Jason Benell <\/a>lives in West Des Moines with his wife and two children. He is a combat veteran, Dallas County supervisor candidate, and president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers.<\/em> This essay first appeared<\/a> on his Substack newsletter, The Odd Man Out<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDemocracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.\u201d<\/strong> \u2013 Franklin Delano Roosevelt<\/p>\n\n\n\n The battle over schools is not something we should take lightly or view as a blip in a partisan battle. This is a generational challenge, which threatens the very existence of our state and our country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The arguments between public and private schools with voucher programs has taken up a lot of space in Iowa’s political discourse, and for good reason. With hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars going to private religious institutions and years of underfunding public education, we are seeing an attack on the very institutions that have made the United States and places like Iowa even possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/span>\n\n\n\n This isn\u2019t a simple matter of \u201cI dislike schools teaching religion\u201d or \u201conly the wealthy will have more opportunities,” though those statements are true. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The intended goal here seems to be not to give families choices, or allow folks to attend their preferred religious school, but to undermine the idea of education itself. The evidence for this is overwhelming when we look at how these laws function and the priorities of lawmakers pushing them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Often, we hear conservatives say \u201cschools should just be for learning reading, writing, and math,\u201d suggesting that everything else is either a distraction or a waste of time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Besides being outwardly ignorant and inwardly inconsistent, this kind of thinking reveals a certain anti-intellectualism. Anyone who echoes that line gives away that they really don\u2019t care about education, they only care about the idea<\/em> of education. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Conservatives think it\u2019s good to be smart and highly qualified, they just don\u2019t think the steps to get that way are worth funding\u2014at least not with their dollars, and not in a way they don\u2019t understand. They seem to be scared of new ideas and of critical thought, and their policies towards education reflect that fear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you keep putting people like that in charge of schools, you will not only get citizens who aren\u2019t as flexible or resilient in their thinking, you will produce citizens who don\u2019t know what education is. <\/em>Education is more than sitting in a room for a few hours a day receiving a lecture or making macaroni pictures with a bunch of little kids. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s always been about more than that. No culture, society, or civilization produced great engineers, scientists, or artists by blocking off access to information and \u201conly teaching the basics.” They left their academic doors wide open and made their mark on history by pushing boundaries. In contrast, years of collapse are often marked by fear, superstition, and disassociation from the pursuit of knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When education and reason give way to superstition and fear, you can spot a culture about to collapse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Republicans seem to think that isn\u2019t true\u2014possibly because they wouldn\u2019t be Republicans if they had critical thinking skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.\u201d \u2014 Aristotle<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Conservatives\u2019 ideology seems to be based on the idea that knowledge can be a bad thing, inherently dangerous or even harmful. We see this reflected in their crusades against schools acknowledging that LGTBQ people exist or that non-religious folks are inherently evil or broken. They seem compelled to create outgroups and taboos to justify removing access to information and knowledge, lest the people be corrupted by thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For that reason, I see education as the enemy of conservatism. Republicans seem to agree with me, and I suspect that’s the real reason they want to erase history. They want to create a world where education is shallow and narrow, only reinforcing their ignorance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For conservatives and Republicans, if an idea takes time to understand and explain, it isn\u2019t worth having available to the public. They seem incapable of understanding that educated people can hold an idea in their head without adopting it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If an entire generation can’t write a paragraph, doesn’t know about the struggles of certain groups of people\u2014even their own ancestors!\u2014and can’t function on a global stage, then that generation is lost to the first huckster or con man promising them fame and fortune. People who don\u2019t know their history are doomed to repeat it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another reason Iowa Republicans want to attack public education: they love affirmative action for bad ideas. Their ideas are stale, and academics, intellectuals, and educated people reject many of their axioms as false due to lack of data or consistency. They know that when young people have access to different viewpoints (whether that be in film, theater, literature, political theory, or philosophy), very few land on conservative values or ideas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Conservatives often thrive where their ideas are promoted and critical analysis avoided. Since they can\u2019t compete academically or philosophically, they create siloed institutions that mimic education and inquiry with separate standards for theocratic apologetics and pseudo-science. And they want to use public funds to do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s no surprise that prominent conservative \u201cthinkers\u201d tend to come from a small subset of institutions, and tend to have the same ethno-religious make up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They like the idea of \u201cseparate, but equal\u201d (to quote Jim Crow-era laws and the civil rights removal bill Governor Kim Reynolds signed last year*), so they don\u2019t want to teach kids about it. They like the idea of a poll tax, so they don\u2019t want to teach kids about it. They like the idea of persecuting sexual and religious minorities, so they don\u2019t want to teach kids about it. They like the idea of authoritarianism and dislike civic participation, so they don\u2019t want to teach kids about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sure, they get rich by funneling public money to their private donors, but they also can eliminate the ability of a people to function democratically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Conservative Christians and Republicans want to bring us back to the Bad Old Days of Jim Crow and the Red Scare. They find the First Amendment useful only insofar as they can use it to control the public sphere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Education is the cornerstone of our democracy. Don\u2019t let nonsense scare tactics fool you: schools are one of our best public goods and are what made America so successful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first step on the path to authoritarian theocracy is to dismantle public education, so that in a generation our children won\u2019t have the tools or language to call out the autocrats. If they succeed in that endeavor, it will likely be the end of democracy as we know it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *Senate File 418<\/a>, the 2025 bill that repealed civil rights for transgender Iowans, included this line: “Separate accommodations are not inherently unequal.”<\/p>\n The post Public education is the cornerstone of our democracy<\/a> appeared first on Bleeding Heartland<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n
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Commentary,Education,Iowa GOP\r\n
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