If you wanted to devise a plan that would assure the dumbing down of an entire population, what would it look like? On which fronts would you need to organize your assault? There's no need for lengthy deliberation about an answer here because others have already come up with a plan that virtually assures we will become a nation of poorly informed individuals. It's a plan that was implemented years ago and is now running full tilt boogie. It's been in place long enough, too, that now we have evidence that this plot is working and we in the U.S. are, indeed, largely uninformed, and on the way to becoming perhaps even more so.
How has this happened? Broken down into components, the plan is stunningly simple, really, and it builds and feeds on itself. And, just what are those components? Which actions needed to take place, where and by whom? Let's take a look-see and see what the process has been.
Control the media
In the past three decades, ownership of media outlets in the U.S. has consolidated to the point where we now have only a half dozen huge corporations weilding absolute control over 90% of the media available to most of us. This group of six corporations (Comcast, News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS) controls public discourse, and they do it beginning with the decisions they make about which stories or issues they're even going to cover before they get to the place where they present the preferred story from the perspective of their own bias and agenda. It doesn't matter whether the consumer favors newsprint, television, radio, or even online sources for news...Comcast and News Corp et al create the message, present it as "news," and run it over and over again on all their outlets until it becomes what passes for "truth."
This means that even those people who make conscious attempts to be informed on issues have to work hard to access more than a party or corporate line perspective. Sometimes, you have to dig deep to even find out there is a story. Unfortunately, too few of us make the effort required, for whatever reason, and I think we can expect to see more studies that show in concrete terms the disaster for an informed populace that is the result of people relying on corporate controlled media for their news. A recent study conducted by the Fairleigh Dickinson University offers a look at what happens when, for example, the preferred vendor for news is Fox and demonstrates perfectly the point I'm trying to make here.
Buy politicians you can count on
Once you've secured control over most vehicles for public communication through consolidated ownership of media outlets, the next thing you need are politicians who will happily accept your financial support and, in turn, use the bully pulpit of their elected office to promote any agenda you want promoted. Of course, if what you want is a dumbed down population, these spokespersons will need to espouse an anti-science and generally anti-intellectual position. If you can get them to couch it all in Biblical or otherwise religious terms, it's a double play, because nothing confounds logic or fact like faith and belief.
American anti-intellectualism is not new. It's a sentiment voiced as long ago as our colonial days, a time when John Cotton proclaimed, "The more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee." Perhaps Puritan Cotton's opinion had a biblical basis, grounded in the text of Genesis with God's admonition forbidding partaking of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Albert Einstein would later observe, "Highly developed spirits often encounter resistance from mediocre minds." Indeed. Anti-intellectualism is pernicious class war waged by the same people who accuse others of waging class war when social inequities are raised. They accuse others of snobbery while demonstrating their own. Touted as a populist stance, anti-intellectualism grows faster than, well, arugula.
The next time you hear someone like Senator Inhofe from Oklahoma with his "global warming is a hoax and humans are arrogant" message, or the likes of Texas Governor Rick Perry explaining why it's a good idea to teach creationism right next to evolution, at least you'll know why.
Assure that the text books of your choice are used in schools across the country
With corporate media creating and controlling the message and public servants in place to tout the party line, you can afford to move next to control what's taught in schools so you can prepare young students to be future consumers of your conglomerated media and to vote for your bought and paid for mouth pieces so the party won't stop for future generations of your personal lineage. And, if you want your version of history, science, and everything else taught in schools all across the country, you can get the ball rolling by working, really, just one or two states...because text book publishers, like other capitalists, are about making a profit and they make more money publishing the books they can sell the most of. What that effectively means is that populous states like Texas and California with activist school boards pushing an anti-science agenda are in a position to dictate which textbooks get published just on the basis of the sheer volume of their orders.
