How The Educational System Helped Create So Much Political Hostility
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman welcome to the show Will Bunch, National Opinion Columnist for the Phildelphia Inquirer and author of the upcoming book RESENT U, to discuss how the educational system created the political firestorm we’re in today.
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I mean, just look at how I accentuated that phrase, Happy New Year.
I went Happy New Year, not Happy New Year.
And I think that means that I'm just thankful that it's something we can start over with, but I don't know how amazing I feel about the actual year itself.
It's almost like putting your foot out there and testing the ground a little bit.
If I felt better, I would have been Happy New Year.
But instead, it's Happy New Year.
The emphasis.
It's where the emphasis is on the syllable.
That's what we're talking about.
Well, we are happy that you are here.
And I don't know, maybe I'm speaking for Nick here.
I'm hopeful.
I'm optimistic.
There's some rough stuff brewing.
Of course, 2022 is going to see us covering the midterm elections coming up.
Oh, I just ruined next year.
I just already ruined it.
It's only early January.
I already ruined it.
But we're going to be covering that.
And today we have a really special guest.
We have Will Bunch, who is an opinion writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the author of Resent You, How College Broke the American Dream and Divided the Nation, and How to Fix It.
We have a really good conversation, but before we get to that, we gotta talk about a couple things.
First and foremost, headline, headline, Marjorie Taylor Greene thrown off of Twitter, which I think is pretty much meaningless, but we have to talk about it.
She only had five strikes, Jared.
She now claims she only had three.
Yeah, two of them were a mistake or something, right?
Right.
Even still, three is fine with me.
That's a good number.
I agree.
And I want to point out in real Marjorie Taylor Greene fashion, I love at the beginning, it was like, I don't care.
I don't care.
I, but this is great that I got thrown off.
And then like two seconds later it's like, but I only had three strikes.
So you should bring me back because I don't care, which is, you know, it's, it's, it's sort of the, the, I think concentrated Marjorie Taylor Greene because she is absolutely, after all, a complete and utter grifter and troll.
That's who she is.
But she does it on purpose.
She's murdering herself to have this.
Again, don't forget Marjorie Taylor Greene can't go more than two weeks without being in the news.
And it had been about 12 days, or actually it's not quite true because she had the whammy we'll talk about in a second.
But you know what I mean?
Maybe, you know what?
Because she went more than 14 days without being in the news, she had to give us a double whammy.
So this was the other one.
But I would argue that she probably did it on purpose, knowing that they were going to do this.
And then she could have another cause to sort of cry about.
And we don't need to even talk about First Amendment, right?
Because that's what they're going to be yelling all the time.
Everyone on this podcast understands why it's not pertinent in this situation, right?
Right.
And listen, the whole thing is this is absolutely in her best interest.
This is who she is.
The entire point of the Republican Party at this point is pure aggrievement, which we're going to get into a little bit with Will Bunch here in a minute.
But the entire point is they have to say, look at how I'm being treated.
Look at what the powerful people are doing.
And by the way, they're not wrong.
It is weird that big tech has this type of power.
It is weird that basically they are able to control this on a whim, right?
Listen, I was as glad as anybody that Donald Trump got removed from Twitter, you know, as his presidency was almost over.
After they had profited off of him and gained users and a lot of influence using him and juicing him like a product.
But I also thought that it was weirdly dystopian that corporations just could get together and say, the President of the United States no longer has a platform here.
That is weird!
Like, you can say that's a victory, but you can also kind of side-eye it and say, my God, this whole thing is pretty disturbing.
Yeah, I mean, listen, it was still brave of them to do it, even still, right?
Because, again, it's any kind of future profits they're not getting for however long the guy lives.
So that is another part of it.
So, you know, I don't know.
I think the bottom line here is it's a private... Wait, hold on.
Time out.
Do you think if he runs for president in 2024, you think that there's not a possibility that they'll reinstate him for that?
Maybe.
They might say, hey, we'll give another chance.
But then again, he gets he gets the POTUS Twitter account.
So don't forget that.
And so does Marjorie Taylor Greene.
She has her own official account.
It's still there.
She still has a platform and she wants it to use her official, you know, and whatever her name is for the congressperson of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
So, you know, let's not forget like they're not silenced here.
You know, it's ridiculous.
No, and let's get to the big actual story after we have that appetizer, if you will.
And that is, of course, that Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is absolutely desperate for attention and is absolutely a grifter, but knows that she can get the most attention by pushing things like fascism, authoritarianism.
And I gotta say, one of my favorite things in the world, Nick, is when you DM me or when you'll text me something, because it's a little bit of a grab bag.
Do you know what I mean?
Maybe it's good.
Most of the time, it's really bad.
And in this case, you served me up a beautiful, beautiful stake of bullshit, which was that Marjorie Taylor Greene is now running around talking about a national divorce.
And for those keeping track at home, a national divorce is literally a civil war type situation.
And that is what she is now pushing for fundraising, for attention, for power.
And that's where we are.
That's what we're doing now, for attention and clicks and retweets and likes, apparently.
Yeah and that was in late December and I feel like she used the words divorce so she wouldn't get banned from Twitter at that moment and she chose those words carefully because there is no other there is no other way to describe what she wants other than to have some sort of secession from you know one part of the country and the other and you know we talked about this before I got to the point at some point in the past, you know, in 2021, where I was like, fine, give them their own part.
Get the people out who don't want to be in whatever part of the country they want.
Let's have them.
Maybe it'll be Mississippi, that whole area.
We can't get people masks.
We can't get people masks.
How are we going to move millions of people from one place to another?
It'll be the Underground Railroad.
I don't know.
Something.
Oh my god.
Soros will do it, Jared.
He'll do that.
Oh yeah.
The patron saint of the McCrae Podcast, George Soros.
Yeah.
So anyhow, I don't know.
But listen, it's awful.
It's horrible.
It's undemocratic.
It's against everything we've talked about for the Constitution.
And yet, in the name of the Constitution, she's arguing for all this crap.
Please tell me, you're there, you're local, please tell me she's going to get primaried or lose in the general?
No, no chance.
There's more of an opportunity of her running for president.
Oh wow.
Really?
Yeah.
I wonder what her polling numbers are.
Here's the thing, as somebody who watched Donald Trump Climb his way up to the nomination as everybody said that there was no possible way of him winning.
I do not want to sit here and tell you that there's no possible way.
Stop ruining my 2022.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm just I'm being honest.
You're piling on now.
That's awful.
That's an awful primary, by the way.
Like whatever happens by 2024 that the Republican primary in 2024 is going to be Mad Max Thunderdome on like PCP like and bath salts.
Because they're doing it.
They don't want to beat Trump necessarily if Trump wins.
They don't want to position themselves for 2028 and beyond.
But we saw Marjorie Taylor Greene as president in this movie, Don't Look Up, which maybe we'll talk about on Thursday.
Right?
We kind of got a taste of what that might be like.
So I'll pass.
Thank you.
I'll pass as well.
And before we get to Will, we also have to talk about the fact that the good old former president, Donald Trump, is using what platform he has remaining to endorse Viktor Orban.
And this is the statement.
And then we need to unpack who Orban is.
Of course, we've talked about the fact that Tucker Carlson went to Hungary.
The entire Republican Party is playing footsie under the table with Hungary.
Trump said in a statement, Viktor Orban of Hungary truly loves his country.
By the way, Nick, I missed his random capitalization in statements.
Oh, I see what you did there.
