Seeing the Danger of SCHOOLING Machines: An Accountability Malfunction Voting Can't Fix?

Thoughts about the vagaries of voting machines today put me in mind of the mandatory tests used once upon a time--not just in the South either-- to prequalify voter fitness by proving oneself to the government already in power, by passing whatever tests it sees fit to impose on you, without your consent to be governed by test results because you can't vote yet.

Talk about a high stakes Catch-22!
I feel a rant coming on --

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. . . Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

Pass the test so you can vote against the test, but passing the test means accepting it as legitimate and internalizing its role, doing what government demands, so once you pass you don't want to vote against the test. . .

Government compels you to learn what it teaches and then to prove you've learned it to specification, before it will certify you as a citizen as fit to self-govern and to control your own government, economy, college education, career arc, etc.

Until then the government, through the omnipresent schools of its voting public, controls everything from the individual's sleep and friends and sick days, handwriting style, speech and dress, right down to personal potty privileges. And any citizen who dares challenges the rightness of this public order is anti-education, ignorant and dangerous to us all.

Like No Child Left Behind today, back then states all over the continent fell into this sophistry, legislating to leave no voter behind by letting only some voters pass; and don't kid yourself, it wasn't just Mississippi. The public justification was much like driver's license testing, I suppose, maybe also akin to finagling membership in a private fraternity -- the legally accepted exclusivity of *private* primaries stood in some states until the end of WWII, can you believe it?

When government runs the systems that supposedly help US run IT, this same deeply flawed irrationality recurs: that the best way to protect our individual freedom is subjugating it to various government-gatekeeper teaching and learning as a prior necessary condition, to protect us from each other's individuality if not deviance, in the name of our general welfare and common defense.

Thus says this circular argument, it is the rightful job of the very government over which private individuals supposedly are sovereign, to impose mandatory preparation, testing and credentialing (we pretend this is "education") as a form of prior restraint on a native citizen's independent exercise of guaranteed civil liberties.

Duly elected legislators, mainly Democrats at least in the South, instituted the then-legal control of literacy testing prior to voter registration. They successfully defended and spread this idea as a valid means to identify, isolate, and if need be to prevent from voting, individuals whose life experience was out of whack with the powers that be, any citizens who in concert with a bloc of peers might see culture, society and economic issues so differently that their ballots could shift power from those already in power.

While the Supreme Court was striking this down as constitutionally offensive when applied to voter participation, its scrutiny seems to have slipped as applied to school testing for economic participation or even the pursuit of happiness, shutting out legions of kids who could register to vote but lacked a diploma to show employers, because they couldn't pass some government test.

Do you think high-stakes literacy tests as a legit way to discriminate against private citizens were struck down permanently by the USSC's decision in Oregon v. Mitchell, back when I taking public school tests myself?

Literacy requirements are banned for five years by the 1970 renewal of the Voting Rights Act. At the time, eighteen states still have a literacy requirement in place. In Oregon v. Mitchell, the Court upholds the ban on literacy tests, which is made permanent in 1975. Judge Hugo Black, writing the court's opinion, cited the "long history of the discriminatory use of literacy tests to disenfranchise voters on account of their race" as the reason for their decision.

I remember that my state's school "literacy test" did lose in court soon after. But seeing what No Child Left Behind has wrought, it's clear government bar-setting by citizenship testing is FAR from barred.

It just moved to more audacious, much richer territory and federalized the whole thing, get 'em while they're babies to mess with their minds and beliefs doing 12-to-14 in the pen. They sure got me, how about you? Prior restraint isn't constitutional under the First Amendment, but maybe it doesn't apply to schoolkid unfreedom because American voters all have been schooled so well to see schools as gosh-darn key to all freedom?

Freedom means that "we the people" control who can travel our roads, be heard in decision-making, be hired and participate in our economy. We have signed all that freedom over to the schools (which must be very "free" indeed, then!) along with our children to rear. Apparently we need government school now even to control who plays college sports, or democracy and free enterprise will crumble!

Schooling like voting is full of poor planning and execution, mechanical and human errors, misdirection and manipulation, sins of omission and commission, waste and corruption, cheating and fraud, misplaced powers, political gridlock -- and widespread suffering of innocents, who won't be able to help themselves, unless they don't need any help. Catch-22.

All apparently untouchable, un-reformable, under the same astonishingly flawed construct of public "accountability" that makes individuals conform to government edict in all manner of things -- that before citizenship rights and full economic participation can be allowed, every voter-worker must be brought to an acceptable educational level as set by government, inculcated by government in mass facilities, measured by government-approved, government-adminstered tests and licensed as government sees fit.

Without a high school diploma, today's 18-year-old might be able to vote thanks to Hugo Black's Supreme Court 30 years ago, yet still may be doomed to a shadowy half-existence as worker, parent and person by that exclusionary government school "literacy" test -- whether he votes or not, and whether his vote gets counted accurately or not.

I guess it did sound reasonable if not constitutional --maybe still does?-- to argue that every citizen in a participatory democracy really should demonstrate some level of standardized knowledge and ability, to prove one can function productively and can pay a fair share of the social freight, yield to our right-of way, not hog our passing lanes, not speed or run red lights or crash into the rest of us as we enjoy our family and business travels.

And I guess we buy this reasoning, because we vote to require what we call "driver's education" . . . although it should worry well-educated folk more than it apparently does, that in many states, driver's licensing isn't just about testing an applicant's driver education success. Too often now, it's about passing algebra too, and getting good grades overall, not talking back or acting out in class, showing up for the standardized test rather than ditching school that week. You can lose your driver's license over school rules no matter how high your driving test score or how good your driving record; what "counts" by LAW is your whole school record, as if there were any rational connection there. . .

But I'm not a literalist, I can think in metaphors. It's not really about safe driving even when it IS about driving, is it? Government's rules of the road aren't just for driving -- law and its public servants (you didn't think they serve US, did you??) decide who profits from opportunity and prosperity, and who doesn't, and often who can help make the rules in the first place (back to voting and making it count!) in our participatory democracy.

The public promise of school was to sufficiently "educate" every future worker-voter-driver-parent to fit our established order, or to marginalize them if need be, by refusing them the public crendentials essential to public participation, and thus protect us all from whichever ignorant and deviant individuals might endanger what we who fit hold politically and economically dear--which, as an economist friend of mine pointed out recently, is redundant.

He reminded me that economics IS politics.

School is politics and economics, especially its testing mania --
None of which, evidently, is protection against ignorance, error, bad actors and subsequent loss of our liberty.
There oughta be a law . . .

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