Exactly! Without education for the higher order thinking skills, the US is not worth defending, and the 2012 Texas Republican agenda opposed education for higher order thinking skills, and textbooks would be treating the creationist story of the Bible as science if people had opposed this and gotten a Supreme Court decision declaring the Bible story is not science. I treasure one of the Nova shows explaining the difference between science and religious mythology. If we do not understand the difference, we can not have the democracy that was inspired by the Age of Enlightenment.

This could be a whole nother thread. Our democracy is not compatible with the God of Abraham religions. I am passionate about this, because I do not think we would be in the mess we are in now if it were not for Christians getting us here, just as they did in Germany. Should I start a thread for this?

But we also need to focus on what education has to do with our democracy, and how that education was taken off course, and hopefully, that will unfold in this thread. Right now seem bogged down in the increasing powers of government and not well focused on the education issue. Do you seem to have some thoughts on the necessary education or are you just questioning what that education needs to be? I have shelves full of old books about education and nothing is more important to democracy than how it prepares the young for citizenship. That education was replaced by education for technology and Christianity is a huge part of the problem. Sorry to those of you who are Christians. I don't know how to beat around this brush and not risk offending people.

Ah, I was writing a book on the education problem but got derailed with the religious issue, and here it is again, confounding this thread. The Athenians had many gods and democracy did not come out of a religion with only one god. Some can read the Bible and see a god of war. :lol: This gets really funny when Christians are fighting Christians and both sides think God favors them. I think the notion that there is one god with favorite people is the worst notion people can have. Aztecs and others also thought they were a god's favorite people. This is a human invention, not a truth and not compatible with democracy. Arming these people with nuclear weapons would be the will of God why? He isn't big enough to fight his own battles? :lol: Greeks had a god of war, but not all the decisions were his. Trump is arming despicable people who are a serious threat to their neighbors, and Evangelist Christians think he is doing the will of God and is a good father to our nation. This is an education problem and Texas Republicans have fought hard to defend maintaining this error in education!

The purpose of education has changed many times in the last two thousand years. For most of this time, religion was the only education available to masses. The various philosophies that influence education complicate that matter. How do you come to life, through a religion or a philosophy or perhaps nothing other than education for technology?

What is human nature and what is the potential of human society? What must be done for a society to achieve its potential?

"There are both specific and general features of fascism, but large bureaucracies in themselves aren't one of them."

For me, the difference is who is control. All governments are a combination of autocracy and democracy. Perhaps Saudi Arabia with its ruling prince and royal family is the most autocratic? Then there is communism that is autocratic because the government attempts to control so much. Then there is fascism and socialism and laize fair capitalism. Our modern societies, no matter what country we are talking about have much more power to control all matters of life through bureaucracies. Large bureaucracies are about controlling and this degree of control of relatively new isn't it?

How much control a national governing power has over citizens is a matter of philosophy or religious belief isn't it? Not that long ago Christian nations gave kings privileged rule on the belief a god ordained who would be masters and who would serve and there was no concept of human rights, nor the dignity of man meaning everyone. Peasants had no political power short of a rebellion or revolution. Between 1920 to the present, has our government gained more control over our lives? How about property managers? Does anyone live in a rental? Have people living in rentals noticed a difference in the last 20 years? Is the head of a household still the authority or has some of this authority shifted to the property manager? How about the need to carry and show ID? Has anyone noticed a changed in the last 20 years? How about our right to privacy? Has anyone noticed a difference in our legal privacy? How about the government's control of the media? The government gained media control and control of research during the Eisenhower administration and Reagon's research on welfare fraud and followed by the media reporting on welfare fraud, is an example of what someone in power can do. So was our invasion of Iraq the result of manipulated media. Has anyone noticed a difference? How about people loosing their jobs because of saying the wrong thing? Has our attitude about freedom of speech changed? Change happens over many generations and the young have a very different experience than we had before changes started taking effect and one form of control justified the next.

