Shadow1980 said:
Ignoring the not-so-subtle mocking for now, but we don't get to pick and choose what our tax dollars go towards like it's a buffet. That's never been how it works, and it will never work that way. You tax dollars will always go into a general fund. "I don't use it, so why should my taxes pay for it?" is not a valid argument. For example, I've heard people ask why they have to pay taxes for schools when they don't have any children or their children are all grown. Yes. Why indeed? Why shouldn't the government allocate some of its budget to fund educational facilities so we don't have a society full of ignorant people? You would think the answer is obvious. A functional democracy requires an informed electorate. They need to know more than just basic literacy and mathematics. They need to not just memorize but actually comprehend basic facts about science, history, economics, civics, geography, and so on. Business interests and religious authoritarians are directly threatened by education, and that's why they've spent decades undermining it in one way or another (and what is the GOP besides an unholy fusion of the most base, atavistic impulses of capitalism and fundamentalism?). In regards to business interests, to quote George Carlin "They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago." To add to that, they don't want a population that understands how the physical world works, because the capitalists' business model requires people to be unaware that negative externalities even exist in the first place, as the tobacco, chemical, and fossil fuel industries demonstrate. I mean, if your business model is dependent on getting as many people as possible smoking as many cigarettes as possible, scientists discovering that smoking is really bad for public health isn't exactly good for business. As for the religious authorities, throughout history they have likewise felt that science, archaeology, and other fields of study directly threaten their authority. Science has long had a knack for telling people things they don't want to hear, like "The Earth isn't the center of the universe," "The Earth is billions of years old," and "Humans share a common ancestry with all other living things." That's because they can no longer treat their holy book as literally true front and back and point to this or that passage to settle any and all arguments. That's why they've spent decades in just the U.S. trying to undermine the teaching of evolution, among other bullshit they do. When they say "schools shouldn't be indoctrination centers," they're lying. They absolutely want schools to be indoctrination centers. They just want to be the ones indoctrinating people. I wouldn't expect anything less from Christian fundamentalists, given their historical track record going back literal centuries. They want every child to be good little Christian soldiers who never question the Bible and their preachers, because it's for the good of their souls and the soul of the nation. There's a reason why there's supposed to be a wall of separation of church and state, because whenever organized religion captures the levels of state power, the result is always disastrous. If someone wants to believe the Earth is 6000 years old or that gay people are possessed by demons or whatever, that's their prerogative, but those beliefs don't have a place in public schools. Curricula should be determined by educators and experts in the subject material, not some clueless parent who spends half the day watching Fox News being told that there's nefarious communist conspiracies lurking behind every corner trying to turn their kids into transgender Marxists or whatever. Which brings me to the CPB. There's a very good reason for non-profit government-funded educational television to exist. But the problem is that impartial educational television doesn't mesh well with business interests. At the end of the day, every commercial television network is seen by the executives as a vehicle with which to sell ad space. They care about ratings and profits. We did once have major educational cable networks, but they all met the same fate as executives saw that reality TV was a huge cash cow. That's why "The Learning Channel" simply became "TLC" and became an outlet for slop like "Honey Booboo," "17 Kids and Counting," and "My 600-pound Life." Doesn't exactly leave much room for well-researched scientific or historical programs, now does it? Outlets like PBS are important. But conservatives are threatened by it because they are threatened by education. That's why they want Big Bird replaced by Dennis Prager's slop in schools. They believe everything must serve the dual purposes of A) generating as much profit as humanly possible and B) producing a legion of barely-literate people incapable of critical thought and that are little more than blindly nationalistic worker drones who focus all of their frustrations on some marginalized group (typically immigrants, racial & religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ people) that serves as a scapegoat. |
Gonna make it short, most people are not interested in it (anymore), the question is if the democrats would even bring it back if they are back in power, it is more a symbolic issue. TLC became slop because viewers are more interested in the slop. This is an issue everywhere, Tiktok has an option to show you more STEM educational related content but people barely turn it on because they are more interested in AI Slop. Education being a mess is a Bipartisan and partly cultural issue.
