Training Our Way to a New Oligarchy? Not Yet! | Life at the Intersections

Training Our Way to a New Oligarchy? Not Yet! | Life at the Intersections:

TRAINING OUR WAY TO A NEW OLIGARCHY? NOT YET!

Students in Jefferson County, Colo protest forced changes in U.S. History standards by local school board. Credit: RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images

 In Texas and now in Colorado conservatives on the far right have been in a panic about history students actually learning history. Whether being earnest in their own beliefs or being duped by corporate propaganda efforts, these conservatives want desperately to put a lid on history study at the high school level that might explore all of American history.
Top-down prescriptions

Prescriptive plans that call for studying the conservative heroes from the past only, downplaying the progressive leaders, and not studying any wrongs or failures in America’s past have been handed down from the Texas State School Board, producing embarrassingly stupid textbook passages that seem more like spoofs generated by The Onion rather than a statewide school board.

All of this has to do with feverish efforts to establish a new American oligarchy — which is the dominant, systemic rule by a wealthy minority.

Wait. An oligarchy? In the U.S.?

And if “new”, when was the last one?

Oligarchy in our past? Oh, yes!

The U.S. last saw an oligarchy in the pre-Civil-War Southern slave states where only 10% of its population controlled 90% of the wealth and controlled all decision-making and education in that society. That 10% was made up of self-perpetuating wealth within the same families and based upon inherited slaves, with little chance of anyone outside of those families moving up into their ranks, except by marriage.

All white residents in those states for multiple generations where taught from childhood that they owed their loyalty to that 10%. Thus, a bloody Civil War was gladly fought mostly by men who had never owned even one slave, but were taught and believed that they were fighting for their state, or some concept as “states rights”.

In actuality, they were fighting, suffering and dying for a small, powerful oligarchy who would rather start a war against other Training Our Way to a New Oligarchy? Not Yet! | Life at the Intersections: