KNOWLEDGE SCARES CONSERVATIVES by Thomas Mills
The following is a blog article from POLITICS NORTH CAROLINA, a blog page published by Thomas Mills. This article was posted on 1 May 2021 on their website.It is reprinted here.
Republicans are set on dismantling our public education system from the ground up. Their voucher plan subsidizes private schools at the expense of public ones while continuing to put more money in the pockets of rich people. Their plan to end tenure at UNC and give the Board of Governors more control over what is taught in the classroom will keep the best researchers and professors out of North Carolina. The community college system is the only one that is not being dismantled.
Republicans have long despised public education. They believe the schools are a burden on the wealthy, and they don’t really believe most people need an education to get employed. Despite research saying otherwise, they claim that young people are being indoctrinated by liberal professors, and that’s why so many young people oppose their policies. In reality, those young people have learned to think for themselves and that’s why they are not conservatives.
The reason that conservatives oppose education is that so much of their dogma fails to stand up to scrutiny. Throughout history, conservatives have been wrong on the big issues, especially those concerning how to treat our fellow Americans. Argue about party labels all you want, but conservatives supported slavery, genocide of native Americans, Jim Crow laws while opposing a social security and Medicare, voting rights for women, solutions to climate change, and marriage equality.
Conservative policies lead to greater economic disparity, fewer individual rights, poorer health outcomes, and less educated populace. For decades, conservatives told us that tax cuts for the rich would pay for themselves and bring broader prosperity. On its face, the premise seems ludicrous. Turns out it is. Conservative leadership has consistently left us with high debt and deficits and struggling middle class, all in the name of tax cuts for the rich.
First, conservatives told us that climate change wasn’t happening. Then, they said that it wasn’t that bad. Then, they claimed that it wasn’t caused by human activity. Now, they say there’s nothing we can do to stop it. They’ve been wrong the whole time, research proved it, and professors taught it. It just gets under their skin.
Like they told us less taxes would bring broader prosperity, they also told us more guns would make us safer. They’re still in denial but the research is showing how wrong they’ve been. Today, firearms are the leading cause death among children and conservative tells us that’s the cost of freedom. Most Americans don’t believe they’re very free if they have to worry about mass shootings at malls or their children shooting themselves with easily accessible guns.
Knowledge scares conservatives. There’s a reason that most academics and academies have liberal leanings. Empirical truth debunks reactionary reasoning over and over again. It also threatens fundamentalist teachings of any religion. The modern conservative Christian movement has more in common with today’s radical Muslim movements than it does with the forces of the Enlightenment that led to the founding of America. One is grounded largely in facts and an understanding of the world. The other is grounded in myths and the preservation of an outdated status quo dominated by men. There’s a reason that they come for the universities.
