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Responding Reflectively to Ruptures

In “The Great Moving Nowhere Show,” Hall discusses Blairism and the politics of the status quo veiled in the language of progress. My own opinion of the current social and political reality in the United States is that we are in the beginning stages of a cultural moment in which people are refusing to accept the status quo and the ways in which politicians pay lip service to progress while abandoning their constituents and favoring the needs of wealthy, corporate donors over the physical, mental, emotional, moral, spiritual, and economic wellbeing of the people.

I came across a thread on Twitter recently, which has since been deleted or I would post it, and the gist of the thread was, “We have come to a moment where radical changes are necessary because the incremental changes that would have worked twenty years ago with climate change, livable wages, healthcare, gun regulation, police brutality, and so many other issues facing society were blocked at every turn by politicians and power brokers seeking to preserve the status quo.” I connect this to a famous quote from John F. Kennedy, which he said in 1962, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” My fear is that people’s disillusionment is moving more people to the right because conservatives are using outrage, which comes with the illusion of control, to create political momentum. Outrage is easy to cultivate and sustain as a political force, whereas organizing disparate groups of people around a common, complicated cause is immensely difficult, which leads to my question:

To what degree do the ruptures of the last several years--Trump’s election, COVID, George Floyd, to name a few--serve hegemonistic interests in moving people to the right, and in what ways can the left use these moments of rupture to better organize their own ideological apparatuses while exposing the flawed rhetoric of conservative political leaders?

My next question is more education-focused, and it concerns a moment in “The Great Moving Right Show,” which describes a political reality stemming from economic rupture in which the working class is forced to accept an “educational subordinate class” (184) status with "panic over falling standards and working-class illiteracy, the fears concerning politically-motivated teachers in the classroom, the scare stories about the 'violent' urban school...successfully [turning] the education sphere towards themes and goals being established for it by the forces of the right" (182). This shift comes with a push for “standard training, acceptable social skills, respect for authority, and traditional values, and discipline” (184) and I think we see this happening right now with interest groups in America funding parent organizations who are seeking to control what happens in their children’s schools.

If we are seeing a push for an “educational subordinate class” in America’s education system, how can educators organize their best efforts in exposing and subverting the true intent behind attempts to limit curriculum?

 

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