It's weird how you can just suddenly start thinking about people like Benito Mussolini.
"he does a wonderful job in protecting Hungary, "stopping illegal immigration, creating jobs, trade, "and should be allowed to continue to do so "in the upcoming election.
"He is a strong leader and respected by all.
"He has my complete support and endorsement "for reelection as Prime Minister of Italy." I mean, Hungary, sorry, sorry. - No, I see what you did there. - It's weird how you can just suddenly start thinking about people like Benito Mussolini.
It's very strange. - Oh, I know, I know, yes.
Yes, Orban, yeah, is your favorite, you know, you're my favorite person these days when we talk.
Our favorite autocrat, yeah.
Well, you know, he's playing into this notion that people want a strong leader that's going to take care of them and don't worry about the other stuff.
I'll just make sure that you can, you know, you'll be home for dinner with your kids or whatever.
Just don't say anything out loud about any dissidents or anything like that.
Are you saying, Nick, that he's going to make the trains run on time?
Yeah, basically he's going to make the trains run on time and maybe keep the streets clean, right?
It's unbelievable.
I mean, the things that Orban has done against his own media to shut it down, and then also immigration, that tells you all you need to know.
And those are facts that he will actually acknowledge.
That's what's so scary about it.
He's not hiding it.
He makes it completely clear what he's doing.
That's his entire platform.
And you know, when you think That, like, you can't be more blatant about this stuff.
Orban is the most blatant autocrat authoritarian that there is.
He even coined the term illiberal democracy.
He said, we're done with liberal democracy.
All of this voting, all of these rights, they get in the way.
And here's the linchpin, and here's why the Republicans love him so much, is he says, I'm doing it to protect Western civilization.
If we don't, there's going to be a bunch of immigrants streaming over the border, and a nation has to have borders, and we have to protect Western civilization.
He has laid a blueprint for what Republicans want to do in the United States of America.
And if you listen to them, if you actually read their articles, you listen to their podcasts, you actually pay attention to their research, that's what they want.
They say it in so many words.
They want an urbanized America.
And that's exactly what's happening here.
You have all of these authoritarians around the world who are starting to coalesce.
You've got Putin, you've got Trump, you've got Orban, Netanyahu there for a hot minute, right?
You have a lot of these people with these authoritarian tendencies who are helping one another and standing up for one another.
Wait, you forgot the headliner, North Korea.
Oh, I forgot.
I forgot Trump's best friend.
Right.
And by the way, when you go back and reread the coverage of those moments when the summit he had, people forget, like Trump had said, I'm buddies with this guy now.
They're not doing nuclear weapons anymore.
Trust me.
He tells me they're not.
And then what does it turn out?
They literally, the intelligence community has to leak this data that they know he's gotten farther along than they ever had before because Trump let him do it.
So why is Trump lying?
Trump knows this.
Why does Trump lie to benefit Putin?
Again, a lot of it has to do with the fact that he wants to be those people, but it also deals with the sort of collusion that we talked about before with Russia and the United States and the elections, that there's no other explanation for that kind of stuff.
No, and you know, to borrow a term from your world, game recognizes game.
I mean, these people know who they are.
They understand.
And this is something we talk about all the time.
We're at a moment of crisis.
We're at a moment where liberal democracy is being tested, where capitalism and neoliberalism is starting to fray.
Something else has to come along.
The question is, is it going to be what these assholes are putting together?
And by the way, Nick, for the book right now, I'm in the Trump presidency.
I'm back in like 2017.
Holy shit, is that a crazy time?
You know what I mean?
It's like trauma.
You almost push it out and don't think about what all it was.
My God, was it awful.
But what we're seeing is they are pushing something, which is illiberal democracy, which is authoritarianism, right?
Make the trains run on time.
Make the people go do their work.
Make people shut up and prefer one group over another.
Hint, by the way, it's evangelical white men.
But on the other side, We have to come up with something new.
We have to have an alternative, because I have to tell you that these guys, these guys are getting together on this shit.
Like, they are comparing nodes, they are helping one another, they are being each other's despotic wingmans.
That's where we are.
Wingman, wingmen, not wingmans.
Wingmen.
Right.
Bullshit.
You could be my wig man.
But, you know, listen.
We have to get into those communities.
I almost feel like, you know, the movie version is, is that a bunch of these liberal pinko commie bastards descend upon these neighborhoods where there are a lot of right-wing people who would otherwise hate them, and somehow they have the meet cute, and then next thing you know, like, they're like, oh, I get it.
Like, you really are just normal people who all want to get along, and next thing they're, like, having a three-legged race down the street, you know, with each other.
Like, that's what needs to happen.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
You know, oh, those guys aren't so bad!
Like, I can't believe that, you know, even if it's on a very, you know, myopic level of, like, it's someone who's very close to their neighborhood or something, it might thaw some of that out.
Like, that's all I could come up with because, you know, otherwise it turns into, you know, Violence.
It does.
And as you become more alienated, you become more frustrated.
You start to embrace those things.
They have answers.
The answers are wrong.
They're disgusting and they're terrifying.
But they have answers.
And answers to a lot of people are a lot better.
And particularly when the answers are like, hey, we're going to give you priority and we're going to take care of the people that you don't like.
Namely, people of color, gay people, vulnerable communities, women.
Muslims, we'll make sure that we take care of them.
Just don't ask what's happening over here.
You know, don't look too close to see what's happening over here.
That's an answer that some people are willing to hear.
The problem is when the response is, yeah, I know things are hard, Maybe we can means test a couple of things.
Maybe we'll be able to reach across the aisle with this group that just completely lost their ever-loving minds and figure out some sort of a bipartisan thing.
There has to be a reply because these people, they have their answers.
They're disgusting.
They're wrong.
They're terrifying.
They're dangerous.
But they have, quote unquote, answers.
Yeah.
And one way, which is clear to me, is education.
And we need to be able to figure out, because it does go down on such clear lines of, like, college educated versus non-college educated people, you know, it's a very, that's a big, that's one of the bigger Venn diagram circles, you know, where they don't intersect at all.
And so if we can't get that started and that improved, then I worry that we'll never get that started.
And by the way, it feels like it's done on purpose, right?
We've created a situation to have this.
I'm sorry.
They've created the environment of education the way it is now, and the byproduct, the natural byproduct of that is the political situation we're in.
Yeah, and we're going to talk to Will Bunch about that right now, and we'll be back to talk about it some more.
Hang out for a second.
Here's Will Bunch.
All right, everybody.
We have a really special treat today.
One of my favorite writers out there today who is absolutely killing it with the articles Bringing up necessary stuff, talking about the dangers that we are facing.
We're going to go ahead and start with this article from Will Bunch, who is an opinion writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and also the author of Resent You, How College Broke the American Dream and Divided the Nation and How to Fix It, which I, for one, can't wait to read.
Will Bunch, thanks for joining us.
Hey, Jared.
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks, guys.
I really appreciate it.
So, Nick and I were just talking about this before Will was able to come on, and we are so excited to get into this first article, which I think is bringing up a problem that people don't really want to touch, they don't really want to deal with, they don't really want to actually consider.
And I thought that Will did a great job in the Enquirer linking January 6th as a moment as this attempted coup, insurrection, and linking it to the problems with our educational system, our lack of understanding of civics, the way that we have sort of segregated the population in terms of who deserves an education, what type of an education the way that we have sort of segregated the population in terms of who
I think this gets down to the actual marrow of the bigger problems that we have to start dealing with But, Will, can you start us off and talk about where this article came from, what it was that inspired it, and what your feelings were as you put this together?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's a great question and a great introduction.
