Class warfare design.

Intelligible Design posted September 15, 2005 (October 3, 2005 issue of The Nation)
Katha Pollitt

Why, at the very moment that we are talking obsessively about academic “excellence” and leaving no child behind, are we turning our public schools into factories of rote learning and multiple-choice testing, as if learning how to read and count were some huge accomplishment? Well, if your fate is to be a supermarket checker–and that’s a “good job” these days–you won’t be needing Roman history or art or calculus. By the same token, cutting state university budgets, burdening students with debt and turning college into a kind of middle-management trade school makes sense, if shrinking opportunities for the professional elite lie ahead. Why create more competition for the graduates of the Ivy League?

Another mystery potentially explained: Government’s determination to keep working-class women from controlling their fertility. Why does it set a biological trap that dooms them to years of struggle with repercussions for everyone around them, including their children? (It’s true that teen pregnancy rates are going down, but they’re still astronomical by the standards of any other industrial nation–six times the rate in the Devil’s own country, France.) For all our talk about single-parent families–the reason for the terrible poverty of black New Orleans, if we are to believe right-wing columnists Rich Lowry and David Brooks–we act to bring about more of them, and of the most vulnerable, makeshift kind. Somehow single motherhood is supposed to be the fault of the left, but it’s the right that has cut public funding for contraception, held up Plan B, restricted abortion, flooded the schools with useless abstinence-only sex ed and now even threatens to bar confidentiality to girls seeking birth control. If you wanted a fatalistic, disorganized working class, a working class too worn out by the day-to-day to do much more than get by, saddling girls with babies is a great idea.

Hurricane Katrina was heartbreaking–and it was shocking too. The realities it laid bare–the stark class and race divisions of New Orleans, the callousness and cluelessness and sheer shameless incompetence of the Bush Administration, the long years of ecological mismanagement of the Gulf region–show how far the process of adaptation to decline has already gone. Bush’s ownership society turns out to be the on-your-ownership society. The rising tide that was supposed to lift all boats is actually a flood that only those who already have a boat can escape.

(thanks to Cyndy at mousemusings – looking forward hearing about your experience at the Washington march)