Beat the Press

To get a good country, get a good education.

The damned thing about a fascist takeover is, the steps you need to take to get rid of the fascists are made impossible by the fascists.

So people will have to improvise on these recommendations I am making. Maybe some local school boards will be able to implement them; maybe some people will have to do them at home as part of some subsidized home-schooling racket (sure to be popular in a Trump administration!) or else just as an evening parent-child activity like Bible reading or scrapbooking.

I propose two courses of study for young Americans.

Back in the old days — and I mean really old, before my time even — schools generally included civics among the subjects they taught. The image above is from a 1917 civics textbook on sale at Etsy, Community Civics by R.O. Hughes of Peabody High School, Pittsburgh. The TOC covers a lot of ground, in dozens of chapters from Branches of Government to Quality of Street Car Service to Disposal of Wastes and European Systems of Management, and so on. You can get an idea from this sample of the measured, thoughtful tone of the thing — which I’m sure has its own time-specific prejudices (I can imagine where that “Union and the States” section might get to) but you can also imagine a modern version that has fewer or at least milder prejudices.

There are modern civics books, I’m told, but I’m guessing they’re not as thorough as this one, which seems to follow the old pedagogical method: Cram the kids chapter by chapter, quiz them to make sure some of it stuck, and include some probing essay questions so at least a few of them will do some actual thinking.

The big idea was to show not only how one’s government and related systems worked but that it was meaningful to know how they worked. A lot of what we consider the old folks’ idealism (or naiveté) about government comes not from propaganda (though there is always going to be some of that in such education, hopefully not enough to totally turn the kids off), but from the effort and attention that went into teaching them about it.

The old-timers understood the basics. They had been shown the mechanism of the engine. They knew government was not just some black box into which you fed votes and got out tax breaks, but a series of interlocking systems in which they, as citizens, played a part.

Call it a hunch, but I think if our young people were given some such education, they wouldn’t vote like such fucking morons.

The other thing is newer: Media Literacy. We all have heard it preached for grown-ups, and there are some textbooks, but I think all kids should have classes in it the way they had — have, in my regime — civics classes.

I was thinking of doing one of my Received Opinion with Bolt Upright sketches today, but found the prospect too dispiriting. You guys know from those sketches and other commentary how badly I think our press has failed us in this election particularly, and how little they learn from their own failures — I mean look at this shit:

Amazing. Yet we fail our children by not teaching them to recognize this kind of dipshittery.

When I was a Sylvan Learning Center tutor I snuck in (it was not part of their rubric) simple news analysis as an exercise. I had the kids read a Daily News story and then tell me in a few words what it was about, to see if they could synthesize the information. (Which is hard for adults, too! I often have to refer several times to a story I have read to make sure I have all the facts straight.) If the story involved commentary — either by the writer or by sources — I checked them to see if they could tell that from the hard facts. “Fact and Opinion” were part of the rubric, but taught in silly made-up examples; I thought using a news story instead was not only a good reading assignment but also, like, you know, a life skill.

And it is. If more people had been taught this in school, I believe, when they read something in the papers about “concerns” about “crime” and you asked them if they knew the difference between that and a response to actual crime rates, they wouldn’t just gawk at you as if you’d asked them to give the value of pi to 13 decimal places.

This is not just good ol’-fashioned l’arnin’ for young’uns, but I think a way forward. It would make students more knowledgeable of the very important realities with which they will be confronted as adults — and much harder to bullshit.

Who’s with me?