Is Dumbing Down Schools a Political Issue?

First of all, dumbing down the schools is not a "liberal" vs. "conservative" issue. Leftist (a more accurate term than "liberal") parents love the children they send to public school every bit as much as rightists who send their children to private or religious schools. If they sometimes push their children into poor learning environments, it is not out of a lack of love.

Next, what makes an issue a "political" issue? A political issue is one that is discussed in political campaigns, mentioned often in legislative sessions, and featured prominently in the speeches of elected officials. Political issues are frequently addressed in legislative bills and laws. In that sense of "political", school dumbing down barely moves the detector. While government schools have become mass producing meat grinders for the minds of the young, there are no government or political officials whose mention of government schools ever comes close to describing the problem.

Rather, it is a question of "raising test scores", "achieving higher levels of ethnic diversity", "increasing tolerance", "better orienting girls for careers in science and math", and other overly focused goals that fail to address the underlying problem of failure to prepare young minds for a tumultous future.

The dumbing down of schools in North America goes far beyond left-right politics. It goes to the heart of whether future generations will be able to confront the existential and near-existential threats they will meet. It is a large determinant of the survival of western civilisation. Minimising the importance of the widespread movement to dumb down education, is a form of denial which is equivalent to denying existential risk itself.

Whether dumbed down children are indoctrinated into leftist, rightist, centrist, or uppist or downist political points of view is irrelevant. The salient point is that the children's minds have been stunted--as if they had been chained inside a closet during their formative years and missed numerous developmental windows.

It is true that confirmed, activist leftists are far more likely to deny that there is any such problem as I have mentioned with government schools. Any problems that may exist can be easily solved by budgeting more money for the schools, by providing better financing to the intellectual architects of the present system. Do the same, only more of it. This advocacy by leftist activists, and the opposition to modern trends in government education by many in the center and on the religious right, may well lay the groundwork for this issue to become a public political issue, in campaigns and in legislative action.

But those political activists above are not usually addressing the key concern--the dumbing down, the stunting of minds, the age-isolation away from learning responsibility: leading to psychological neoteny. The abolition of the diversity of ideas--the only kind of diversity that matters in education--from the college and university environment that leads to academic lobotomy. Those issues remain beneath the radar for the most part. They are not political, unless the desire to see humans achieve the most that they can is political.