on Capitol Hill of education leaders and policy makers, where he released a report detailing the problem and recommending how to fix it. “To improve our college completion rates, we must think ‘P-16’ and improve education from preschool through higher education.”

While access to college has been the major concern in recent decades, over the last year, college completion, too, has become a leading item on the national agenda. Last July, President Obama announced the American Graduation Initiative, calling for five million more college graduates by 2020, to help the United States again lead the world in educational attainment.

Conservative so-called "values" are working exactly as planned: If you choke off education to all but the very wealthy, you create a population that is unable to think critically and has no skills. This makes for people who will accept utter horseshit as just an alternative point of view to factual information, who will believe that despite the preponderance of white males at the head tables of the corporations that actually run things in this country, that whites are being besieged by minorities, who can't handle science that flies in the face of the idea that a man in the sky created earth in six days just as it exists today, and most importantly, who are willing cannon fodder. An uneducated population can't handle information society jobs, which allows those heading the corporations to send them all overseas, to countries where education IS still a priority.

Meanwhile, at the local level, we have Republican governors like Chris Christie trying to balance their budgets on the backs of the public education system, preferring instead the scam of giving poor families vouchers for private schools that won't accept their children and cost twenty times more than the value of any vouchers the government will provide. Because once they destroy the public school system in this country and college is unaffordable, the race to the bottom can really heat up.

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