Reply #70: Fascinating thread-- your topic brought out very insightful replies

[omega minimo]

There was a definite shift in education-- and the commonly held notion of what education is for-- during the “Reagan Era.” Since that time, we have become a much more, pardon the expression, mercenary society in many ways. A nation of spectators.

The destruction of the felt notion of the public trust and commonwealth is one of the big payoffs for TPTB and one of the biggest dangers for the public, IMHO.

Allow me to echo the following from your posts:

“The corporate powers-that-be thus concluded the best ways to combat socialism are to discredit intellectuals and dilute education itself: i.e., dumbing down.
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“As the dumbing down has continued, so has the shift further to the right.
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“The sullen refusal to acknowledge our country's dire problems -- all of them products of the ongoing corporate effort to suck the entire nation down a socioeconomic black hole and spit it out as the newest Third World-style oligarchy -- is unquestionably the greatest and most ruinous of the multitude of problems we face.
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“But the vast majority of U.S. students are not educated at all: they are merely brainwashed to be compliant little corporate automatons --allowed only the most minimal knowledge and given maximal conditioning and practice in vital corporate-workplace reflexes like conformity, back-stabbing, brown-nosing, ratting out "trouble-makers" and absolute obedience to authority.”

...hence the mid-90’s popularity of “Who Moved My Cheese?”

Also, for those who don't feel they are "compliant little corporate autmatons" there remains the problem of the "spectator society." Many "well-educated," well-meaning folks who will sit and watch a crime or other tragedy through the window or the windshield or the sunglasses and not do anything.
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“But the fear instilled in the corporate establishment by the advent of the Counterculture brought that beneficent process to a sudden and jarring halt, and the entrance-exam scores resumed the decline that had been noted after World War II and has continued ever since the Kennedy interregnum.

“interregnum”? I’ll have to look that up. But I can grok the CONTEXT!!!!!
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“...dumbing down is deliberate. Not only that, but U.S. mass media has been afflicted by an exactly parallel process: a further argument against the notion the process is inertial rather than deliberate. But it is probably most often deliberate in the same way the aftermath of Katrina was deliberate: the establishment of basic policies which then have (predictable) results that can nevertheless be dismissed as random.”

And that dumbing-down and dangerous dis-association created the lack of American outrage over blatant genocide on TeeVee. These are the tests that Americans fail to pass over and over and over-- every subsequent time they know they can go FURTHER via MORE "basic policies which then have (predictable) results that can nevertheless be dismissed as random.”
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“Another is the near-total ignorance of celestial navigation resulting from dependence on Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) systems -- such techniques (and the principles underlying them) should be taught as an intellectual exercise even if they seem redundant.”

And one dares not bring up the possibility that a grieving bride might experience spending the night with an honor guard and the casket containing her beloved, WITHOUT THE PRESENCE OF A COMPUTER (or cameras).
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