“Pulp Fiction” was a precursor to Science Fiction according to the lecturer I listened to while bicycling.  In talking about literacy, he praised Public Education but the biased and badly told story of how bad the Public Schools are and how they have let down the American people is, instead, common currency.

The lecturer was explaining how “pulp” or cheaply produced novels after the Civil War, were gobbled up by an unsophisticated readership.  He had just made the point that Europe was discriminating and well written stories by the pre-cursors of scientifically oriented (later simply anything of an astounding or horror nature) were the stuff that editors and publishers preferred.  Here in America, public education that was just developing into the system that everyone hates today, created a literate people who believed in democracy and republican institutions in a free representative society.  Without the public schools, parochial schools, the popular Sunday Schools (parents went to church, the children went to classes) as well as the elitist academies served only a small slice of the enormous population of children from families arriving from other parts of the world.  The Civil War ended but the new public schools were segregated.  An historic Supreme Court decision created a separate and unequal system. It took over sixty years, to officially change this. The separation continues unofficially and public education is blamed.

 What we see today is an unrelenting attempt to recreate a TWO PART system where there will be an superior school system for an elite class and another for the children who either do not know how to upgrade themselves or who are just LEFT BEHIND. What people should be thinking about is what this does to our concept of democracy.  There are sentiments for a TECHNOCRACY where we will be led by the adept who are specially schooled in “how to” make things work. This system will be owned by others who “know how to” get preferential treatment by working the system. What will slowly emerge in the future is a tiny successful class owning most of our means of production and the oil that greases the wheels. Huge numbers of children will be educated to be the drones, a “B” underclass, doing the smelly undesirable work.  The elite of money and power have made a mockery of democracy. They practice something repellant to those of us whose memories of better times are still fresh. 

While we boast about democratic states in Afghanistan and Iraq there are hints about building “democratic nations” in the rest of the world. At home, democracy is perverted.  Control of oil energy by present owners will extend to and control over technologies that create energy from wind, tides and the so-called hydrogen fuel cell. Development will be delayed until they own these, too. When I see one class abusing others, I see class warfare. PUBLIC Education could fix this.