FUD pioneered decades ago stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. It is a marketing technique used in business and politics to harm competition. FUD is a manifestation of the appeal to fear. It is now being used to target public education. Privatizing schools is the goal. Those who are trying to create a market-based system to replace public education are using FUD to undermine public confidence in public education. Their well-funded propaganda campaign seeks to spread enough doubt to destroy an essential Democratic institution. They are selling the false narrative that our public schools are obsolete and failing. The “reform” narrative is a fraud. Test scores on NAEP are at their highest point in history for white, black, Hispanic and Asian students. Graduation rates are the highest in history for these groups. The dropout rate is at an historic low point. Why are they using the FUD campaign against one of our nation’s most treasured democratic institutions? It helps the competition. It makes people so desperate that they will seek out unproven alternatives. It makes the public gullible when they hear phony claims about miracle schools. The “miracle school” usually has a high suspension rate, a high expulsion rate, and high attrition. The scholar Robert Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford and one of the worlds leading experts in Agnotology, is studying the phenomenon of the “the cultural production of ignorance.” His work shows how propaganda can be skillfully deployed to confuse and mislead the public. Ignorance is not bliss. He believes that what you don’t know can hurt you. He says there is more ignorance around than there used to be, and its purveyors have gotten much better at filling peoples heads with nonsense. There are whole industries devoted to sowing public misinformation and doubt about their products and activities. When this sort of manipulation of information is done for profit, or to confound the development of beneficial public policy, it becomes a threat to health and to a democratic society. There is no evidence from any other nation that replacing a public system with a privatized choice system will produce anything other than social, economic and racial segregation.
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 03:17:43 +0000
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