So, it's interesting, you know, like most column writers in America, you know, you couldn't You couldn't, and probably shouldn't, let the anniversary of January 6th pass without commenting on the one-year anniversary.
And in fact, you know, my editors have inquired and said, hey, you know, the Sunday before January 6th, which was yesterday, January 2nd, we're going to do a special issue in our Currents Opinion section about January 6th.
And I go, well, if I have something to say about January 6th, you know, and believe me, I've been writing a lot about January 6th for the last 12 months.
I wasn't exactly sure what tack I would take, though.
And then inspiration came from the strangest place because, well, two things.
I mean, it wasn't totally a lightning bolt.
I mean, I've been thinking a lot over the last year about education and particularly the lack of civics education, just the lack of
General education, you know, reasoning, uh, you know, science, uh, uh, not just with January 6th, but also, uh, with what we're seeing with, you know, vaccine refusal and vaccine denial, you know, what we've been seeing for the last decade or two on, on climate change and some other key issues.
So, so this has been on my mind.
It's, it's, it certainly was on my mind a lot as I wrote this book about the state of American college and how it affected our politics.
So I've been thinking a lot about these things and then, Just coincidentally, last week, as I was trying to hone in on what I was going to write about January 6th, I happened to see this story in my paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, that went viral about this really interesting case.
The Pennsylvania Constitution has some language about education in there that says, basically, support for education should be equal for all kids.
Across all districts, and I forget the exact wording in the Constitution, but it's clear that that's been.
Obliterated over the last few decades, you know, you know, suburban districts under the current system are much more heavily supported than either urban districts with high poverty rates or rural districts, which also have high poverty, higher poverty rates.
So somebody finally the, you know, Education Law Center and these education legal groups and a bunch of districts finally got together and filed a massive lawsuit about unequal education funding in Pennsylvania.
And, you know, it's currently it's currently in the statewide Commonwealth Court.
It's being argued.
And, you know, it's one of those court cases that it goes on for weeks and someone's got to sit there through a lot of dull moments.
But occasionally there'll be a moment that just Shines a light on everything, and a week or two ago there was such a moment when the superintendent for a very small rural school district, the Otto Eldred School District in McKean County, Pennsylvania, which is a very rural, mountainy county on the border of north central Pennsylvania with New York State.
Only a population of 40,000 people in the whole county.
And this guy was testifying about lack of state support for schools and what it's meant for how they've had to cut back on subjects like biology and algebra.
And, you know, he says it's been reflected in students' test scores in these subjects, which have dropped over the years as state support has declined.
Now, he's being he's being grilled in this lawsuit by a lawyer for the state legislature, which is controlled by Republicans and is basically engineered this steady decline in the state level of funding over the years.
And this guy named John Krill, a wonderful name, right?
So Krill, who's this- It fits the guy.
I'll just say that.
Absolutely.
A bottom feeder, right?
So this guy Krill, who's a Harvard Law educated corporate lawyer in Pennsylvania, he's defending the legislation.
He starts grilling the superintendent.
And he says, um, you know, if, if somebody, if somebody is going to be a carpenter, do they really need to know biology?
You know, he asks, and, uh, you know, which inspired some back and forth, you know, superintendent obviously tried to explain why, yes, he does.
And, you know, I mean, to me, that question is so ironic right now, because, you know, you look at the denial of science that's taking place out there in this life or death matter of whether people are getting vaccines.
And, you know, as soon as I read that, I immediately, Did some googling to see if I could find out if McKean County, PA has a low vaccination rate.
And much to my utter non surprise, it has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the state of Pennsylvania.
But this exchange continued and this lawyer Krill also asked, you know, does a kid does a kid really need to be taking Algebra 1 if he's on the McDonald's track?
You know, and it's just one of those moments, you know, you're like stunned to hear the quiet part said out loud, because, you know, for years we've been saying that in our education system that we put certain kinds of kids, whether they're from, you know, poor, you know, predominantly black and brown neighborhoods in the city, or whether they're from, you know, remote rural districts where the rate of college attendance is very low, that, you know, kids are just put on these certain tracks
Way too early in their career that you're just going to be a factory worker or nowadays you don't have factories.
I guess you're going to be a warehouse worker or you're going to be a fast food worker.
And as a result you don't really need to learn all these highfalutin things like algebra or biology.
And you know it's it's long been argued that that's what we're doing to our kids.
But to hear this guy Phil say it out loud was kind of shocking.
And to me it just Summed up the lack of investment in education that plays right in into January 6th.
And, you know, I mean, I mean, the bigger picture and I didn't even I mean, it's such a big picture.
I didn't even really get too deep into this and into my column that I finally wrote.
But it's kind of the subject of my book, which deals more with higher education.
But, you know, obviously, this attitude of telling kids that they're on the McDonald's track, you know, that They're going to be a carpenter that you don't need to know stuff, and then they grow up, and then they come to resent people who tell them what to do.
You know, look at, actually, I read a really good column this week about all the resentment that targets Dr. Fauci, you know, and Dr. Fauci should be this beloved figure at this point.
I mean, he's not always right about everything, but, you know, he's this public health guru who's guided us through several crises, and yet he's just the subject of scorn and contempt on the right.
It's really kind of reflects a resentment and scorn, you know, for learning, for knowledge.
And, you know, I think this comes from not giving people opportunities and writing them off.
And, you know, I mean, the politics of resentment is the politics that created Donald Trump.
And the politics of resentment, you know, so greatly fueled the people who were there on January 6th.
You know, they weren't all They weren't all people from McDonald's track, but they all did share this sense that elite educated people looked down on them, you know, that they were denied opportunities.
And so that's part of the problem.
And also part of the problem, frankly, is what they were denied by getting a lousy education.
You know, even though the back and forth in this court case dealt more with science subjects and math, you know, algebra and biology.
I think unspoken was how America in the last 30 to 40 years has totally abandoned education in the civics.
Because, you know, civics isn't something that boosts your math or reading scores on these tests that these kids are drilled in.
So schools suddenly found they didn't have time for civics.
And, you know, now we see this world of misinformation about government and how the government operates.
Um, you know, if you don't, if you don't understand civic, if you don't understand how a civil society works, uh, it's obviously just going to make you so much more susceptible to the big lie, which is what we've been dealing with.
Uh, you know, in the months before January 6th and in the year since January 6th, uh, just the ever growing number of people in one political party who are willing to believe this completely unsubstantiated falsehood that, um, Joe Biden became president through election fraud.
And, um, uh, you know, um, so, uh, that just, I think it just speaks to, um, a lack, just, it's not just a lack of knowing the facts about, you know, how a bill becomes a law, although I guess that would certainly be helpful, but it's just a, just a lack of respect for the whole process of learning, you know, of, of, of inquiry, of, uh, of, you know, rational thinking of how how do we solve a problem?
You know, I mean, the reason the reason that a carpenter benefits from biology isn't necessarily because he needs to know genetics in order to hammer drywall on the building.
But he does need to understand the process of science, you know, how we how we discover things.
And so, you know, when things that are going to be important to him in his life, like whether he should get vaccinated or whether he should wear a mask, You know, so he can appreciate how those decisions were made and the kind of knowledge that goes into those decisions and have some respect for them.
