Trump Trainwreck - Ongoing diary of betrayal and evil

[pbrower2a]

In case you thought that the President-Elect could do little harm with education, then think again. How about appointing someone who thinks that working-class kids would do just as well by being shoved into the underpaid workforce?

Quote:A think tank funded by Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education pick recently advocated for putting kids back in the workforce.

The Acton Institute, a conservative nonprofit that is said to have received thousands of dollars in donations from Betsy DeVos and her family, posted an essay to its blog this month that called child labor “a gift our kids can handle.”

“Let us not just teach our children to play hard and study well, shuffling them through a long line of hobbies and electives and educational activities,” said the post’s author, Joseph Sunde. “A long day’s work and a load of sweat have plenty to teach as well.”

Child labor isn’t universally forbidden in the U.S.― actors and newspaper deliverers are two exceptions― but it is tightly regulated.

DeVos was a member of Acton’s Board of Directors for 10 years and while it’s unclear how much influence she currently has on the organization, its homepage now prominently features a message congratulating DeVos on her nomination.

The essay raises serious questions about the woman who would potentially be in charge of U.S. public schools. Education advocates have already expressed concern about DeVos’ history of supporting school voucher programs.

“In nominating DeVos, Trump makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on privatizing, defunding and destroying public education in America,” American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said.

“She has lobbied for failed schemes, like vouchers — which take away funding and local control from our public schools — to fund private schools at taxpayers’ expense,” the National Education Association said. “These schemes do nothing to help our most-vulnerable students while they ignore or exacerbate glaring opportunity gaps. She has consistently pushed a corporate agenda to privatize, de-professionalize and impose cookie-cutter solutions to public education.”

Trump’s team did not immediately return a request for comment.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bets...af95edf12e
My comment:

 I am well satisfied that being overworked and underpaid  in tasks of sheer drudgery as a child does little to prepare a child for anything other than being overworked and underpaid in tasks of sheer drudgery. The most effective teaching that I have ever known has elements of play.

Maybe we are finding out the hard way what "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN" means -- going back about 120 years, when working-class kids were spared the irrelevancy of schooling so that they could work to replace their parents worn out by age 35 in 70-hour workweeks of back-breaking toil.

Does anyone want to turn the calendar back 120 years or so? Sure, times were wonderful for the economic elites of the time.... but except for revolutions and wars that topple elites and the harsh justice against recently-overthrown elites held culpable for everything that went wrong, aren't most times great for elites? The middle class? If one was lucky enough to be in it, real estate was cheap and spacious. But there was no plethora of white-collar jobs that make possible the urban sprawl of giant blocks of tiny condominiums, strip malls, ten-lane expressways inadequate for the traffic upon them.  The least problematic aspect of a return to the past would be the disappearance of the technologies of entertainment. Television numbs us, the popular music of our time isn't an improvement from the ragtime of Scott Joplin's time, and the correspondence that people used to send was far wittier and more thoughtful than the instantaneous communications on the telephone. But return to the social norms of the Gilded Age? That is the ugly capitalism of Marxist stereotypes, the sort of order that a decent person would seek to reform, if not overthrow.

  
Here's a reminder of how and things would be if Donald Trump and his political figures got their way, except that he would not cast off modern technology.

The Good Old Days -- They Were Terrible