Education - Fascism, The Future of Indiana

 I have written maybe too much about education. I think it's necessary for a democratic state. My argument has been it is more helpful in preventing crime than long prison terms.

Counterpunch's Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom by Henry Giroux supports my first thesis, and does much, much better than I think I have done.

The call for a socialist democracy demands the creation of visions, ideals, institutions, social relations, and pedagogies of resistance that enable the public to imagine a life beyond a social order in which racial-class-and-gender-based violence produce endless assaults on the social contract, welfare state, immigrants, women, Black and brown people, the environment, and democracy itself. Such a challenge must address an assault by the savagery of neoliberal capitalism on the public and civic imagination, mediated through the elevation of war, militarization, violent masculinity, and the politics of disposability to the highest levels of power. Neoliberal capitalism is a death-driven machinery that infantilizes, exploits, and devalues human life and the planet itself.

Understood properly, neoliberal capitalism is a form of necropolitics, or more specifically, a type of gangster capitalism that is utterly criminogenic. Gangster capitalism thrives on the silence of the oppressed and the complicity of those seduced by its power. As an educational project, it trades in civic illiteracy, historical amnesia, and depoliticization. One consequence is that as market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing, along with the educated citizens without which there is no democracy.

Any viable pedagogy of resistance needs to create the educational and pedagogical visions and tools to produce a radical shift in consciousness, capable of both recognizing the scorched earth policies of gangster capitalism and the twisted fascist ideologies that support it. This shift in consciousness cannot occur without pedagogical interventions that speak to people in ways in which they can recognize themselves, identify with the issues being addressed, and place the privatization of their troubles in a broader systemic context.

We live at a time in which a scourge of fascism emerges from both the political arena and the powerful right-wing media, such as Fox News. Fascist politics thrives on disimagination machines that normalize relations of power, infantilize individuals, and reproduce oppressive ideologies masking as commonsense. As C. Wright Mills has made clear, in an age when the social disappears and everything is privatized and commodified, it is difficult for individuals to translate private into public issues and see themselves as part of a larger collective capable of mutual support. The erosion of public discourse and the onslaught of a culture of manufactured ignorance ‘allows the intrusion of criminality into politics.’ As theorists as diverse as John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Maxine Greene have observed, democracy cannot exist without an educated citizenry. Wendy Brown states rightly that democracy ‘may not demand universal political participation, but it cannot survive the people’s wholesale ignorance of the forces shaping their lives and limning their future’.

Education has always been the substance of politics, but it is rarely understood as a site of struggle over agency, identities, values, and the future itself. Unlike schooling, education permeates a range of corporate-controlled apparatuses that extend from the digital airways to print culture. These have become under the GOP reign of terror updated sites of apartheid pedagogy. What is different about education today is not only the variety of sites in which it takes place, but also the degree to which it has become an element of organized irresponsibility and a prop of white supremacy and gangster capitalism. This is clear in the policies of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others whose attack on public and higher education aims at producing modes of civic illiteracy, modeled on a flight from critical thinking, self-reflection, and meaningful forms of solidarity. This is a fascist model of education in which book burning, censorship, and the racial cleansing of history merge with an attempt to turn public and higher education into right-wing, white supremacist indoctrination centers operating under the power of state control.

Read the article in full, he extends his points further and in detail I have not acquired. I want to point out what is happening closer to home.

Indiana Daily Student published Indiana ranks 28th nationally for child well-being, and reports:

Additionally, the report states Indiana high school students who have legitimately considered suicide increased by almost 28% in 2021. The report stated many of these students identify as a part of the LGBTQ community. Of those students, 65% who identified as LGBTQ considered suicide, according to IYI.  

Eighty-point one percent LGBTQ students high school kids felt sad every day for at least 2 weeks in 2021 compared to their heterosexual classmates, which only thirty-eight-point seven percent those students felt sad every day for at least 2 weeks, Haynes said. 