But, you know, if we just see education from the sixth grade on as just kind of putting people on career tracks and training them for either a career in Silicon Valley if they're one of the privileged or a career in McDonald's if they're one of the not privileged.
We're going to keep having these problems.
Well, you know, I was actually a high school teacher for several years in the late 90s and early 2000s.
And for what it's worth, we were forbidden from telling anybody, you know, you're going to work at McDonald's if you don't work harder as a student.
Like that was a thing where I think it must have been forbidden because teachers used to say it, right?
Like in the 80s or whatever.
And it got to that point where they actually had to explicitly say that, which I thought was fascinating because I think I was probably tempted to say that too, you know, coming out of that era.
And we used to joke around it at lunch, and it's not even a joke, that if aliens were to come down and observe what we were doing in this big inner city school, they would say, oh, you're trying to create people that will have to do all these menial jobs, right?
That is the goal of what you're doing here.
And we knew because of the lack of support and the lack of organization across the board that they were not getting the best education.
My question, though, is you've been around long enough to remember Your friend and ours Ronald Reagan and we always bring him up.
We always talk about this, but I sense that I wonder what your take on it.
This is is when he uttered the nine most terrifying words in English language, which were I'm from the government and I'm here to help I wonder if that was the beginning of this where The attitude shifted so severely against what government could mean and could help in terms of curriculum, in terms of standards and goals, that that led to sort of the destruction of the curriculum that we have now and lack of civics.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, you basically just, you know, teed up kind of the setup of my whole book.
And Ronald Reagan is very present throughout the book.
I mean, he's if anybody is he's kind of the villain of my book, Resent You, that comes out in August.
It's probably Ronald Reagan, who I, by the way, also wrote an entire different book about Ronald Reagan called Tear Down This Myth that looked at how conservatives have created and misused Reagan's legacy for their own modern purposes, and also looked at Reagan's actual track record versus the myths that have been created around him.
You know, Nick, there was so much in your question.
I mean, two things I would say about Kind of Reaganism and how it fits into all this, which is one is, you know, even even before Reagan said the line about I'm from the government, I'm here to help you.
I mean, his his start in elective politics, of course, was when he ran for governor of California in 1966.
And if you're a student of history, you'll know that this was in the immediate aftermath of really the first high profile student protest of that era, which was the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
Uh, you know, which students basically won a victory in their ability to speak about political issues, uh, on the, on the campus property at the, at the University of California at Berkeley.
And, uh, um, uh, I mean, Reagan based his campaign basically on fighting against the rat.
I mean, there were that, that, and also the Watts riots.
So it was, it was, his campaign was part, part anti-welfare, which also obviously feeds into an anti-government mode, but also, Uh, very much about public education, and it kind of fit this whole zeitgeist that, um, we're giving these kids, you know, at the time, tuition in California public universities was free.
There was no tuition.
Um, uh, just very small, tiny fees.
And that was it.
And, um, you know, so the attitude, especially among people from Reagan's generation, I mean, Reagan had obviously gone to college, but all the people from his generation who had not gone to college, which was a majority of voters at that time, Presenting these young kids who had this amazing opportunity that they hadn't had to go to college and educated themselves and now they're now they're rebelling against the system, you know, and This is the whole debate about what what is college and what is higher education or what is education really?
for in terms of You know if if you if you want liberal education and you want people to become free thinkers and people to Uh, develop rational thought and to, uh, develop skills of inquiry and asking questions about things.
Well, they're, they're going to ask questions and, uh, you know, as it turned out, you know, I mean, after, right after world war two, when you saw the big explosion in college attendance, which came about because of the GI bill and then, uh, played right into the baby boom that came right after that.
Uh, and it was an era of low tuition and, College attendance skyrocketed, and so did liberal education.
You had more people suddenly majoring in subjects like philosophy, sociology, which had not been popular before.
And these students asked questions.
So they protested civil rights.
Then they protested the Vietnam War when that came around.
And this led to an incredible backlash.
And when Reagan became governor, I mean, he said famously, I mean, he he actually surprisingly, he never successfully imposed tuition that ended up being his successors, but he pushed for it for his entire time in office.
And they did raise fees a lot on students.
And his famous line was, the taxpayer shouldn't be shouldn't be subsidizing intellectual curiosity.
And this That that one sentence, yeah, I think even more than the whole I'm from the government and here to help you.
I mean, I think the whole thing about not subsidizing intellectual curiosity summed up the Republican attitude towards education.
And like you said, I mean, it gets into this whole idea of basically training young people to be workers in a capitalist society.
You know, it's like, how do we create an education system that gives them enough skill where they can work in a factory or work in a McDonald's or work You know, or work in a, you know, Dilbert-style cubicle farm office setting, I guess.
But not so much free thinking that they're going to constantly question authority and they're not going to, you know, support things like socialism and they're not going to rebel against the system.
And I think this has been the formula that Republicans have been trying to keep in place.
And, you know, so again, Getting back to the moment in this in this court case, that's the whole thing about the McDonald's track.
I mean, like you said, Nick, I mean, it's not a new concept, obviously, and particularly, you know, you mentioned inner city schools.
And I mean, this has been the, you know, totally valid complaint of, you know, black and brown activists for for generations that their kids are written off from the moment they arrive at school, you know, that they're that they're given that they're Penalized by low expectations.
And, you know, if anything, if anything, it's like that attitude is spread and is to more places and the more kids is, you know, as we've gone on and, you know, just just a privileged few in this knowledge economy seem seem to be breaking out and really flourishing in the system.
And, you know, like I said, the people who held back are resentful.
It creates a culture where they're not going to glorify knowledge, they're going to scorn it, you know.
And, you know, it's not good and you can mock it, but it's almost understandable in a way that people would, you know, if people are told that they're going to be dumb their whole lives and they're not given opportunities to break out of that mode, yeah, they're going to be resentful.
Of course they are.
Well, and I want to point out, as the college professor on this call, that none of this was on accident.
This wasn't a mistake in any way, shape, or form.
I always try and explain to people because, obviously, because I am a liberal arts professor, obviously I have a beautiful wood-paneled office where I, you know, sift bourbon, you know, in between classes.
I have some patches, but they're few and far between.
And I'm glad you brought this up, Will, because Before the 60s and the 70s, before you have this backlash, before you have this free speech movement, the anti-war movement, I'll tell you who was really fond of investing in colleges and professors, and that was Republicans, and that was the federal government, because that's where we got our war weapons from.
That's where we got our technology.
In fact, social sciences ballooned up because they were being used as weapons of war.
That completely changed in the 1960s and 70s when all of a sudden they pushed back against that.
They started questioning the orthodox of the military industrial complex.
And so what happens is, and to go along with what you're talking about, they start divesting from these universities.
All of a sudden, not everybody is going to go to school, the prices start going up, the information economy obviously takes over, and then you're going to have the people who get ahead and the people who don't.
And this wasn't accidental.
People like the Koch brothers, people investing millions and billions in all of this, are very interested in privatizing this entire system.
They're very interested in making money, hand over fist, and all of this, and bringing the entire system down.
And the side effect of all of that, as you keep bringing up, I think pertinently, is resentment.
There are people who cannot afford to go and get that education.
It doesn't mean that they're dumb.
It doesn't mean that they're stupid.
It just so happens that they don't have the opportunities to go do it, and they are ripe for demagogues to say, I know you're angry.
I know you're pissed off.
I'll tell you who to be angry and pissed off.
At which, of course, is where we get Donald Trump and any number of demagogues at this point, right?
Right.
