The Strategic Importance of Crushing the Teachers' Unions

A third level topic here continues to be the importance of education. We've seen it in the Fleet and we see it at parties and family gatherings - blazing examples of the failure of the US public education system.

With rare exceptions, the public education system and its social promotion and social experimentation ethos has created a mass of ignorant and mal-educated citizens. Poorly educated voters is a cancer to any republic.

Long gone are the public education systems where, even in a poor Mississippi county, Mother Salamander could get an education that would lead her to the front of her generation of women in her field.

We could go on and on ... but let's look at where we are now. One of the first places in the last 40-years that the professional educators decided to gut was geography. That, along with history and the classics, are the foundation for understanding how the world works and where a nation such as ours should comport itself.

Why does something as simple as geography matter? Kyle Dropp at WaPo outlines the problem quite well for us. To make it extra sexy for your humble blogg'r, he talks statistics like he knows it;

On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part ... Survey respondents identified Ukraine by clicking on a high-resolution world map, shown above. We then created a distance metric by comparing the coordinates they provided with the actual location of Ukraine on the map. ... About one in six (16 percent) Americans correctly located Ukraine, clicking somewhere within its borders. Most thought that Ukraine was located somewhere in Europe or Asia, but the median respondent was about 1,800 miles off — roughly the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles — locating Ukraine somewhere in an area bordered by Portugal on the west, Sudan on the south, Kazakhstan on the east, and Finland on the north.
...
Information, or the absence thereof, can influence Americans’ attitudes about the kind of policies they want their government to carry out and the ability of elites to shape that agenda. Accordingly, we also asked our respondents a variety of questions about what they thought about the current situation on the ground, and what they wanted the United States to do. Similarly to other recent polls, we found that although Americans are undecided on what to do with Ukraine, they are more likely to oppose action in Ukraine the costlier it is — 45 percent of Americans supported boycotting the G8 summit, for example, while only 13 percent of Americans supported using force.

However, the further our respondents thought that Ukraine was from its actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily. Even controlling for a series of demographic characteristics and participants’ general foreign policy attitudes, we found that the less accurate our participants were, the more they wanted the U.S. to use force, the greater the threat they saw Russia as posing to U.S. interests, and the more they thought that using force would advance U.S. national security interests; all of these effects are statistically significant at a 95 percent confidence level. Our results are clear, but also somewhat disconcerting: The less people know about where Ukraine is located on a map, the more they want the U.S. to intervene militarily.

After the government decided it needed to put me on a bus for two hours a day so someone in Washington DC could experiment with people's lives, I was about seven my Mom and her significant intellect went to work full time so I could go to private school, and I was a latchkey my entire youth, so ... yea - I have a bit of attitude on the topic. I didn't have a mother at home because in the Space Age, our educational system couldn't produce what she had in the the middle of a World War.

I still hold most, not all, public school districts with the utmost contempt with their layers of bureaucracy, teaching school theories that fail, social promotion, and warped priorities. The ones who are more interested in protecting union members than educating the next generation of voters, they hold the power in most areas - forcing those who can to take what little disposable income they have, or sending mothers back in to the workforce, just so their kids can have a good education.

Ignorance gets people killed - and when ignorance masses, nothing good ever happens.