Enemies of Education?

What a phrase!

How ridiculous to assume that people would actually want to slaughter, gut, and devour education because they regard it as their "enemy."

A regime that depends upon total control would want to do so; I understand that. If you want to preserve power, it is important to prevent people from thinking too much. Keep them from thinking, and you have it made. Don't educate them; just train them to do work. In our country, how many politicians do you actually see behaving as though they believe such a thing?

Some few of them, it is true, seem to regard the majority of citizens to be ignoramuses, incapable of real thinking. Of course, if they believed such assumptions, it would be perfectly natural to see why they would want to destroy education, particularly public education. After all, what is the sense of wasting tax dollars trying to educate the uneducable? But in this great nation certainly, most politicians don't harbor such attitudes about common people, do they?

Admittedly, a few politicians, those who want the most labor for the smallest wages, for example, appear to possess such a perspective. You can observe as they befriend the ignoramuses and do their best to fool them into submission, warning them of treacherous intellectual elites who are constantly trying to fool them into compliance. "Framing the debate" in this manner helps them to maintain a certain amount of aversion to education among the ignorant. But really, the number of politicians among us who seek to deceive people in that way must be exceedingly small, must it not?

Now, big money moguls who don't produce wealth, but who possess the symbol of wealth (money), have very powerful reasons to preserve an uninformed class of American voters. They want most of the ignoramuses to respect the symbol of wealth more than the work that creates true wealth. Buying low and selling high must not be perceived as "fleecing" (even though that's exactly what it is).  Buying and selling is nothing more than buying and selling! It's just a person's right, and perfectly legal. If it can be done profitably, such a skill should be advanced as a mere "job," and perhaps even one to be admired at that.

People who behave and believe in those oversimplifications and myths would wish to maintain them, of course, and would certainly like to see education, particularly public education, dead if possible, but that crowd in a nation such as ours, one would think, must be few in number.

They do seem to make a lot of noise at times, however; you can hear them every once in a while complaining about "rising tide[s] of mediocrity" while they're engaged in cutting educational funding - to ensure that the "tide" continues to rise, apparently! But we all trust - do we not? - that those selfish, greedy Americans must be a rare breed in a nation as highly focused on human rights as ours.

Those who routinely play on fears to build their powers would naturally want to weaken education as much as possible. Educated people are the first to step forward and question fear-mongering. When a rascal is trying to get constituents to guard his special interests against people who favor the general welfare, he or she will definitely find it advantageous to spread fear, and an ignorant crowd is the most fertile ground for such an endeavor. But how many powerful Americans would actually do that - foster ignorance and fear, calling their stream of misleading statements a "public [educational] service," just to preserve power?

Most of us can accept that the concept of "enemies" is a comforting one, to be sure. Life is so much easier when you have someone to blame and denigrate when they disagree with you. Defend the right of wealthy people to gather even more wealth; insist upon many, many low wage jobs; keep desperate people desperate, but be friendly with them; keep ignorant people ignorant, and be especially friendly with them. Then, as people step forward to question your motives, demonize them! Define them as enemies - you're free to do so in a free nation as ours - and your ignoramus friends will follow your lead!

Naturally, that doesn't happen in America. Oh, yes, it looks a little like it does at times, but surely, Americans are truly not enemies of education, are they?