I mean, I mean, people it's funny because people on the left are always asking, you know, I don't understand these conservatives and especially these like rural conservatives.
You know, why aren't they angry at the CEOs of the corporations that outsource their jobs to China or outsource their jobs to Mexico or just shut down their factories?
You know, why is it that they hate You know, college professors like you, Jared, and why do they why do they hate journalists like me?
And why do they hate Hollywood movie stars?
You know, it just seems, you know, the people on the left, it can seem strange, like who these people resent.
And, you know, you know, I, you know, I covered the Trump campaign in 2016, to some extent, and went to a couple rallies, either on the outside or once on the inside.
And I always I really didn't care much about what Trump had to say.
But I was always kind of there to Talk to the people in the crowd and kind of understand their motivations and why they were there.
And I actually went to, uh, it's kind of a weird forgotten thing, but, uh, it was actually this time of year, uh, uh, five years ago, uh, uh, after Trump was elected and he was the presidential elect, but he still wanted to keep having rallies because he loved them so much.
So I actually went to a rally in Harrisburg or Hershey near Harrisburg, uh, between, Between his election and his him taking office.
And the only thing that people in the crowd want to talk, you know, people said, oh, it's economic resentment.
But, you know, nobody really had anything that was a beef about jobs or the economy.
The thing they wanted to talk about was how much they hated CNN.
I mean, the one thing that got the crowd really fired up was, you know, chanting CNN sucks and anything against the media.
Again, I mean, you have to.
You know, I mean, I've been covering I've been covering politics ever since, you know, the first the first presidential election I covered was 18.
Yeah, 18 seems like it was 1984.
It feels like 1884.
But, you know, 1984, the first first candidate I covered was Jesse Jackson campaigning on Super Tuesday in the Deep South.
So I've been I've been doing this for a while.
And But I get disappointed in kind of the way that we cover our politics, because I mean, we all know that there's angry, resentful voters out there, but it seems like the political reporters don't want to do the work of taking it all the way back to the root.
And to me, the root is very much in education.
You know, who gets opportunities for education and who doesn't?
You know, and like you said, I mean, when this decision was made, After the 60s and 70s, you know, and you're right, government did.
I mean, also, one thing you didn't mention, there was also much more government interest in funding K through 12 math and science education in those years because of the space race, you know, the whole 1958, the whole post Sputnik, you know, a major education Eisenhower says we have to meet the challenge of the new the new era.
Yeah.
And all of a sudden, the federal government found money to Funneled to schools, you know, and like you said, I mean, colleges like Michigan State, for example, back in the 60s, was just insane, the amount of money they got from the federal government for, some of it was for basic science, some of it was for applied research, but it was all, you know, geared towards, you know, winning the Cold War, basically.
And when that bottom dropped out, money-wise, and then also when you had the Conservative backlash against free thinking, liberal education at the same time.
You know, I mean, that that teed up the whole privatization of higher education.
And it's interesting because.
I think I think there have actually been kind of two effects of that.
One is the resentment it created among people who were shut out of college access all of a sudden.
What we've been talking about here.
The other thing, of course, is, you know, the millions of people who He said, well, all right, I still have to have a college education because that's the only credential that you really can use to make a middle class living in this society anymore.
So I will do whatever it takes to get that college degree.
And they were told, OK, well, what it takes is you need to take out this loan.
And it's a fair deal because by taking this loan out, You know, you're going to get a degree and that degree is going to give you what you need to make so much money that you will pay this loan back.
And this has been so problematic in so many ways.
You know, I mean, so many people, well, I mean, people didn't finish and get their degrees in some cases, but even those who did get their degrees in many cases found that they were not getting jobs at a rate that the pay these loans back.
And again, Again, it kind of cuts this whole broader issue of capitalism and social control, right?
I mean, how much freedom do you have to prevail against the prevailing social order if you owe $100,000?
And if you lose your job, you're not going to be able to pay back your debts.
So it's a very convenient system for the establishment.
And I think When you look at politics on the left side of the dial, particularly for voters under age 40 or under age 35, certainly, I really think, you know, there have been several drivers, but I think the college loan crisis has been a huge driver.
You know, again, I also spent a lot of time covering Bernie Sanders' campaign also in 2015, 2016.
I wrote a short e-book about Bernie's rise, in which I, again, I went to a lot of his rallies, talked to a lot of the people, and so many people again and again talked about the college debt, you know, that their kid was still living in the basement, or they wanted to go to college but they couldn't because they were so afraid they wouldn't be able to pay back their loans.
So really, if you look at it, the privatization of college has shaped the modern right and the modern left.
You know, it's interesting to me because we hear about the anger.
So, you know, the rhetorical questions are, are these people angry?
And yes, they are.
Who are they angry at?
And I know you mentioned, you know, CNN or the media, and they mentioned, you know, liberal, liberal professors, which Jerry constantly is pointing out how, how few liberal, I mean, some people are very angry at me.
Listen, I know it.
It's all right.
But I mean, I don't know how many times every week we have to hear about these professors who are so ultra right wing that it's like, how is it possible that you could claim on a blanket that there's all these liberal professors?
Because there's so many on the other side.
But here's the thing.
If they really are that mad and they feel like they weren't given what they were promised in the propaganda that is the United States system, they're mad at the politicians in some respects.
They're certainly mad at the Democrats.
But the solution in my mind would be that they'd want the government to do more for them to help them get what they were promised or what they think that they were promised.
But how is that not socialism then, right?
Isn't this a dichotomy that we're dealing with?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I think, I mean, if it starts, I think to some degree.
In my book, I talk about basically I feel like the whole college crisis has kind of divided America into four groups, not two in a sense, because I kind of compare it to a pizza cutter.
You know, you slice the pie one way between left and right, but then you turn it 90 degrees and you slice it another way between young and old.
And I mean, the driving force in the conservative movement is, I think, older people and in these blue-collar or these rural communities.
These were older people who feel like the social contract was changed on them because they came of age at a time where you were told, you know, correctly for most people that you didn't have to have a college degree to live a middle class lifestyle.
You know, in these towns that had like a thriving factory, it was kind of assumed that you would go into that and people were okay.
You know, a lot of people were okay with that.
It's like, you know,
I'm gonna make enough money to get a get a powerboat and I can go up to the lake on weekends or I'm gonna buy a cottage where I can go hunting up in the up in the mountains or you know that you could do that on a on a factory lifestyle back in the in the 70s or the 80s or even up to the 90s I guess to some degree and you know that social contract was changed on them you know these people excuse me these people have lost their jobs
They have a lot of free time on their hands, and they use that free time to listen to talk radio or watch Fox News, and they get radicalized.
So this, I mean, this group is kind of the driving force, you know, among younger people who've been shut out, you know, from the system because of the lack of access to higher education.
What you're seeing a lot of is this rising rate of deaths of despair, right?
You're seeing this increase in, you know, opioid or drug addiction and overdose deaths.
You're seeing this sharp increase in suicides among groups that didn't previously have high suicide rates, you know, white working class, middle-aged people, which has now unfortunately spread to young people.
In my book, I have a few vignettes to kind of explain these different types of people you find in America these days.
And for that generation, I actually, rather than talking to the young people, I talked to the mother of two kids in their mid-20s.
One of them committed suicide, and one of them died of a drug overdose.
Two of her five sons.
You know, and a nice family.
From a very industrial union factory where people didn't have college ambitions and they hit their 20s and they ended up being more adrift than they expected to be.
