American education system: Critical infrastructure, ignorant adults

From preschool to graduate school students undergo a form of distraction therapy. Video games, American Idol, late night talk shows, nonsense news and information, marketers for clothing, tech gear, music, and credit cards bombard the mind like spray wax at the end of a car wash. But this is all part of the plan for education in America.  It's an education in buying and selling; what George W. Bush described as freedom, "freedom is the ability to buy and sell." He was right on many levels but no one likes to pull the curtain back and find that the education industry is just like the defense industry with contractors, consultants, presidents, CEO's, analysts, investment bankers, fraud, waste, abuse  etc.

It is utterly popular and awfully tedious to say that there is an education-military complex. Eisenhower's overused statement is very much dated. In fact President U.S. Grant thought about those matters during his presidency. But, we seem to be in the midst of the development of a national security republic perpetually at war and undereducated, by design, in the machinations of the American national security state.

Arguably, it is dangerous to try and break up the industrial model of education, particularly now in the midst of high unemployment in the USA and the perilous state of the US and world economy. The warehousing function that K-12 and college universities play is vital to local economies and keeping millions of young people off the street. The industrial model excels at manufacturing minds with conformity/uniformity built in.

And yet, the US education industry is not even listed as a leading Critical Infrastructuresector in the USA. Perhaps it should be listed under the Defense Industrial Base as important as its function is to the nation.

What's a Nation State to Do?

So you want to privatize, corporatize, and decentralize the US education industry? You want to end formalized education at 18 years of age as Brezezinski said in 1970?  Is this the best way to get more competent American engineers, scientists, warfighters, buyers, and sellers? You want to make the US education industry more efficient and effective?  You want high scores on the national College Board-Educational Testing Service (teach to the test) to claim the number one slot in the world? You want to save money by eliminating excess human capital, and closing/consolidating schools?  You want to do Podcasts, Skype around the world, work in electronic collectives via the Internet and World Wide Web?

The answers to these questions raise significant issues for the future stability of the American nation-state and, indeed, the continuity of the American Republic and its form of government.  At the moment, the glue that binds Americans together is many years of participation in the US education educational system.

What needs to be changed within the American education is not so much the addition of technical wizardry, robust communications networks, or the next big fad (teacher as facilitator, blended learning, TED lectures, etc.).  An emphasis needs to be placed on the nuts and bolts, the blocking and tackling aspects of education, the items that are foundational-human capital.

It all has to start with the reeducation of "educated" adults in positions of power: parents, professors, teachers, mentors, politicians, military leaders, et al. It is a crime to blame the young for the failings, the ignorance, of adults who refuse to re-educate themselves about the world around them. They fear the information and knowledge that the Internet and WWW. They are the "learned" that Eric Hoffer refers to above.

Duh...What?

Most American adults do not know the difference between the Internet and WWW or have a rudimentary knowledge of the history and mechanics behind it. Hence, the young reflect that. The same adults would not be able to locate Benin or Brunei on a map even though Google Earth is at their fingertips. "I know nothing about anatomy," said an adult recently. Well, over at Chrome there are, for no charge but time, 3D software programs on human anatomy. In fact, for every field of academic endeavor, there is a free education software program that can be downloaded and used to self-educate.

Over 50 percent of American adults reject Evolutionary Theory and Evolutionary Psychology/Biology. American adults (the "great leaders") are destroying America's English language to the point that words/concepts like accountability, torture, displaced peoples, drones, casualties, shootings and death are meaningless to K-12 and college university students.  Those same adults rip teachers and administrators for lack of effort and appropriate qualifications and demand action and accountability.

Finally, the academic disciplines are mostly stove-piped and isolated from each other during a time when understanding the economic, social, biological, and cultural interconnections from the local to global level are paramount. In fact, students are more stimulated and thrive in a well-run interdisciplinary program as opposed to smokestack pedagogy. There are many ways to discover. For example, can literary analysis/criticism inform about militarism in society? Yes.  Greg Winston's Joyce and Militarism (2012, University of Florida) focuses in on some of James Joyce's classics and the times/environment they were written. It is an extraordinary book that travels through the occupation of Ireland by England and World War I.

Murray Gell Mann put it best at a conference sponsored by the National Defense University in 2003.