Article #1 in a Series >>>>> The Origins and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

Refiections on the Unmasking Wrought by Covid-19 and the George Floyd Murder

The United States is a nation that proceeds on the basis of deep contradictions.  The society and body politic move forward for extended phases during which the unsavory aspects of our national history  and abiding circumstance are not brutally revealed.  Then, with the occurrence of a precipitating event or events, those unsavory features gain glaring revelation. 

The concomitant calamities of Covid-19 and the murder of George Floyd served as two unrelentung tugs on the collective mask behind which we had been hiding, exposing multiple faults that we had largely been able to cover for many moons.

The United States was born as an experiment in Enlightenment values, asserting humanistic ideals that regard each human being as equal before the law, possessing multiple Natural Rights, and deserving space to develop her or his potential.

But in the beginning, her space was highly constricted, that of Native Americans was perpetually shrinking, and that of most African Americans tended toward nonexistence. 

These are salient aspects of our two realities, which we hold in a state of cognitive dissonance until certain events precipitate a societal rush to a metaphorical psychotherapist who induces exposure of unsavory features in our past.  

We have the world's most brilliant undergirding document in the United States Constitution.  Immigrants or the near descendants thereof founded us, and such stock continued to descend on our shores, prosperimg as they could not in the lands of their nativity. 

But the most brilliant of those humanistic founders were slaveholders who created a system that expanded only slowly the demographics of citizenship---  so slowly that we lived through many decades of slavery, then the police state of the American South, the lower-tier status of women, and stress for those outside the traditional identities of gender. 

Most of the founders were humanists who extolled scientific methods and discoveries.  But they did not oversee the development of a flourishing system of public education that imparted to all constituent members of society that same respect for scientific method and discovery.

We are a nation that regards all people as equal and that has featured abominable  inequality and, especially, inequity.  

We are a nation that has thrived on scientific method and discovery.  But a large segment of society exalts superstition and supposition over science.

These constradictions are embedded in our history and current circumstance.

The concurrent calamities of Covid-19 and the murder of George Floyd have exposed those contradictions.  The wound is raw and agonizing.  

Abysmal public education has sustained the contradictions.

Only a revolution in public education can resolve the contradictions and promote the healing force of scientific rationality that will heal our raw and tortuous wounds