We’ve downgraded public education, from kindergarten through graduate school. For primary and secondary school, education budget cuts to fund income tax reductions for the rich, a nation once ranked first on global academic standards has watched our test scores plunge. Pre-pandemic comparisons were already abysmal. According to Pew Research (2/15/17): “One of the biggest cross-national tests is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years measures reading ability, math and science literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds in dozens of developed and developing countries. The most recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science.”
With about 13,000 individual school districts, local school boards debate teaching “creationism” as state legislators in red states pass bans on “critical race theory,” with little concern for the traditional role of teachers presenting facts, not “alternative facts.” We’ve made college education the modern-day equivalent of a high school degree three decades ago, but average college graduates are faced with the highest inflation corrected tuition in history (double or triple what was effectively the cost 50 years ago) and carry an average of $40 thousand in student loan debt. And while the Biden administration want to make at least community college tuition free, Republican resistance to that economy-builder is fierce.
Free or near-free college education is available top universities in so much of the rest of the world, from Germany to Mexico. STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) is the focus in most of the world, a very necessary aspect of job and economic growth. But one of the largest category of unfilled jobs in the United States is for those with college STEM degrees. We used to fill those jobs with educated immigrants, but barriers to H1B visas, severely erected by the Trump administration with significant lingering effects into the present, pushed those qualified immigrants to the UK and Canada instead. Major US tech firms, like Oracle, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have moved major research operations out of the United States accordingly.
But there is one other horrific result of these changed to our educational system, amplified by our immigration barriers: intolerant resentment of the educated as elites to be crushed, parallels felt within our view of immigrants as well. Effectively, we have politicized knowledge. Elites, now defined simply people with education, are no longer trusted, easily usurped by “us against them” conspiracy theories. Even as majority of rising generations are getting at least some college educations. Parents and grandparents even turn on their educated young. Against doctors and scientists.
Nothing screams the impact of politically motivated ignorance than climate change denial – evidenced by an unwillingness of conservative populists to approve policies to reverse the very global warming issues that impact them the most – and the brick wall we are facing with continuing populist COVID-19 vaccine skepticism. That COVID infections and death dropped like a stone as vaccines were increasingly deployed, and that the Delta variant surge we are experiencing has become a deadly pandemic of the unvaccinated, just does not matter.
For so many, refusing to wear masks or get vaccinated is simply a political statement against some imagined “radical left” conspiracy, their affirmation of conservative beliefs. Under some misguided belief that their right to engage in activities that may well infect others has some mysterious (nonexistent) constitutional protection. And so we get sick. Some die. Variants have a massive and readily available mutation field to grow and infect.
The American political denigration of science, with all of its horribles, is made even clearer when we compare the United States with its culturally similar neighbor to the north. Los Angeles Times editorialist, Doyle McManus (on August 1st) expounds: “Canada has fewer anti-vaxxers than the U.S.; a poll found citizens’ trust level in their government to be twice as high as Americans’. (Cole Burston Canadian Press)…
“Three months ago, Canada, which has no domestic manufacturer of COVID-19 vaccines, lagged far behind the United States in immunizations. Only 3% of its population was fully vaccinated. Canadians watched glumly as friends and relatives south of the border lined up for shots, while residents of Toronto and Montreal suffered repeated lockdowns.
“No longer. Last month, Canada blew past the United States in the share of its population that’s fully vaccinated — 58% as of Friday, versus 49% in the U.S. — to take first place among the seven big industrial democracies. (The United States ranks sixth, ahead of only Japan.)
“How did Canada, the country that most closely resembles the United States, do so much better, even though it had to wait longer for Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to deliver their vaccines?... The simple answer is that in Canada, the pandemic didn’t become a politically polarized issue, as it did in the United States.
“Canada’s major political parties, including the opposition Conservatives, joined early in full-throated support of mass vaccination. Leading politicians didn’t dismiss immunization as unnecessary, deride mask mandates or attack scientists… When Andrew Scheer, then the Conservative leader, criticized Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last year over the immunization program, it was to complain that he wasn’t delivering vaccines fast enough…Canadians have argued over how quickly to lift limits on public gatherings, restaurants and retail stores, but their debates have been muted by U.S. standards…
“Of course, not everyone is impressed by Canada’s anti-pandemic measures… Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently derided them as an example of what not to do… ‘We were the leading state fighting against coronavirus lockdowns,’ he bragged on Fox News. ‘I believe had Florida not done that, you would see the other states to have followed Canada, [which is] still locked down.’
“But the governor should be careful about the comparisons he invites… Florida led the United States in COVID-19 cases last week, and more than 39,000 Sunshine State residents have died from the disease…Canada, with a much larger population, has had about 26,500 COVID deaths. Its per capita death rate is less than half that of Florida.”
I will argue that our political polarization is the result of so much more than our traditional rural-urban values schism – about 90% of the US population live in urban areas. It is the product of kowtowing to anger and frustration at change, religiosity and a belief that simple (understandable) answers provide viable solutions to complex problems. It is the worship of ignorance over “it takes a real effort to understand” facts. Outsourcing opinions to “leaders” and “media personalities” who toss those simple answers about as if they were true.
I’m Peter Dekom, and a society where large swaths of its citizenship worship ignorance and decry educated expertise is doomed to unravel and fail, no longer able to complete in a world where facts are learned and given respect.
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