Education – America’s key to democratic sustainability

The Founding Fathers believed that an informed voting electorate was crucial to sustaining democracy.  As such they created public education to ensure that all social  classes were mixed initially – and that this way a true meritocracy could develop – so that gifted and hardworking Americans could be upwardly mobile.  Here are links I’ve found relevant to discussing the Sustainability of Education itself.

• Directly related to our SLO’s – evaluating sources
  1. Obama Signs Defense Bill, Establishing Anti-Propaganda Center
  2. How to Teach High-School Students to Spot Fake News Slate
  3. The Classroom Where Fake News Fails NPR
  4. We Need to Teach Kids How to Be Skeptical of the Internet – a Stanford study found “80% of middle schoolers couldn’t tell “sponsored content” from articles, over 80% of high schoolers accepted the validity of photographs without attempting to verify their authenticity” Reddit discussion

• Philosophical approaches
  1. How Comedy Became Education’s Best Critique
  2. Reddit discussion re Education law

• Politics and education
  1. When political beliefs are challenged, a person’s brain becomes active in areas that govern personal identity and emotional responses to threats, USC researchers find. Discussing politics in the classroom maybe dangerous. Is it worth it? Why
  2. The war on public schools

• Sustainability of teaching as a Profession
  1. America’s underpaid-teacher problem in one chart
  2. Teachers Are Stressed, And That Should Stress Us All
  3. 9 Fundamental Digital Skills for 21st Century professionals

• Real threats to American Exceptionalism
  1. Surge in foreign students may be crowding Americans out of elite colleges
  2. Incompetent people don’t know they are incompetent because they lack the ability to realize it. The Dunning-Kruger effect.