And this is pretty common.
So I think I think that's how it plays out to some degree among these younger people who who get locked out of the system, you know, and a lot a lot of them are not politically radicalized yet.
But I think there they will be over time, I think, if I think there's another interesting aspect of this too, because I think on one hand, and just to take January 6th, I think you were very smart in your article to go ahead and base that around there and make that sort of the core of it.
Like, at January 6th, you have people who are very pissed off because they're not part of the so-called new economy, right?
You've got extremists there, but you've also got this weird group.
You've got small business owners, you've got entrepreneurs, you've got people, and you mentioned the powerboat that you take out on the lake.
They've got the powerboat that they take out on the lake.
Matter of fact, some of them even have a powerboat dealership, right?
And there's a weird thing that happens there, which it's this phenomenon.
It's small business owners who feel like they should have bigger businesses.
They feel like they should have more money.
But also there's the aggrievement that I think that Trump has, which is, how dare you look down on us?
How dare you experts think you're better than us?
How dare you think your culture is better than us?
And a lot of it, I will, I'd be interested to hear what you think about this, a lot of it Is sort of their consumer identity of being like sort of a obnoxious kind of trollish activity that says, um, it makes me think, Nick, you might appreciate this.
It's the, um, what was it from Revenge of the Nerds?
It's like the slobs versus what's that idea?
Oh, I don't even remember now.
I just remember nerds and the jocks.
You know what I'm talking about.
It's like there's some sort of a weird thing happening there that makes them dislike experts and educated people and a certain bourgeois liberal society, if that makes sense.
Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, these people have been successful financially, you know, they're doing they're doing well.
They have they have the big boat, but they feel that society isn't giving them the respect They deserve because because they don't have the things that the things that liberals respect, I guess, or or whatever.
Excuse me.
So in the in the book, I although my editor cut it down a bit, unfortunately, but I had a whole riff in the book about.
The Trump boat boat parades of the 2020 campaign, which is exactly what you said, and there was a great.
There was a great article in The Washington Post and I'm blanking out now on who wrote it, but it was really good where she went to Sandusky, Ohio, and rode along in one of these trumpo parades, and it was exactly what you said, you know?
These people were doing, had built these really successful small businesses, but they felt they were looked down on.
They felt people didn't give them respect, and they had a lot of resentment.
You know it's funny because we talk all about that dichotomy you know all the time about how the torque involved in these positions which are not really tenable in one person's mind could also cause the frustration because perhaps they're not the self-reflection might not be there to understand inherently how these things don't really work together like I can remember hearing people complaining about how Brett Kavanaugh's life was ruined Because of his, you know, the process of confirming him, right?
He's ruined.
And you want to say to them, well, he's got a, you know, it's a nice family.
He's got a nice house.
He's a Supreme Court justice for the rest of his life.
Like, I don't see how this is anything but ruined.
And I wonder, I feel like that must be what kind of the agitator is fueled by that, where they can't quite see it in themselves and it's self-reflective enough to understand it, but it is there subconsciously.
And they know, like, yes, my life is pretty darn good, yet I need to be, I'm still angry, right?
And I still need to find someone.
I think that's the fear, I think, is where the politicians themselves that know they can get votes by saying that rhetoric don't realize necessarily how influential that becomes to the mindset of the people they're talking to, if that makes sense.
No, it makes a lot of sense.
I think you're making a great point there, because it's like we, you know, I mean, This thing that you just talked about, I mean, these feelings of lack of respect and resentment, I mean, these are the things that are really driving American politics right now.
And yet, it's like we don't have the right language to talk about them.
That they're there, and people sort of understand it, but we don't really talk about it the right way.
I mean, one of the reasons, maybe the main reason I wrote my book was, like I was saying before, I felt we weren't taking it back.
We weren't peeling away all the layers of this, you know, that... I mean, one thing I've noticed in political coverage in the last year or two is now it's very well understood, you know, among political writers and, I guess, political junkies who read that type of journalism, it's understood that the big divide in America right now is what we call the college-non-college divide.
And yet, I just see so little analysis of why?
So why?
Why would that, you know, Like, you know, for 100 years, we understood economic class divides, like, you know, of course, you know, of course, the middle class would have resentments against the upper class, and it makes perfect sense.
But the college, non-college divide is a little bit harder to understand.
And so, I mean, my feeling is you can't understand it unless you take a step or maybe two or three steps back and look at, well, what is, you know, What is college in terms of when I when I mean that I'm not being facetious?
I mean, what is what is college for?
Because, you know, in in the public's mind, the purpose of college is.
Constantly changed, you know, from generation to generation, you know, I mean, it's interesting because actually, if you go back kind of before the period of my book, like back to the early to the early 20th century, there was a lot more careers, careerism around college, just like there is today.
You know that back then people kind of saw colleges Kind of more career training, and then it was really in the mid-20th century that this idea of liberal education, you know, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, became embedded.
And, you know, the institutions embraced it, and students embraced it.
You know, I mean, one of the most fascinating things I learned in researching the book was UCLA, every year for decades, did a survey of its freshmen to get their attitudes.
If you go back to like 1969, 1970, you'd find, you know, 70, 75% of students thought the purpose of going to college was to learn, to gain knowledge, to become a smarter, well, better informed person.
And in the last like 10 years, you have about 70 to 75% of students answering the question is to get a career, to get a job.
You know, I mean that the purpose of college has changed.
that much in just two generations.
You know, and the ultimate question is, is higher education part of the public good?
In the sense of, do all of us, even those of us who aren't in college now, or maybe didn't even ever go to college, or, you know, or if you're like me, my kids have already been through college, you know, Are all of us as citizens invested somehow in having a system of higher education that works?
And if we are, then it should be supported by taxpayers and not, which would mean that we all share the cost, as opposed to the privatized system in which the burden is put entirely on the individual.
And since most individuals don't have the money that it costs to get a college education nowadays, they have to take out these usurious loans.
Um, you know, back, if you go back to the 40s and 50s, we were very close.
We never quite got there, but we were very close to the ideal of college as a public good.
You know, tuition was very low.
You know, I mean, you had, as you said, I mean, you had some fluky circumstances and then you had the government happened to be interested in funding colleges because of the Cold War and defense research.
So that was maybe an accident of history, but, um, uh, you know, In Pennsylvania, my home state, not that long ago, as recently as 1980, the public universities in Pennsylvania were 75% taxpayer funded out of the state budget.
Today, that figure is 25%.
And what makes up for that is tuition.
And when you say tuition, you're really saying loans.
Well, it's weird.
It's almost like we're all interdependent on each other.
And when we have education, it leads to innovation and a healthy society.
And whenever it is just about getting trained for a job, we all kind of suffer.
That's an odd thought.
Right.
And, you know, if education were seen as a public good, there'd be other benefits as well.
This really gets back to the whole January 6th thing.
One unexpected place that doing this book took me to was, um, I, you know, I really wanted to think, I didn't want to just lay out the problem, but I wanted to think long and hard about once we acknowledge this problem, well, what are we going to do about it?
And, you know, some of it, you know, obviously I think, you know, I support forgiving student loans.
Um, you know, I think they were, they were mostly, uh, derived out of bad faith, you know, and I think, I think we owe that to those people to forgive these loans.
You know, I think we should work back towards public universities being free, being part of the public good and supported by taxpayers, just like K-12 education is.
But another thing I get at, and the thing is, it's not going to be easy to get to that place, and especially, you know, given the conservative Opposition that we know is in place, you know, it's going to be very hard to get to those places.
