We must remember that, in the 1880s, the United States was beset by what were called at the time “red scares”; that is, the possibility that the workers and other poor people would take a run at the mostly unearned and undeserved wealth of the owners of the country and those that serve them by virtue of a communist revolution was greater than it had been previously during the short history of the “great” experiment that pretended to be an experiment in democracy but came with constitutional safeguards against the people ever having any real political power. Therefore, the powers-that-be instituted mandatory public education, the hidden purpose of which was to promulgate anti-communist propaganda and the avowed purpose of which was to prepare people to be useful cogs in the giant business machine that was gradually replacing agriculture as the principal economic activity of the nation.
This has proceeded to the point that, in my daughter’s high-school, nothing is taught that will help provide food, clothing, healthcare, few affordable luxuries that take the misery out of life, or entertainment. Nothing is taught that might be even slightly useful in the wake of Peak Oil. We have world geography rather than permaculture, biology rather than animal husbandry, Euclidian geometry rather than fabric and/or clothing manufacture, etc.
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Thomas Wayburn, PhD
Houston, Texas
December 9, 2012