PS my grandmother walked away from a teaching job when the school interfered with her discipline of students, and more recently I spoke with women who gave up nursing jobs when the management of hospitals changed and the management style became more controlling. We are not talking about one aspect of our lives but a changed consciousness that is blind to everything but the good reasons for the change. I think past education made us leery of government and furiously defensive or our liberty and personal power, which also went with a strong sense of duty to God, country, and family. We were ordered by family order, not military order applied to citizens.

Even if our present situation doesn't meet the definition of fascism, we still have capitalism to contend with; we still have powerful states protecting capitalism, and we still have militaries in place to make sure the economic status quo is maintained. I don't equate the current situation with the Axis Powers at their zenith; what we have now is different, and dangerous.

Add to that the fact that there are some fascists in power -- we'll soon see what will happen in Brazil. Trump has tendencies in that direction, and so does the far right, including some of his own Republican Party. Europe has a few right wingers lurking in the shadows, waiting. China, India, the Middle East, Russia...

So... what happens next? I don't know, of course. I certainly don't like the trend lines.

Why wouldn't our present situation meet the definition of fascism?

This thread is about education, democracy, and liberty. Compared to liberal education,education for technology is dehumanizing. Liberal education internalizes authority and education for technology externalizes authority- making the people dependent on the experts. Liberal education made everyone a generalist and education for technology makes everyone a specialist. Liberal education taught independent thinking. Education for technology uses groupthink. Liberal education taught logic and in 1958 that ended with a focus on memorization. Now people scream bloody murder when a child's education is slowed down with subjects that require them to think and are not restricted to preparing them for their place in the beast.

Liberal education used the Conceptual Method. With this method, the student learned increasingly complex concepts. Technological education used the Behaviorist method, and that can be used for training dogs. This is also the dropping of logic and relying on memorization. Right answers are rewarded and wrong answers are punished. This leads everyone to think there are right or wrong answers, and in general, there is no understanding of the complexity of concepts such as democracy or human rights. Black or white thinking is bad for the democracy we had. A liberal education is education for good moral judgment, and education for technology dropped moral training and left it to the church as Germany did. That destroys liberty because no one is prepared for liberty, and this goes with a bureaucratic order that makes thinking unnecessary and only requires people to obey policy without question.

Two things are needed for fascism, experience with democracy and industrialization. In 1958 we placed liberal education with the dehumanizing education for technology and we are preparing the young to be products for industry, and find their place in the mechanical society where privacy and freedom of speech are being destroyed. Are people perhaps thinking because we have a democracy we are not fascist? Really what makes us different from the efficient, mechanical society we defeated in two world wars? We don't speak German?

I am working for returning to, the education for democracy we had because only when that democracy is defended in the classroom is it defended. Imagine what would happen to Christianity if it set aside the Bible and focused on education for technology. Well, that is what happened to our democracy. We stopped transmitting the culture that made us a national leader for human rights and now we are good with improving our economy by selling weapons to anyone who wants to buy them and it is not democracy and human rights we put first, but nationalism. This is not what we defended our democracy against?

Why wouldn't our present situation meet the definition of fascism? — Athena

"The Present Situation" doesn't have to meet the definition of fascism in order for serious trouble to be at hand. Fascism isn't the only threat we might face. The quality of "education, democracy, and liberty" have certainly been eroded and degraded.

Dehumanization, externalized authority, black and white thinking, an emphasis and reliance on technology, the destruction of the liberal arts, the degraded quality of civic participation -- all that and more -- is, IN ITSELF, an existential threat without being fascism.

Let me flip my approach here: The United States pioneered some of the techniques which 20th Century Fascism utilized. We conducted genocide against the Aboriginal people, then placed the small fragment that survived in concentration camps called 'reservations'. We enslaved black people (it was the foundation of our 19th century economy). We had a very strong eugenics movement in the late 19th - 20th century. We conducted repressive measures against left wing labor (the Red Scare of 1919, and continuing brutal repression of organized labor). We were staunchly anti-communist.

What we have in the United States is a deceptive slow-motion fascism. What happened in Europe was a high-speed fascism that developed over the course of a decade, though it was built on much older cultural characteristics. Our authoritarian government, militarism, racist regime, degraded education system, and so on developed over more than a century, and was in service to capitalism, rather than some vague master race theory. The techniques of manipulation and control which are used in the United States became part of normal everyday life, rather than the sharp disjuncture of the very rapid rise of German National Socialism or Italian Fascism. End of flip.

