I almost as a rule ignore Ann Coulter because her game is to bait liberals and cash in on the attention. But sometimes she says something that is worth thinking about. For example, let’s pretend for a moment that she’s right about this:
Ann Coulter is not a fan of President Obama’s plan to provide tuition-free community college, or of federal college loans in general. Coulter told Florida radio host Joyce Kaufman on Monday that such programs are just a “scam” to “subsidize the most left-wing industry in America, that spends its days indoctrinating kids to hate Republicans.”
It goes without saying that teaching kids to “hate Republicans” isn’t an explicit part of any community college class’s syllabus. If this actually is occurring, it results from some combination of casual student-teacher interaction outside the classroom and through osmosis within it. In other words, teachers are transmitting values to their students that cause the students to look askance at members of the Republican Party.
What are those values?
I think people like Ann Coulter think the values are primarily about equality, whether legal or financial, and a historical interpretation that condemns the right on these issues. But the more insidious values that are transmitted to the community college student are about empiricism, evidence, standards of scholarship, and scientific theory. How do you learn about the world, and how do you do research? What qualifies as a good theory? What constitutes a well-sourced paper or article? How do you avoid logical fallacies? How do you go beyond your own personal life-experiences to understand where other people and cultures are coming from? What do all religions seem to have in common, and why does religious thinking fail in a rigorous academic environment?
Ultimately, community college faculties may be more conservative or liberal in their politics depending on region. But they’re pretty consistent in teaching critical thought and insisting on academic standards.
It’s mainly in these senses that community college students are being indoctrinated to “hate Republicans.” It’s not explicit, and in some areas may even be counter to the political leanings of the campus. But a party can’t be completely hostile to all the values of the academy without becoming an enemy of the educated.
She, herself, had a fine education.
So she can’t blame her fine college education for liberalizing her.
She chose to be a vicious and absurd Reich-Winger, for fun – and, it should go without saying, the profits she gets from grifting the gullible rubes.
What a waste of O2, H2O, and minerals!
Agreed, but this post isn’t really about her.
This is the issue which makes me less optimistic about the future of governance in our country. If the plutocrats and militarists become successful in taking over the educational system in our country, we could find future majorities who are allowed the right to vote who become radicalized by cradle-to-grave misinformation. Those Federal majorities could support some extraordinarily brutal policies which are at a scale much greater than the brutal ones our empire is executing now, both domestically and internationally.
I’m simply astonished that the mega-rich have gotten large swaths of the public to turn on SCHOOLTEACHERS, but propaganda, it’s a helluva drug.
There’s plenty that causes optimism for our future. The financial and power divide between rich and poor has gotten so apparent that even our corporate mainstream media and the conservative movement have had to take notice. This is leaving an opening for the liberal/progressive movement to be the authors of policies which truly help the 99%. But the 1%’s attempts to shove deceptive education into the heads of people beginning in their youngest childhood, attempts which have gained major traction in many areas of our country, does worry me.
“Can lead a horse to water but can’t make it drink.” Obviously, she didn’t dare drink a drop of anything than the slop she carried with her from home.
Silly Liberals. Thoughts are for trolls.
The problem is not with the colleges it is with the type of policies that the TP/GOP push. Anyone taught to think can see that those policies are not any any of the American citizens best interest. Just for the benefit of the very rich and Corporations that poor money into the coffers of the TP/GOP.
Anyone taught to think can see that those policies are not any any of the American citizens best interest.
That requires a certain type of learning to think and see. It’s easier for individuals to think through what’s best for themselves than how they will fare if the focus is on what’s best for the whole. Thus, in the aggregate Britain’s NHS delivers health care equal to what 90% of Americans get, but delivers it to all, with a higher percentage of its population over the age of 65, and at half the cost and no personal debt or bankruptcies. But at the individual level, Americans are sure that they get more (they don’t) and better health care (some might), and therefore, don’t even talk to them about socialized medicine.
But then Hillary needs 200 people to tell her what the right thing to do, maybe, is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/us/politics/economic-plan-is-a-quandary-for-hillary-clintons-campa
ign.html
I’m curious to hear Boo’s take on that article.
Why would anyone for one moment want to consider a late sixty year old candidate for POTUS, that allegedly has oodles of public policy experience, and still has so little clue about economics and government that she’s huddling with 200 policy advisers to get her some talking points before throwing her hat in the ring?
She’s a neoliberalcon, and not one with depth and breadth either, that’s in search of the magic words to bamboozle 50%+1 of the electorate to put her name and face in the US history books forever. Deep down I must be more of an optimist that I think, because I’m truly shocked that liberals/Democrats are daft enough to promote Hillary Thatcher for POTUS.
But we have people here telling us that she’ll be this great president, or something. Does Clinton really need more than 4 advisors(Krugman, Stiglitz, Dean Baker and Robert Reich) to tell her what she needs to do? And none of those 4 are advocating abolishing Capitalism. All that article really does is confirm for me that we’re really screwed in 2020, if Hillary manages to pull it out in 2016.
Isn’t this special (USA Today):
Reality check reminder:
Going for the white, financially struggling, working class women’s vote again. The Walmart and Hillary consumer base.
She was a member of Walmart’s board way back when. I wouldn’t expect anything less.
January 2011Michelle Obama, Wal-Mart partner on healthy foods program. Am sure Wal-Mart heirs appreciated the good and free PR from Mrs. Obama, but their money still went to Romney and the GOP.
And this is why she very well may lose.