The Week has an article that lays out just how this all comes together. But it's important to note that, even if 21st century technology makes it easier for publication houses to do short runs or altered runs, your children are still screwed if your own local school board is taken over by zealots like the ones in Texas. The battle over text books is taken very seriously by the anti-science crowd and that's why you've seen so many activist school boards in recent years.
Rape limited resources available for public schools by pushing private charter schools and vouchers for private schools as progress and "choice"
This part of the plot reminds me a bit of the ruse so often run about Social Security in this country...the one where you break something then decry its sorry state and use its "failure" as justification to dismantle it. Uh huh. (You might also consider the U.S. Postal Service here as another case in point.)
Access to free public education changed this country for the better and I'm not sure how even the nitwits can argue otherwise in the context of overall creativity and ingenuity, productivity and, yes, even corporate profits. Civil rights battles in the 50s and 60s made a lie of the old "separate but equal" myth, and integration would soon force us to see just how unequally those who had been separated had been educated in their "separate but equal" schools.
So, the answer now to our problems in public schools is to separate? Again? Into charter, magnet, parochial, and otherwise private institutions of learning? Well, maybe it is the answer if what you want is a compliant but mostly uninformed segment of society to be drones or robots in service to your profit margin.
Scapegoat teachers and their unions for all of society's ills
If there's a problem in our public schools, it's because teachers are evil and the unions that represent them are how they're able to support lavish lifestyles while corrupting our children. Because, of course, only the truly vile would strive to go into debt getting an education so they could get a job requiring them to spend six hours a day in a confined space with small humans who have not yet developed the full range of behavioral adaptations required for peaceable assembly. Right?
Controlling the media and textbooks is not enough if you cannot silence the only people who really know a great deal about education...teachers. It's critical that they be demonized, otherwise people might actually listen to what they have to say about teaching-to-the-test and the rote "learning" they are so often mandated to pimp.
Frame any free access to information as an unwarranted "entitlement"
The internet has played a key role in removing barriers to information and, until recently, if you could afford to pay an internet service provider every month or get to a public library, you could have at your fingertips more information than you have time in your life to consume. Not since the invention of the Guggenheim press has how information been disseminated changed so quickly or dramatically. Access to information in the hands of the great unwashed?
No, not in this plan. Enter fees for online access to news sites, accompanied by insistence that the publication's survival depends on it (their online advertising revenues aside, of course) and the suggestion that it's all "worth" it because nothing's free and to suggest otherwise is socialist or...
Same for public libraries. In tight economic times, who needs them when we have so many pressing concerns, anyway? After all, who really reads? Elites? Shuttering facilities and reducing both staff and hours of operations limit access to information. Period. So, of course, it's a necessary part of the plan too.
A different plan
We need one. And we need it in a hurry because this handcart is rollin' down the track at full speed. Who hasn't seen the spectacle of Jay Leno's street interviews? I'm pretty sure those people breed and I'm afraid they may also vote. We need more of us and fewer of them and the only way I see for that to happen is for us to come up with our own plan that begins with confronting the lie that public education and the money to pay for it does not benefit every single one of us, no matter where or how we live. It's in our own best interest to rally whatever resources we can to create a new paradigm, one in which being uninformed isn't seen as either the status quo or even in some perverse way a desired state of being as early moralists and now their modern day version suggest.
Some of us may need to consider running for school boards ourselves, as organizing on a local level has proven hugely successful for the ones responsible for this mess. We can vote for politicians to represent us who want our children to be educated, not indoctrinated.
We can again call out the lie that separate will ever be equal. We must. But we also must confront the idiocy that there's something immoral or bad or otherwise wrong about wanting more and better anything for ourselves and others. Including access to information. There is nothing any more "wrong" about accessing information with which one equips oneself to live ones life than there is "wrong" with wanting to eat when you're hungry or shelter and a bed to sleep in when you're tired. When you get right down to it, I'm not sure any of us is equipped to pursue either life, liberty or happiness without information on which to base life altering decisions. That means we need to get smarter, not more stupid.