Article #9 >>>>> The Origins and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

The Terrible Toll of Knowledge-Deficient Education on Students at the Urban Core During the 1980s  

By the 1980s, the anti-knowledge ideology inflicted by education professors on curriculum and teacher training was taking a terrible toll on students in locally centralized school districts throughout the United States.

The toll taken could be observed in several sets of dichotomies categorizing the American public  >>>>>

>>>>>   Some of those who had been able, by nature of family influences, personal reading habits, and college or university matriculation, to gain a relatively strong base of factual knowledge developed a rational approach to life consonant with principles of the Enlightenment present in the thinking of the Founders at the nation's inception;  others, bereft of personal inclinations and influences external to their public education, developed an approach to life synchronous with that superstitious, irrational, fact-resistant strain that was also present from the early decades of United States history.

>>>>>   Some of those capable of rational thought and inclined toward scientific and logical analysis were able to observe and process the manifold advances in American life by women, African Americans, Latinas/Latinos, and Native Anericans so as to impel society toward more nonsexist, racially pluralistic modes of thought and action;  but others, variously cowered in resentment or openly hostile, expressed their opposition to the advancement of women and nonwhite groups either bluntly or in coded language.

>>>>>   And within the African American community there developed stark contrasts between those positioned to seize the opportunities provided by civil rights, fair housing, and equal employment legislation of the 1960s to attend universities, rise to positions as physicians and attorneys and business managers, and select from an array of residential options;  and those left behind, sullen and hopeless, at the urban core.

On these latter, the toll taken by wretched public education fell particularly hard.  

Denied knowledge and skills necessary to become culturally enriched, civically engaged, professionally satisfied citizens, those mired in cyclical familial poverty with no route of escape too often lived out their lives on mean streets leading to death or incarceration.  

Multiple deleterious phenomena gained witness at the urban core:  proliferation of crack cocaine;  the perceptible opportunity but ultimate disaster of easy money;  lives lived in a haze of addiction;  welfare dependency;  the decline in two-parent families;  tbe decrease in committed life relationships;  greatly increased gang activity;  rising rates of crime, inducing both Black-on-Black crime and ignorantly brutal police response.

Wretched, knowledge-bereft public education undergirded all of these unfortunate developments.

Widespead public ignorance produced both the three sets of dualities and the despair at the urban core. 

A major, data-abundant study published in 1983 found public education so indequate as to deem the nation's economic and societal future to be at risk.

The risk persisted and became more disastrously manifest in the years and decades thereafter.

Wretched public education renders the nation more at risk than ever in the year 2021.