A momentary flashback. Carter not knowing which way to turn and Reagan stepping up to promise “morning in America” and the ignorant voters buying it. Even the majority in California that was so unimpressed with Reagan as governor that when his term was up, they elected the son of the man Reagan has defeated. And Jerry in those days was very quirky.
WAPO: How Big Food Brands are Boosting Profits by Targeting the Poor
A niece of mine thinks nothing of driving 160 miles to stock up on such bargain crap. (If the total cost of getting there were included, she’s probably losing money on each trip.) And she thinks she’s a savvy shopper! Even if she has zero savings and debt she can barely afford to service.
Good comments:
Ultimately, community college faculties may be more conservative or liberal in their politics depending on region. But they’re pretty consistent in teaching critical thought and insisting on academic standards.
Community college faculties in this state tend to be more conservative. As a student 35 years ago, I had an interesting conversation with a business finance lecturer (fresh out of college) about who exactly was receiving welfare and Social Security in the three rural counties that the county was serving. It interrupted his spewing of the welfare reform and Social Security is going away line. But yes, even the self-proclaimed Reagan Republicans then were professional enough to emphasize critical thinking. I imagine that even Virginia Foxx as President of Mayland Technical College was emphasizing critical thinking back in those days if only to open up students to criticism of local Democrats.
I appreciate that you use Ann Coulter as a writing prompt and then discard her to get to the issue here. Republicans have the illusion that by defunding higher education they will shut down the youth Democratic vote. Scott Walker is rearranging the charter of the University of Wisconsin to allow him the legal running room to do whatever he intends to do to de-liberalize that institution.
And Republicans have forced out the President of the North Carolina university system. The scuttlebutt is that Art Pope, the “third Koch brother” is destined for that job. Pope in the past has sought to close historically black higher education institutions.
Having disposed of public unions, with the complacence of Republican union members, Republicans now seek to delegitimize and disempower other perceived key Democratic constituencies. And they will not back down on all sorts of minority voter repression while white Democrats will cave on this issue.
The euphoria over Hillary is masking the fact that the donkey is dead. Unless there is rapid major reform in state and local parties to guarantee that forecast Hillary wave, it ain’t gonna happen. The organizational structures are being shut down by Republican governors and legislatures. Citizen United means money not people control the campaign and election.
This fight is not about education philosophy, it is about party constituencies and turnout.
For Democrats Wisconsin, Michigan, and now Illinois are disaster areas politically. Indiana is unreachable. Ohio is still battling. The South is gone except for minority-majority district, which one court order can erase, and a couple of New Democrats.
I’m not seeing any coattails from a Hillary Clinton election. There are too many and increasing institutional hurdles and too much complacency in the Democratic establshment, what remains of it.
If President Obama can succeed in getting the Republican grassroots to demand community college plan funding—the prospect that I think scares Ann Coulter and the reason she chose the topic–that might change the political climate in a small way. But for now Republicans are running with the advantages they built in the November elections while Democratic officials are still their individualistic go-their-own way, kow-tow to lobbyist selves.
I don’t know about you, but it is why I am in a funk and tend to do other things now.
For Democrats Wisconsin, Michigan, and now Illinois are disaster areas politically.
And the Democrats did it to themselves in Illinois. Quinn shit on his own voters. Then probably wondered why they couldn’t be bothered to vote for him.
They did to themselves in North Carolina as well. A prosecutor turned governor prosecuted for corruption followed by a governor who had a staff member prosecuted for corruption in a state in which there were few corruption scandals (or they never surfaced). And a state party operative who thought shaming voters was a great way to turn out the vote in 2014.
I don’t know what happened in Michigan besides the exploitation of racist resentment of Detroit. Or in Wisconsin besides being blindsided by oodles of Koch brothers’ cash. But both of those now look irreversible in the short term unless someone knows how to get to rural voters.
The other thing that has happened is the demise of the ticket-splitting era that Eisenhower’s run introduced.
I know. And that doesn’t even count places like Alabama or Mississippi where the state party apparatus is a complete joke.
But we must give MS credit for having the highest childhood vaccination rate in the country because they haven’t completely destroyed their public health sector and allowed anti-vaxxers of all stripes to undo MS mandatory vaccinations. Life is tough for low income folks in MS, but at least they don’t have to worry about a measles outbreak.
The Republican philosophy is to “keep them blind so they can’t see what we are doing.”
Zactly.
Snark aside it would be interesting to check out an evangelical college and see how they teach analysis and science. That’s assuming they offer any science classes of course.
But really, what’s the point of college if you don’t learn to exercise curiosity and develop the logistics of logic? Kinda like getting a box of legos then just throwing them all up in the air and walking away.
According to locals who went there, Liberty University is best know for oral sex–no threat of abortions. That takes care of curiosity.
And it was well known that even in the 1950s and 1960s despite Bob Jones University’s 18-inch rule (dating students were required to remain 18 inches apart at all times), there were pregnancies every year. That takes care of logistics if not logic.
The most typical and successful major at evangelical colleges besides religion and music is accounting.
When Stephen Colbert says that “truth has a liberal bias” he means you can’t sustain the Coulter point of view if you think about it a little bit carefully. Critical thought is indeed an enemy of the right.
For a fascist state education is an obstacle to the docility of the populace.
It’s not hard to follow. Hostility to science, hostility to math, hostility to empiricism, and embracing xenophobia are just the things your modern day aristocrats depend on.
Denial on climate change, Laugher Curve math, etc.
When the sheeples is dumb it’s very convenient for folks who know better.
Thomas Jefferson