WE DON'T WANT NO EDUCATION

Whenever President Obama mentions education he always uses it in the context of our country needing to make an investment in education if we want to remain competitive in the future. Yet across the country when faced with budget deficits most Republican governors and some Democratic governors like New York's Koch brothers financed Governor Cuomo insist that one of the first items to be cut is education.


There seems to be a glaring disconnect between the rhetoric of investing in education and the reality that most of those same states demanding draconian cuts from education have at the same time provided tax breaks to corporations and refuse to consider raising taxes on those who were able to afford to finance the political campaigns of those calling for cuts to education to pay for tax breaks to the wealthy.

Once again the Democrats lack the courage of their convictions by appeasing Republicans who cannot conceal their disdain for organized labor by claiming a crocodile tear concern for our children who will have to pay the debts some Democratic and most Republican politicians created with deregulation of the casinos on Wall St. and a state of perpetual war on drugs at home and terrorism abroad. In shameless and rank hypocrisy both parties declare that "everyone has to sacrifice".

Thomas Jefferson believed that democracy demanded an educated and informed electorate and that "a despotic government could restrain its citizens and deprive the people of their liberties only while they were ignorant". Yet by framing the current debate about education and its relation to budget deficits, teachers unions, tenure and pay based on student test results we continue to obscure and ignore the relationship between education and democracy.

To that end our current education system is an abject failure which produces nothing but test takers to qualify for a job with little or no job security, promotes the ignorance that is bliss and perpetuates a system no longer recognizable as democracy when the few prosper at the expense of the rest and neither Democrat or Republican really wants to improve an education system that challenges the status quo of our plutocracy where the Democratic Party supports a public education system that breeds conformity through standardized tests and produces college certified "workers" in an economy predicated on profit over people while the very existence of Republican Party ideology of ruling through fear and ignorance can ill afford an educated public.