Does this approach (the two paragraphs in italics) represent your view to some extent? If so, then I better understand where you are coming from.

In his account of his term as the American Ambassador to Berlin in the mid 1930s, William Dodd suggested to Hitler that he should use the American approach to Jews in the universities: place quotas on the number of admissions. Hitler dismissed the suggestion as altogether inadequate. Even into the late 1940s and 1950s, Jews were not admitted to quite a few civic organizations in Minneapolis. From the mid 1930s to the 1980s, the policy of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was to segregate blacks in dense public housing estates, or worse, concentrate them in privately owned slums. This wasn't an implicit policy, it was explicit. (Its detailed in the 2017 book, The Color of Law.)

The peculiar skewing of the history that I learned in school (and just about everybody else our age learned) was the normal, natural, obvious American Story. The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, the Puritans built the City on a Hill, the south had plantations, the Indians were in the way, George Washington was the Father of the Country, Lincoln freed the slaves, and America has chugged along the road to ever more glorious achievements.

Well, we find that there some pretty big flaws in our understanding of our history. If we are fascistic, then fascism crept up on us on cats paws rather than roaring in like a mob of pigs.

Two things are needed for fascism, experience with democracy and industrialization. In 1958 we replaced liberal education with the dehumanizing education for technology and we are preparing the young to be products for industry, and find their place in the mechanical society where privacy and freedom of speech are being destroyed. — Athena

You are hung up on the 1958 NDEA. What you are describing is true enough; it just happened earlier, and (IMHO) the NDEA didn't have very much to do with it. Prior to WWII, higher education was reserved for either the elite (those with enough money (usually money) or brains to be admitted to University, or they were people with middle class aspirations who would become accountants, elementary and high school teachers, and the like. After WWII, the government paid many thousands of veterans to go to college, and later the NDEA helped more people go to college.

The replacement of the liberal arts with technology wasn't immediate: a lot of the WWII vets and NDEA students took typical liberal arts degrees in English, History, Social Science, Mathematics, etc. Quite a few of them did, indeed, take engineering and technology degrees. At least from what I have observed, the retrenchment of the classic "liberal arts" didn't get rolling until the late 1970s and into the 1980s--a generation after the NDEA and VA programs.

More damaging to the classic liberal arts than retrenchment, in my opinion, has been the perverse corruption of postmodernism, and its peculiar and deconstructing obsessions. If nothing else had happened, this alone could destroy the liberal arts.

Too much for now.

"I also want to reiterate how our education and means of production are involved with each other. Expressed another way, the way we work and what is taught are bound up with each other. A significant change in one is talking about a significant change in the other."

Education motivated by the enlightenment was not education for technology, but did encourage science as our liberty and advancement require science. Education did it have much an economic purpose. Education for technology is the result of modern warfare dependent on technology. I am quite sure the economic benefits of adding vocational training to education were unexpected. Industry wanted to close our schools in the US when we mobilized for war. Closing schools would have put an end to child labor laws as industry wanted to return to child labor and argued the war caused a labor shortage. I wish we could discuss this more because it applies to us today when we decide the present purpose of education and how to spend our education dollars. And technology is so changing our lives we really need to re-evaluate our vision of the future and how to prepare the young for that future.

I disagree that the emphasis on technology is solely driven by the prerogatives of warfare. I appreciate you fleshing out what that argument entails for our future as a society. I agree that we need to re-evaluate our future. Who we are to do that and what it requires is a question that goes in many directions.
Have you read Ivan Illich? He is someone who is speaking to your concerns about education from a different direction. I don't think he is the last word on anything but he does bring up the problems in a manner that reveals their deep complexity in a world so invested upon techniques of industry.

Van Illich was a Croatian-Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and critic of the institutions of modern Western culture. That might be an interesting point of view. How does it apply to education, democracy, and liberty?

The major changes in public education in the US happened in 1917 and 1958 and both are the direct result of war and changed technology needs. It makes no sense to disagree with these facts. Either something like this happens or it does not.