And, you know, is there, is there, is there kind of an intermediate place?
And, uh, I'm not sure if conservatives would support this either, given their, given their current state of mind, possibly not, but, um, it's been kind of too far in the background, but there is a conversation out there about national service about 18 year olds.
you know, who faced this horrible pivot point, you know, you're 18, it's like, do you go to college and take out this huge loan?
Do you risk not going to college?
What do you do?
And, you know, I think we all agree that mandatory doesn't work.
We've seen with vaccines, for example, that mandatory doesn't work in this society.
But if you had a universal system where there were, the government funded lots of opportunities for 18 year olds to do a gap year of some kind of service.
And, you know, I'm not talking about military service, well, I guess that could be a small part of it.
But I'm talking mainly about civilian projects like the Civilian Climate Corps that's been talked about, which would be modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal, which was this wildly successful program where if you go to a Today you'll see the remnants of things that were built back in the 30s by these people that the government, who otherwise would have been unemployed, that the government hired to rebuild our national parks.
World War II and that whole era was on my mind a lot in this book because it was the year that created the GI Bill, which was really the first time that we thought that regular middle class kids could benefit from college and the government had some stake in paying for this, even if it was only for veterans.
But, you know, at least we had, that was really a step towards making higher education a public good.
But the other thing about the World War II era is, you know, because of surviving the Depression and then, you know, World War II and defeating fascism, I mean, there was this kind of sense of shared national purpose.
And the fact that so many people had served together in the military during World War II helped create some of those bonds.
And it was even better, actually, after the armed forces were desegregated after World War II, but before the Korean War.
I mean, they did studies showing that people who served in desegregated units came out of it with greater racial tolerance, you know?
And so to me, the question is, how do we, you know, people are so Isolated in their silos right now, whether it's privileged kids, whether it's kids from, you know, urban neighborhoods, whether it's kids from these rural areas and from countries.
How do we, how do we bring people from different backgrounds together?
How do we give them this opportunity, you know, to transition into adulthood that we do a terrible job at right now?
And I think, I think a universal, you know, greatly expanded gap year for 18 year olds and national service.
Would be great.
I understand, you know, and I understand it's controversial, you know, for people.
People on the left, anything like that, you know, kind of conjures up the draft in Vietnam to some degree, and you're always going to get that kind of gut negative reaction to it from some people, I think.
On the left, and of course on the right, they don't believe, a lot of people don't believe in any kind of shared purpose, you know, that this belief in individualism It's a problem, but I would love to see a push.
I mean, I think, you know, the GI Bill worked because you were able to get conservatives on board because it was a veterans program that benefited veterans.
And, you know, I think if you could do some work to get some, some, you know, the handful of possibly sane Republicans who are out there on board with some kind of national service program, I think, I think it's a foot in the door towards society Giving something back to its young people that we're not giving them today.
So yeah, that's a great point because we have another guest on recently who talked about the lack of, you know, giving back to society.
And I was almost like being facetious by saying, well, it sounds like you want to institute the draft.
But I didn't really consider that.
You're right.
There's a lot of other ways of being able to incorporate that.
That doesn't have to be military service.
And that's that's you know, we would need to push for that.
I you know, I can't help but think, though, when I'm listening to this conversation, I'm drawn to the movie.
I don't know if we remember the movie Breaking Away.
Remember this movie?
I love that movie.
I remember it very well, yeah.
Great.
Well, you know, and it's sort of about cutters, you know, sort of the town folk in Bloomington who don't go to college in Indiana, and then the conflict they have with the students there.
You're talking about my folks, Nick.
Right.
So here's the question now, because, you know, it ended up being a nice movie, a nice story about a kid who wants to get out of his situation.
He's a really good cyclist, and he's very cultured, even though he's not going to school, going to college.
I'm wondering if you rewrote that now.
That story, I think, would be a thousand times darker, right?
And it would be, we would have, what would your impression be now when you have that kind of conflict between the uneducated, like, in rural America, or the heartland, versus, like, the elite college people?
Right, well, you know, this idea that you can only forge a happy ending by, like, the title of the movie, by breaking away, you know, that if you somehow, you know, through your individual pluck, which is this whole thing with rugged individualism, That you're such a character that you find a way to rise above your fate as a cutter, which the hero does through bicycling, right?
One thing, and I have to confess, probably like most people, I guess, I knew nothing about this before I researched my book, but the biggest government study ever What the purpose of college should be was this blue ribbon panel that Harry Truman created right after World War Two, kind of on the heels of the success of the GI Bill, called the Truman, known as the Truman Commission, that looked at higher education.
And I learned a lot of fascinating things reading up on this, you know, the way that they, they saw liberal education, you know, certainly as a way to, Possibly avoid a nuclear war, you know, to prevent the slide into fascism that they've just seen in Germany and that maybe we just saw on January 6th, right?
So, I mean, I found that really interesting.
But another thing was also, I mean, they talked very clearly in their report about moving towards a society where people found dignity in all forms of work.
You know, they explicitly mentioned that.
I think that's part of the attitude of when you make learning something for learning's sake, and don't judge the results based on what you do with it.
In other words, we're not judging your time in higher education as success because you got a job at Facebook, but we're judging it as success because, you know, you've read, you know, You've read a bunch of great authors, you know, or, you know, you just have a better understanding of the world.
And maybe, maybe, maybe you're the most well read person in your town, and yet you're happy working as a cutter, you know, and that's okay.
But we have a society where we don't say that's okay right now.
You know, it's, if you're a cutter, we're going to look down on you.
Even if you're, you know, even if you're a cutter who's, you know, out there reading great literature, it doesn't really matter.
So that was this lofty idea that we had in this country once that it just seems kind of quaint nowadays, which is unfortunate.
And it would be great, you know, if we could kind of work back towards that.
And we've been talking with Will Bunch, opinion writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The article is America Gave Up on Truly Educating All Its Kids, then January 6th happened.
He's also the author of the forthcoming book.
I can't wait to read this, Will.
I really can't.
And then to present you, How College Broke the American Dream and Divided the Nation and How to Fix It.
Will, where can the good people find you?
Actually, the best place is just to Go to the Philadelphia Inquirer, to my author page, Will Bunch.
Some people find me by using my old blog address, which still exists, which was, my blog was called Attitude, A-T-T-Y-T-O-O-D, which is just a very Philadelphia thing that's hard to explain if you're not from Philly.
Although, the site still works, but not all of my columns end up on there for some weird reason that's too complicated for me to understand or to explain.
I would just go to that.
Also, a good way to follow me is just to go to inquirer.com backslash bunch, the UNCH, and you can enter your email address and you sign up for my weekly newsletter, which comes out every Tuesday.
And that's free to anybody who signs up, even if you're not, because if you try to read too many Inquirer articles, you'll probably come up against their paywall, like most modern news organizations.
The newsletter is not paywalled.
You can just sign up and get it every Tuesday.
So I would love for people to do that.
That would be great to stay in touch with all of your listeners.
Awesome.
Thank you so much, Will.
Thanks, Jared.
Thanks, Nick.
Thanks for having me on, guys.
All right, everybody, that was Will Bunch.
I'm really glad we got Will on here, particularly with this article.
It's something that I've been sort of Rolling around in my head a lot.
Again, I'm a liberal arts professor.
I've seen liberal arts completely unfunded, destroyed, as, of course, things like STEM have been pushed forward.
