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The educated proletariat and No Child Left Behind - Printable Version

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The educated proletariat and No Child Left Behind - Clover - Aug 15 2025

Roger Freeman We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat.

Roger Freeman expressed his concerns about an educated proletariat at a 1970 press conference. Articles have been written combining this mentality, Nixon's presidency, and the student debt crisis:

While it seems like the focus is on higher education in terms of this fear of creating the educated proletariat, I feel  that the Bush era policy of No Child Left Behind also played an important role in decimating the likelihood of the educated proletariat. When public schools begin frantically obsessing over reading and math scores determined by a bubble sheet test as their means of getting funding, quality of education plummeted. This is in addition to public schools receiving funding based on graduation rates, causing school districts to refuse to fail students who do inadequate work, leading to cases of teachers reporting on high schoolers who are unable to do much more than write their own name on a piece of paper. Teachers must now waste their time dealing with problematic students who are not proficient enough for their grade level, in addition to dealing with school administrators breathing down their necks about ensuring test scores are good for receiving additional funding.

I realized I had graduated high school with the first cohort of students from the No Child Left Behind policy, while my younger Gen Z sister had graduated high school with that policy already having been in operation for a decade.

We are at the point where there are now USAmerican teachers who spent their childhood learning in the NCLB education system. A new generation of teachers whose experience of how to teach young minds is from their own teachers having to prioritize bubble sheet exam reading and math scores.

I feel that the USAmerican right-wing's threat of the educated proletariat has been fully eradicated at this point. There has been a systematic destruction of education starting from kindergarten to university. Not only has the tree of knowledge been hacked at with axes for decades, it has also been poisoned deep down to its roots.

Weird stuff. That's all I got for now.