Why this really matters is until 1958 our national defense depended on patriotic citizens so until 1958 public education transmitted a culture to assure patriotic citizens and prevent social problems by training everyone for good moral judgment based on reason. But technology changed all this. Not only did military technology change, but so did the need for patriotic citizens. It no longer takes a year to mobilize for war, and the masses no longer have to make the sacrifices or cooperate with military goals.

Technology, airplanes, and drones have made us less dependent on humans to engage in war. The social, economic and political ramifications of the 1958 National Defense Education Act are huge and only part of this about technology. The other part is humans are not needed. Education for technology has always been the education of slaves needed to do the work. A liberal education is for free people, not education for technology. Please rethink the importance of the change, and explain why Van Illich is important to our understanding.

Well, it will be difficult to explain how Illich may be germane to the discussion if I am the only one who has read him. He discusses methods of education and its role in validating personal authority in our society. He agrees with your emphasis upon humans being needed. He also agrees that technology is a critical part of what is going on.
But his narrative of what is happening and why is much different from yours.
Why read me when you could read him to explain?

Why read you instead of Illich? Because I am drowning in books that I haven't read yet, but now I really want to know what Illich has to say. You seriously made me interested. The value of validating personal authority is not well explained in any of my books. The notion is there but it is not well defined and the reason why that is important to society is not spelled out. It simply comes up as a vague principle of democracy and the need to respect people and protect their dignity. The last thing I want to do is buy another book, but I do need to know what he said. Please, can you tell me more?

:lol: I really want that book, but this is a bad time for me to buy another book. Like buying a book I want instead of getting the kids gifts is just wrong. Please, tell me more.

You can download many of his books from this site: Memory of the World library. A fellow member of this forum showed me the library. It is an awesome resource.

I recommend Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality as works that directly address your interests.

"What we have in the United States is a deceptive slow-motion fascism. What happened in Europe was a high-speed fascism that developed over the course of a decade, though it was built on much older cultural characteristics. Our authoritarian government, militarism, racist regime, degraded education system, and so on developed over more than a century, and was in service to capitalism, rather than some vague master race theory. The techniques of manipulation and control which are used in the United States became part of normal everyday life, rather than the sharp disjuncture of the very rapid rise of German National Socialism or Italian Fascism. End of flip."

Your knowledge and ability to articulate yourself brings tears to my eyes. And then add to this the author of which Valentinus speaks and the importance of validating personal authority and I am overwhelmed with thanksgiving that after many years on the internet I have come across people who can carry on the important discussion.

I love you speaking of fascism as fast and slow fascism. That opens the door to investigate this in more detail. I will argue fascism depends on the bureaucratic order and the education.

Most people around the world are prejudiced in favor of their own people. Many aboriginal people believed they live at the center of the earth where creation happened and their stories tell them they are special people. This is relatively harmless until they have the organization that clearly defines who is one of them and who is not, and they have the organization that enables them to overpower others. My point of argument is that the difference between being fascist or not is organizational.

The US picked up the important organization for fascism, that is a bureaucratic organization that crushes personal liberty and power and education that leads to dependency on authority and believing authority must be obeyed. I come to this conclusion because of information from several books. I would like to discuss this more if there is interest.

The bureaucratic adaptation happened during the Roosevelt administration and this was both praised and came with warnings of the dangers. What slowed the progression of fascism was liberal education and that was ended in 1958, Now the consciousness of the US is better suited for fascism than the democracy we had.

The technology of that site is beyond me. I attempted to download the book on education, but that didn't seem to be working for me. I attempted to copy and paste the title "ABC: Alphabetization of the popular mind" and I could not do that. But I do want to comment on that thought. I am often distressed by spell checks opinion of correct wording. Spell check thinks everything is a noun rather a concept and insist I put "a", "an", or "the" in front of every concept.

