[NLA] funding indoctrination

[Eileen Eckert]

Responding to Kathleen's comment that in the wake of the Supreme Court's 
decision upholding the constitutionality of school vouchers, public 
education is threatened and "education will be the province of 'wing nuts'":
We live in a society where 98% of the wealth is held by 20% of the people, 
where approximately 50% of the wealth is held by 1% of the people and where 
wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few (stats based on 
Edward N. Wolff's work. See "Top Heavy" from 1993 and more recent articles). 
The rationale is that they "earn" it through their entrenpreneurship and 
creativity, and that to make any attempts at more equitable distribution is 
an exercise in social engineering that will quash the innovation that made 
this country great. While CEO's take huge salaries, bonuses, and other 
perqs, the people at the bottom of the wage scale can work two full-time 
jobs and still qualify for some form of public assistance. If a company can 
pay its workers so little that they qualify for public assistance, and they 
cannot simultaneously sell their labor to make more money, then doesn't that 
company in effect take a government subsidy for that worker's wages? And 
divert the money into top level salaries?

This is just one example of extreme inequity. If it is widely presented as 
normal, not challenged or discussed in the schools (including adult ed, 
though I know some <do> challenge and discuss it), then don't we already 
live in the land of the "wing nuts"? The fact that it is so deeply embedded 
in our culture as to seem unproblematic or impossible to change doesn't make 
it any less extreme. We are already funding indoctrination, indoctrination 
into extremist capitalism. I'm not in favor of putting public voucher money 
into private schools, but I'm less worried about the very visible wing nuts 
than I am about the "hidden curriculum." Maybe with the advent of the wing 
nuts, the values underlying education practices will surface to the level 
where they can be more widely discussed.

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