Friday, March 24, 2023

They Don't Care

With book banning going on all over the country and state universities being taken over by conservative authoritarians who are limiting fields of study and course content in various ways, people regularly ask, WHERE ARE THE FREE SPEECH WARRIORS?

Most of the free speech warriors don't care about public school kids in Florida, or state university students anywhere. It took me a long time to understand this, but most of these people really do think liberal education is a luxury that only the rich should have access to, and everyone else should go to trade school. 

They wouldn't say "rich" and they might even believe they just mean "top students" as of course meritocracy is real, but they mean the top <%5 of students as defined by our biased sorting hat, most of whom are, of course, rich.

The seeds of this was planted in the general war on humanities and the promotion of STEM.  After blaming African-Americans for taking out bad mortgages for the financial crisis, they moved on to blaming the Great Recession on students getting "useless" degrees.  The consequences of this are pretty obvious now that our tech overlords believe the chatbots are their new sentient friends.

There's no hypocrisy in Harvard philosophy grads telling everyone to "learn to code" or whatever.  They mean everyone else!