While I understand your sentiment I think this is never been a reality for the human species.

Any form of education will always have an element of indoctrination. The best we can do is to mitigate that element of intoxination to only what is necessary... and make its implementation as rigorously accountable and transparent as possible.

Determining that systems of fascism or oppression are bad is a function of values not reasoning. There are clearly plenty ways to reason and justify extreme evil as our nation has seen in these last few weeks and humanity is proven time and time again.

If we expect the evil that we are currently experiencing to be mitigated in future generations we have to be upfront that it is an explicit goal of ours to indoctrinate our children to perceive these evils as evils and to be extremely skeptical of systems that implement any aspect of such evil.

The United States has tried this in the past. It was generally referred to as liberal arts curriculum and science-based education... Look at what the far right did to that throughout our history.

there is always going to be an element of indoctrination in any application of education. I for one think we can be a lot better at being transparent and honest about those elements. At least give future generations formal acknowledgment about decisions of censorship before their educational careers is over...

When we tell children that Nazis are bad, we are telling them what to think. When we tell children that the Confederacy were terrorists and traditionists, we are telling them what to think. Not merely how.

I'm not sure how this would be different.

@domos I think liberal arts and science has largely won over unexamined moralizing. Adopting the tactics of the far right is surrendering to ignorance. "Nazis are bad, m'kay" is no different than " witches are bad" to a child too young to understand. This isn't a battle to be won in a day or sadly even many generations. And yet it moves.

While I agree with the sentiment, this is not true given American history.

White Americans built an entire social culture around dismissing and ignoring literal daily norms of terrorism... A racialized fascist terrorism... And and that unfortunately blinded and numbed them to the madness that led to this last 4 years.

To be honest, practically none of Donald Trump's policies and actions are any worse than past presidents particularly in the Reagan era.

When if we are going to take the Democratic and accountable approach to education / indoctrination... We need to do it in a way that gives future generations to tools to be more cognizant and critical of The norms they participated. And also more willing to try out different solutions rather than maintain our politics of generational attrition.

@powder equating the end of Donald Trump's first presidential term as the end of a populist leader is problematic. That's like saying Hitler's first attempted coup was the end of him as a populist leader... Clearly it was not.

I've reflected about the implications of world war II a little these last few days. I think it might be accurate to reframe world war II as a competition between different versions of fascism. One in which white America set the narrative of Western dominance the Western world and one in which Germany did.

Yeah, Americans fought the Nazis but during and after the war they maintained and implemented a racialized form of fascism all the same.

That unfortunately made it easy to dismiss the normalized terrorism that is American history.

I think children need to be taught this explicitly. They need to be skilled in analyzing the dangers of this type of ambiguity and vagueness so that they cannot be easily manipulated in the future nor should their institutions and systems be easily manipulated as well.

@domos You'll never hear me make the argument that America is some amazing utopia. It's shit, and flawed as fuck, with tons of total fucking assholes, but you'll still need to come up with a really convincing argument that we're on equal footing with leaders that are OPENLY racist and systematically exterminate people based on arbitrary characteristics. (And yes, I do get the audacity of this argument given what a total fucking racist shitbag we currently have in office, but at least even he knows his racism is something to be ashamed of and tries to hide it with asinine statements like, "I'm the least racist person you've ever met." )