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The Dumbing Down of America

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When the elite that run the nation are deciding futures, however, this is to be expected. Their corporations need low-class workers; their armies need soldiers; their government needs slaves. By maintaining separate and unequal education systems, in essence two completely different systems, one reserved for privilege, the other for future serfs, the elite are assured of control, exploitation, power and growing wealth, mostly at the hands of the slaves they have created. The masses, having been trained from birth to become the slaves of the nation's capitalists, are subjected to years of subservient education mechanisms that encourage and indeed guide us toward exploitation. The dreams and hopes of childhood are thus eviscerated as the reality of the environment and education we are born into collides with once creative talents and utopian goals.

Born into environments offering the worst in American education creates in the masses ignorance to the plight our government is subjecting us to. We are made unaware and become indifferent to the massive crime being perpetrated by government officials who help foster separate and unequal education and even encourage it by their unwillingness to make right what has been made wrong. The continued apathy of our government to the vastly different levels of education is proof that it is complicit in the manufacturing of an entire class of slaves produced to be exploited by the powerful few. To continue a system that is so dastardly in its scope and so damaging to millions is to acknowledge the purposeful disregard our government has in alleviating a reality that in this nation at least does not need to exist. It is shameful, it is wrong, it is a crime.

An assembly line of slaves has been created, socially engineered through years of manipulations and exploitations, breeding ignorance, robbing opportunity, erasing talent and harvesting entire generations of worker bees. For America the beautiful needs slaves to work and enrich the elite, it needs soldiers to wage war in the name of capitalism, it needs ignorance to continue its sovereignty and castes from which to maintain the balance that has kept those in power at the top for generations.

Separate and unequal, the secret ingredients to the American juggernaut; separate and unequal, the oil that assures the mighty engine of capitalism from ever corroding and malfunctioning. Through the backs of the masses the elite survive; through the exploitation of the many the few thrive.


Leaving all Working and Middle Class Children Behind


The dumbing down of America continues its injurious path through the policies of George Bush, who is quietly decimating the talents and energies of the nation's youth. Wishing all children to become the bumbling idiot that characterizes his existence, his policies have washed away what remained of viable education. The dumbing down of America has only picked up its pace as children today are being deprived of the tools necessary to think for themselves. Forced by the government to teach to standardized tests, school districts are erasing the arts and other important classes from curriculum. Instead, teachers are being forced to prepare their students to passing the test that determines financial reward or punishment.

This form of education is leveling critical thinking, analytical skills and free-thinking minds. It is destroying education as we know it, along with the futures of millions of children who are being made automatons lacking a mind to question the world around them. This sinister mechanism is purposefully being implemented to dumb down American children. It is yet another tool those in power are using to create a nation devoid of free thought.

Teaching to the test entails sacrificing all subject matter not included in the test itself. As a result, vital tools such as music, art, languages, social sciences, philosophy, health and other liberal arts are being ignored, thrown away into dark closets of indifference. Worthy teachers now have their hands tied down, unable to bring out the blossoms of talent from their students. Instead, they must partake in the manipulation of America's children, becoming the instructors to a new generation of students those in power want desperately to transform into unthinking sentinels easily manipulated and controlled.

America's teachers, already underpaid and under funded, battling a system eager to destroy youth, must now see the seeds they sow become homogenous crops succumbing to ignorance, eroding all semblance of individuality and wasting away once fruitful and talented lives. All children are being left behind, and American society will pay the ultimate and most severe price.


Fostering Ignorance, Creating Sheep, Cementing Decline


Children are brainwashed at a very early age to follow the dictates of the state, to become the obedient drones the state needs in order to survive. Curriculum programs prevent the free-thinking mind from ever emerging even as such paramount subject matter such as art, foreign language, music and philosophy are being eliminated or never implemented. It is at a very early age when these classes can make a such a vital difference in children, in essence granting an enormous head start towards a long lasting, happy life. It is at early youth that the human brain absorbs everything that is taught, it is at this stage in development when positive and all-inclusive education bears fruit. Yet American children, living in the wealthiest nation on the planet, are being denied the essential tools needed for human progress to move forward, individuals to prosper and for a nation to thrive.

Becoming an exercise in futility, education has become a weapon to militarize millions of children to the tune of the government, robbing them of the free-thinking and analytical mind whose questioning of government and individual thought the elite want eliminated. In today's America, no child must be allowed to think or understand what is being done to them and the society they inhabit. Every child being taught must march in lock-step with millions more, becoming benign drones made ignorant to a process robbing them of their existence, neither challenging those in power or absorbing the ingredients necessary to develop a mind that may one day become the ultimate weapon for freedom and salvation.

As in all state systems, in order to have subservient citizens, the young must be programmed early on to the dictates of those in power. In America, these entities are the elite capitalists that have transformed democracy into corporatism. Entire generations of people have become an enormous herd of sheep, unaware of the slavery that grips them and the exploitation that befalls every waking hour. The corporatist state has accomplished the ignorance of its citizens, now ruling unobstructed and unaccountable, free to unleash wave after wave of crimes, both upon those it rules and those it conquers.

The majority of the American people now fail to question authority, debate policy, seek accountability or demand answers. Indifferent we have become to the dangerous ways of our government or to our own plight. Every generation has seen its ability to understand, question and analyze dwindle with each subsequent decade that passes. Soon the day will arrive when complete drones our descendants become, completely subservient to the will of the rulers, shackled in chains of ignorance, transformed into exploitable energies deficient of free-thinking minds.

The only vestige of freedom left is that of the mind, a realm never before touched by the claws of the state and the powerful. Yet this freedom is disappearing, for the state has found a way to annihilate a freedom once thought untouchable. Free-thought is fading fast from an American psyche that once espoused the belief in the power of the individual. In its wake lie hundreds of millions of energies whose minds have been captured in a war we failed to realize we were being subjected to. Free-thinking minds are being made extinct, suffering from years of social engineering and artificial conditioning.

More and more we are failing to understand what is being done to us and our children. With each passing day the corporate Leviathan absorbs more of our collective brain, inculcating us with garbage, conditioning us to its version of what American society should be. The wretched symptoms of capitalism are devouring our very existence, making us the sheeple the system feeds off of. We are being herded to the slaughterhouse, ready to be gutted and mass produced, sold to the hungry wolves and vultures concomitantly ready to feast off our once vibrant energies.

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Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst and Internet essayist. His articles as well as his archive can be found at his blog, http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com as well as at other alternative (more...)
 
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