It Can’t Happen Here… Really?
Sinclair Lewis wrote the satirical political novel, It Can’t Happen Here, in 1935, when the United States and Western Europe had been in a depression for six years. Lewis asks us to consider what could happen if some ambitious politician used the 1936 presidential election to make himself dictator by promising quick, easy solutions to the depression – just as Hitler had done in Germany in 1933. Of course, the Americans in the novel thought it could ‘Never happen here’. Until, that is, people were so poor that the only employment available was the military. Until freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom to redress the government was taken from them. It’s a novel worth re-reading because it’s so prescient.It can’t happen here. Not to education. Not in 2012. Really?
Say this 100 times until you know it by heart: “There is no crisis in education.” The real problem–poverty–has been kept from a public dialogue by ambitious politicians, greedy corporations, hedge fund managers and religious zealots in whose interest it is to suck money from public education and/or remake it in their own image. All of the talk about remaking education and re-framing the conversation has been done without research, experience
