Jennifer C. Berkshire hosts the education podcast Have You Heard. She is the author, with Jack Schneider, of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School.
Conservatives today want to root out discussion of racism and other “controversial” topics from schools. Less discussed: the Right is also making advances in its age-old fight to indoctrinate the next generation in rabid free-market ideology.
The bipartisan obsession with schooling as an investment in “human capital” in the US since the 1970s has fostered a highly unequal society. We need wide-ranging redistribution to tackle inequality — and to defend public education against right-wing backlash.
For years, millionaires and religious zealots have teamed up to preach “school choice” in an effort to dismantle public education.