Since the 1980s, the right moved in a distructive direction, mobilizing a range of educational forces and wider cultural apparatuses as a way of addressing broader ideas that appealed to a wider public and issues that resonated with their everyday lives. Tax reform, the role of govt, the crisis of education, family values and the economy, were wrenched out of their progressive legacy and inserted into a context defined by the values of the free market, an unbridled notion of freedom and individualism and a growing hatred for the social contract.
At the heart of this movement was a culture of cruelty and vulgarity that used education to produce a new form of political illiteracy with no difference between opinions and arguments, reason and emotion and evidence and false statement. In this culture of illiteracy, science became a liability, thinking became an act of stupidity... |