It messes with critical thinking.
It messes with our ability to imagine alternatives.
And that is by design.
Nick, I spent all weekend reading documents around No Child Left Behind.
And it's straight neoliberalism.
The World Bank wants to prepare people for careers, to slot them into careers.
You don't want to imagine new things.
There's a system that you need to fit into.
And it has really terrible consequences, really.
I was a ground zero there.
I was teaching during No Child Left Behind in high school and giving out those tests.
And you know what happened, though?
They were going to do funding based on the improvement from the first year to the second year.
And so I shit you not.
Here it is.
No, I know exactly where this is going and this is the problem.
This is before we had cell phones that were recorded because I would have recorded this.
In the meetings with the faculty and the heads of the school, they told us we have to tank the first year of these tests so that we could show a lot more improvement and get more money the next year.
Okay, I gotta tell you, Jared, these tests aren't the worst things.
Like, there's good stuff they need to learn, they need to know to be able to do well in college, or just to be a good student overall.
And so, as a result, by following that, a whole year worth of kids got a shittier education because of it, right?
Like, that's what happened out of that.
It was awful.
Well, I got a question for you, Nick.
Let's go to yonder Soviet Union era Russia, right?
And let's go back to Stalin.
Stalin was Russia, okay?
And by the way, for those who aren't aware, you cross Stalin, you end up either in Siberia or dead.
And no one knows where you went.
Well, a huge bureaucracy grew up in the Soviet Union in which you were charged with, I don't know, making a hundred rifles an hour, right?
Nick, what do you think happened if you weren't able to meet your quota within this bureaucracy in which everything depended upon you meeting your quota?
Do you think people made their quota all the time?
No.
What do you think that they did when they didn't meet their quota?
Well, they probably disappeared, like you described, and people didn't know what happened.
Well, for a while they disappeared, and then they got wise to it, and they realized that if they didn't meet their quota, they would be disappeared.
Then they started lying.
And when they started lying, they just started saying, yeah, we did that, right?
And now I want everyone to think about all the teachers who have been cheating on standardized tests.
Who have been leaking answers to students.
Why?
Because it's the difference between there being a school and there being an education or not.
Quote-unquote standards are fine.
I get that.
We've created this entire structure that is about privatizing, it's about creating charter schools, it's about giving, uh, it's about getting people like Betsy DeVos into the entire system to make, not just millions, but possibly billions off of it if it's ever totally privatized.
Plus also, you know, segregation.
It's about putting people in this quote-unquote McDonald's track.
It is a giant, giant mess.
And it has had consequences that were both intended and consequences that these people didn't intend and were unaware would possibly happen.
And it has put us in a really bad situation.
Right.
And even if they didn't intend those consequences, when you don't Critically think enough about these things and you know you should be able to see those things that is when you get these negative effects and that's why we need smart people who are in earnest who really do care about the country and care about our citizens to be part of that process.
That's what's so frustrating.
Can you imagine you know when they're trying to do the Affordable Care Act Well, under Obama.
And, you know, they're inner, and it's trying to create something that's going to, you know, drag people out of poverty and not have to deal with the, you know, life-threatening bankruptcy from whatever they might have or illnesses they have.
And then the other side, who is arguing, is the exact opposite of that take.
Can you imagine even that?
Trying to have a substantive conversation about health care when half of the people that are in charge of helping you fashion this are trying to kill people, basically.
That's what's so frustrating.
No, and the reason is because they have a religious faith in markets.
They truly, honestly believe, like within themselves, because of course this is about their own enrichment and their own empowerment, right?
Neoliberals truly, honestly believe that everything is made better by the market.
And then, by the way, people die in Texas when there's a freak snowstorm.
You know what I mean?
Where all of a sudden you look up and there's a fascist authoritarian movement because partly education's been screwed up, all of our social programs are absolutely evaporated, and all of a sudden you're like, oh my god, maybe I shouldn't have had a religious faith in this thing.
Maybe I was wrong here, but they can't do it.
They can't possibly reverse the course, so they just continue to go to markets and markets and markets.
It's It's an absolutely destructive religious type faith.
I know.
The problem is the religious part of that should be the thing that gets them to understand how important it is to help other people.
That's the bastardization of religion.
That's why, you know, Marxism doesn't want to have religion at all.
But it gets, like you said before, it gets replaced by something else anyway with the same fervor.
Also, to go along with that.
And this is something that's been driving me insane, Nick.
As I've been trying to, like, talk to people and educate people about neoliberalism, people are like, oh, what's better, Republicans?
It's like, no, you don't understand what neoliberalism means.
You don't understand that I'm not saying liberal.
And most people don't understand what liberal means, right?
And they don't understand what capitalism actually is and what socialism is and Marxism is.
You know, I thought Will hit on a good point there for a second, which is we aren't given a framework.
We're not taught how to understand what's going on and what fills the vacuum.
Conspiracy theories, right?
And if you ever do come across any kind of class that will help you, it's an advanced level college class.
Education does not prepare us for this stuff.
It doesn't make us think about things because it doesn't want us to think.
It wants us to be cogs in a hole. - And if you ever do come across any kind of class that will help you, it's an advanced level college class.
You're not gonna get exposed to that when you would need it in high school.
And that's the other problem too.
Maybe if you're lucky you go to a really good private high school that has a good curriculum and whatever.
But you're talking about a typical public school.
They're not going to have any kind of critical thinking classes that everyone needs to take.
That's why the best teachers are the ones who hint at things beyond their class.
Well, no, as you're talking... You know what happens to those teachers now.
Yeah, I do.
I absolutely do.
But it's like the best teachers are the ones who take the material that they're supposed to teach.
They teach that material, but they also gesture at a larger world.
Right?
They pique your interest.
They make you go take other classes.
They make you do research.
They make you read books and think about things.
That's the difference between a decent teacher and a great teacher, is you're exactly right, because these things are not on the curriculum.
And the more that Republicans take over, you better damn well bet it's going to be more of this quote-unquote McDonald track.
Right?
Because that's what they care about. - The things I would talk about in class, like during a math class I was teaching and that we'd get into a discussion about something else, I would be petrified to ever say anything like that ever again now because yeah, you'd lose your job and you'd be paraded in front of the school board, all these you'd lose your job and you'd be paraded in front of the That's the climate we live in now, unfortunately, when yes, it's an opportunity at times to be able to open up.
I taught a bunch of different subjects for years at a time.
I used to do a crossword puzzle in my English class.
You know, the Monday one, which is the easiest one of the week, you know?
But that would always spark some other interesting conversation.
I shudder to think what would happen now if I tried to do that.
Well, what would happen?
You would suddenly get a starring role in the CRT QAnon.
Conspiracy theory world because you all of a sudden you'd be at a school board meeting with a bunch of irate right-wing social media Paranoids yelling at you saying that you're trying to indoctrinate their children and you know turn them into something else It's that that's why they're doing this is to keep people from from getting access to this information All right, everybody.
Thank you for hanging out with us.
You know, we're so happy to be here in 2022.
We have so much damn work to do.
We appreciate you coming along for the ride.
A reminder that we have an additional show on Fridays, The Weekender.
All you have to do to gain access to that is go over to patreon.com slash mcrake.
podcast again.
That is patreon.com slash muckrake podcast.
You can also join the discord where the muckrake community hangs out.
Some of the best people on the face of the earth.
You should go hang out with them.
See who they are.
Form community.
That's what we have to do at this moment.
If you need us before the next show, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?