To add to this: No Child Left Behind really was the death knell for America's education system. Changing public school's emphasis from critical thinking to memorization not only creates generations of "parrots" (those who just repeat information that's been spun and warped to fit the empire's narrative), but its obsession with grades and scores only prove that students did the work, not that they actually learned anything. Couple that with its punitive, draconian success metric for schools, lower-income schools and those communities they're in never stood a chance. There's a lot of uproar about neo-lib/neo-con labor and economic policies on this website, which there should be, but there seems to be zero awareness or discussion about how devastating this is for leftism in America. It becomes increasingly difficult (borderline impossible) to deprogram people who've been fed a steady diet of pro-capitalist, pro-white supremacy, and pro-patriarchal propaganda for 20+ years without any kind of real development for critical thinking, critical reading, and critical writing. The left is delusional if it thinks any kind of progress can be made in this country before fixing this, or maybe I'm just being hyperbolic--I don't really know anymore.
To add to this: No Child Left Behind really was the death knell for America's education system. Changing public school's emphasis from critical thinking to memorization not only creates generations of "parrots" (those who just repeat information that's been spun and warped to fit the empire's narrative), but its obsession with grades and scores only prove that students did the work, not that they actually learned anything. Couple that with its punitive, draconian success metric for schools, lower-income schools and those communities they're in never stood a chance. There's a lot of uproar about neo-lib/neo-con labor and economic policies on this website, which there should be, but there seems to be zero awareness or discussion about how devastating this is for leftism in America. It becomes increasingly difficult (borderline impossible) to deprogram people who've been fed a steady diet of pro-capitalist, pro-white supremacy, and pro-patriarchal propaganda for 20+ years without any kind of real development for critical thinking, critical reading, and critical writing. The left is delusional if it thinks any kind of progress can be made in this country before fixing this, or maybe I'm just being hyperbolic--I don't really know anymore.