“I love the poorly educated,” crowed Donald Trump at his primary victory celebration in Nevada in February 2016. Trumpism is the distant descendant of the Know Nothings of the 1850s, otherwise known as the American party: nativist, obsessed with immigration and xenophobic. But in so many respects the president is just the latest edition of the blowhard anti-intellectualism deeply ingrained in American politics. This bellowing preference for the gut over the head was exemplified by George Wallace’s 1968 attacks on “pointy-headed professors” and, more recently, Republican Rick Santorum vilifying Barack Obama as a snob for wanting more youngsters to go to college. But education is also seen as the key to unlocking the door to the American dream, so it is not altogether surprising that in an age of crushing student debt, school massacres and chronically underfunded public education, the latest theatre of rebellion is the classroom. What began as responses to specific crises — the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, or low teacher pay — have rapidly evolved into more general questions raised about the trade-off between libertarian rights (gun ownership; minimal taxes) and the common good. It is a debate, in fact, on the character of American life. The scenario is made-for-TV dramatic. First, the invidious contrast between the mature, impassioned eloquence of the student survivors of Parkland and the clumsy efforts of the political right to depict them as spoiled brats, indoctrinated by their liberal elders to spout un-American threats to the Second Amendment. Those lines of attack were counter-productive. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators showed up in the March for our Lives in Washington DC while the president, blustering about the need to turn schoolrooms into arsenals, fled to his golf course at Mar-a-Lago. Fox News’s Laura Ingraham discovered that taunting one of the survivors resulted in large advertisers fleeing her show in disgust. In Trumplandia all this could still be written off as the bloviations of the snooty bi-coastal elite and their fake news providers. But the revolt of the schools has shifted recently to heartland states — West Virginia, Kansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona — all of which voted for Trump in the 2016 election. The shock troops of this protest movement are not lawyers or journalists but schoolteachers, mostly women. They have, in tens of thousands, staged walkouts and mass demonstrations at their state capitols against the starvation of US education, which is the responsibility of state governments. The teachers are, in the first instance, angry about their pay, which averaged $44,700 in West Virginia in 2016. Online, they have been sharing stories of taking second jobs to feed their families and even resorting to food banks. In Kentucky, teachers demonstrated against a pension plan restructuring that would end their guaranteed retirement funds — and this in a state that prohibits retired teachers from accessing social security. Describing the teachers as exhibiting a “thug mentality”, governor Matt Bevin has gone ahead with the plan. Some of the protests have succeeded and inspired further action. Taken aback by thousands of teachers walking out in West Virginia, governor Jim Justice conceded a 5 per cent pay raise. In Oklahoma, teachers walked out for nine days despite receiving pre-emptive $6,100 pay rises. Arizona teachers recently were promised a 20 per cent pay rise after threatening to strike. The campaign has moved from personnel to principle, raising questions about the social compact between government and citizens. The nub of the teachers’ anger is that education budgets — for books, buildings and basic upkeep — have been starved to feed tax cuts. In these states, budgets are lower than they were a decade ago. This too is a populist fury, but not one that benefits Republican politicians. Last October, in Kansas, which was the subject of a disastrous experiment in ultra-low taxes, the state Supreme Court found the legislature and government in violation of their constitutional requirement to provide adequate, equal public education. Republican legislators are floating a constitutional amendment reserving adjudication of education to themselves. But voters may well heed the words of one of the demonstration posters: “Don't let politicians steal from teachers.” Pictures of crumbling classrooms and ancient text books falling apart are everywhere online. Kansas legislator Randy Garber may insist that “the way to fix schools is to put prayer and the Bible back”, but that is unlikely to cut much ice when it is becoming clear that the fate of individuals — and nations — turns on the knowledge economy. Obstacles to acquiring knowledge have become the greatest source of social inequality in contemporary America. The choice between corporate tax cuts and public education will not go away soon. The showdown is, as Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, says, “the civics lesson of our time”. Alienate the future and you will pay the price.
