Why Education is Not a Priority for the Republicans

I would like to clarify something I wrote in my preceding post, namely my description of Sarah Palin’s voters (those who voted for her in the US general election in 2008) as “illiterate”.

First, most obviously, and most trivially, this was not meant literally. Few, if any, of these people are unable to read and write. What I meant, of course, was poorly educated.

My main concern here, however, is to make it clear that I do not mean what I wrote to contain any element of scorn. In large parts of the US, the public-sector school system isn’t nearly as good as it should be. It falls well short of the standards that can and should be expected of state education in any wealthy and democratic country, not to mention the world’s wealthiest and most advanced. I have no reason not to believe that, for the most part, poorly educated Americans are good people and merely people who, relative to other sections of the country’s population, have received a bum deal. It is true that they are poorly educated, but it is not their fault.

Moreover, the people who emerge from these inferior state school systems are probably not, on average, any less natively intelligent than the more fortunate ones who get better schooling. But, though it sounds brutal, and though it is not their fault at all, they are ignorant.

The Republicans count on this. This relatively ignorant population is the Republican base. It’s this underprivileged population’s lack of education that allows the Republicans to dupe them, every single time, into voting into power a party that serves the interests of the privileged and powerful.