The Indiana General Assembly is doing exactly what Mr. Giroux describes as a fascistic education.

Meanwhile, Indiana Democrats push back according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle's Indiana budget should increase funding for public schools — not vouchers — Democrats say:

Although Indiana schools could see increases to foundation grants — the basic grant for every student — of 4% in fiscal year 2024 under the draft budget, those grant amounts would go up just 0.7% in the following year. School business officials said that means about three out of every four Indiana school districts would get less than a 2% increase — or less funding overall — in 2025.

“In its current form, the budget would funnel about a third of new dollars to school types that educate less than 10% of our students,” Hunley, a former principal and school teacher, continued. “That leaves just 70% of new money to cover more than 90% of our students in public schools, which already have to fight year after year to secure every dollar possible to keep the lights on to pay our teachers, and to provide a high quality education for our students.”

The next two-year state budget is now under consideration in the Senate. GOP legislators in that chamber likely won’t unveil their version of the budget until early next month. A final version of the plan is expected by the end of April.

We have a state that overwhelmingly supports the same people who do not support public education. I do not understand why the Democrats have not made greater inroads on topics like education. It could be that the Democrats are just feckless in their operations, or it could be they are so used to being the underdog that they live in a culture of failure, or maybe it is a combination of the two.

What I would not like to think is that Indiana has been under the control of Republicans so long that the people of this state see nothing wrong with the miseducation of our future. After all, did they not survive their own miseducation? Why should Hoosiers expect anything better for themselves?

From the same source, Indiana House Republicans propose major school voucher expansion in next state budget.

Rep. Jeff Thompson, R-Lizton, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, said the decision comes as a way to increase “options” for Hoosier parents.

“We want those parents to have the best choice they can have with regard to where their children should go — and all parents should have that,” Thompson said Friday. “In this case, we’re just very optimistic about what it’s going to do for families and finding the best spot for their children.”

How are those parents to know the best choice? And what constitutes the best? Indiana's schools have been battered most of my life, most of today's parents have not seen the best of what education could be in Indiana, so by what criteria do they decide the best choice for their children?

Which brings me back to the original article: how does Indiana insure its school are not training fascists?

Would it be possible for satire to inspire better thinking and behavior. We Need the Parents BIll of Rights Act So We Can Censor Curriculum and Ban Books.

I support the passage of the Parents Bill of Rights because I believe every parent should have the right to be involved in their child’s school, whether through censoring curriculum, banning books, or blocking kids from choosing their own pronouns.

The Parents Bill of Rights will mandate that teachers post their full curriculum online so parents can root out the harmful content corrupting our children’s young minds—like sex ed, the scientific method, and the Civil Rights Movement. This is also the only way to stop teachers from carrying out their insidious fixation on hiding LGBTQ+ propaganda in school. A French teacher has no business telling kids that it’s normal and acceptable for adjectives to be gender-fluid.

sch 3/27

And think about this, out of Florida, by way of DailyKos's A 1998 Disney movie is the latest victim of the real cancel culture: The Republican war on education:

Last week, House Republicans passed a "Parents Bill of Rights" intended to move this toward a reality nationwide, but you only have to look at Florida to see how it plays out. In Pinellas County, Florida, a movie about Ruby Bridges has been removed from the schools for review after a parent—her name is Emily Conklin, go ahead and remember it—complained that it might cause white kids to learn that white people hate Black people.

We are talking here about a Disney movie made in 1998 and shown in Pinellas County schools for years, according to the Tampa Bay Times, and now, in 2023, it’s going to be a problem because … white kids are going to learn to be more racist? Or white kids are going to feel bad about white racism? We’ve been through the “white woman objects to kids learning about Ruby Bridges” thing before, and you cannot fool us: The objection is to kids learning just how how ugly racism is and how recently segregation was the law and racism was open and public and vicious. The objection is to kids identifying with Bridges and being upset about how she was treated.

sch 3/28/23