Convincing You That Nothing Better Is Possible | Current Affairs: "Albert Hirschman, in his book The Rhetoric of Reaction, looked at conservative arguments throughout history to show that they consistently make appeals to the same notions: perversity, futility, and jeopardy, i.e., Proposed Reform X is against God/nature, it won’t work, and it will threaten existing progress. The arguments are made consistently regardless of whether there is any evidence that they are true. This is how a “war on the imagination” is waged, and people become convinced that it isn’t worth dreaming of anything radically different than the status quo. So when teachers are being paid so little that they leave the profession, we are told that the only options are to let unqualified people teach or import teachers from overseas. And when our public schools are underfunded and dysfunctional, we have a debate over how best to turn the schools into effective job-training programs.
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