"Industry has shaped our lives in a way that is not good for humans". That is an example of what I mean. Spell check wants me to write "The" in front of "Industry" but I am not speaking of "the industry" but rather the whole concept of how we spend our lives separated from family, working for someone else whom we probably don't know, so we can meet our daily needs, and how this shape who we are by the job we do. My concern is spell check prevents consciousness of larger concepts. Not for me because I am old and set in my ways, but the young who know no better and are shaped by the present experiences. We can damage our ability to develop abstract thinking and when we are programming our young to be products for industry, not to be thinking and feeling human beings, we probably do a lot of damage.

Bitter Crank....

"More damaging to the classic liberal arts than retrenchment, in my opinion, has been the perverse corruption of postmodernism, and its peculiar and deconstructing obsessions. If nothing else had happened, this alone could destroy the liberal arts."

Can you explain "deconstructing" to me? I sus[ect this has a German connection?

I am aware of the delayed manifestation of the full degree of the NDEA and as I understand this the delay, it was the result of the time it took to educated teachers for this different way of thinking and doing things. I also think the transition was aided by hiring vets who had military training, to be teachers or school principles. The change would happen gradually as the former education professionals were replaced by those with the changed programming. Greater change was not possible until the fundamental change had taken place but once it took hold, there was no stopping it, and we now have the centralized control of education we strongly opposed.

This forum is the first time in many years I have connected with people willing to discuss these matters intelligently. I have had my threads taken for spots in a forum everyone takes seriously and put the conspiracy part of a forum that is for nut cases. My experience on the internet has been hell as no one can relate to what I am saying. I even had a teacher get on my case for what I say about education and that is how you all got me. Teachers educated for education for technology, think I am attacking them. They have zero understanding of liberal education and what that has to do with the culture and what culture has to do with avoided social, economic and political problems. I don't know why you all are thinking outside of the box, but I do know, my grandmother's generation had to die before the resistance to the change was dead. Once those who remember are dead, the change has no resistance, but when my grandmother was alive and teaching, there was resistance.

Did I say something wrong? I listed the changes brought in by the 1958 National Defense Education Act that replaced liberal education and there is no reply. I am disappointed and somewhat confused.

The nature of schooling across the world seems to be something that people everywhere don't question to any significant degree. I think it has a lot to do with the "successfully" educated being defensive about it, and the "lower orders" clamouring for some "success" or assuming their "betters" know best. It's thoroughly rotten when you think how dismal the whole thing is compared to what could be.

also want to reiterate how our education and means of production are involved with each other. Expressed another way, the way we work and what is taught are bound up with each other. A significant change in one is talking about a significant change in the other. — Valentinus

The problem as I see it, having tried to advance education in the past, is that people are really no longer interested in teaching truth. Skills are taught to fit personal and social agenda. If a truth does not fit those agenda, no one wants to teach it in compulsory courses, because no one wants to learn what is against their own agenda, and teachers have no power to teach it. Students dont take the course if its not a valued agenda and elective. As a result, there are no elective courses that dont fit with current agenda either.

The example I chanced upon for this is rather fundamental. Jefferson based his natural rights theory on that of Locke. His argument includes the idea that 'pursuit of happiness' must be a right because betterment of the life of others results in a lasting and more permanent happiness, rewarded in the afterlife if not this one. Similarly liberty allows people to suspend desire and act for the good of others.

In current thought, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are purely hedonistic or otherwise self-oriented entitlements. This required the new deal, and new bureaucracy, you call fascist because the rich no longer saw any reason to support the poor, but instead just wanted to keep as much as possible for themselves.

And the situation is now irreversible because there is total and absolute zero interest in the truth of the USA's natural rights. By extension the founding father's intent cannot even be acknowledged in the supreme court, which to keep the peace instead implements Rousseau's social contract to directions acted in accordance with the will of the people. Other issues aside this has exacerbated the income gap between the righ and poor because there is no contrary force to stop those who have power from gaining more, and those that dont from losing it except palliatives such as legalization of marijuana and so on, enacted in an Huxley style to opiate the masses, while divorcing accountability or action to solve resulting drug problems via a cloak of federalism. So I would agree that the democratic republic in the usa is collapsing and eventually civil war seems inevitable.

I believe you intended to be replying to Athena, the initiator of this discussion.

I was just picking up the thread where you got to )