Public Education Developing Our Intelligence, Not Their Profits!
By the League of Revolutionaries National Public Education Committee
Public education in the US is on a similar path as the Climate Crisis. Both are on an objective trajectory that is driven by complex and powerful forces. Both demonstrate collapse. Both are reaching a tipping point after which conditions will rapidly disintegrate. Neither is reversible.
However, both offer humanity a portal through which we can collectively pass into a better future if corporate private profits are abolished.
Across the country, over 1000 schools were closed in the last school year in order to save money. Cleveland, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles are facing large deficits and financial crisis. The official explanation is that fewer people are attending public schools. Of course, a major force that drives this is that the cost of housing is skyrocketing, driven by the massive corporate seizure of housing.
BROKE ON PURPOSE
Including limited liability (LLCs) and small local partnerships, corporations own close to 30% to 40% of the broader rental market. LLCs are shell companies that own shell companies to hide ownership. Corporate takeovers are converting housing from ownership to rentership.1 The result is that many traditional working class families are driven out of the cities. This destroys the property tax base that was cobbled together a century ago to fund public schools. At the same time, corporations and billionaires have been working successfully to get out of paying any taxes at all. Consequently, cities and school districts are “broke on purpose”.
This funding system has also always been a prime example of institutional racism. Property taxes are local and so along with racial segregation, this system offered ways to fund schools without having to pay to educate the children of “those people”. Tax-based funding also impoverished schools for poor rural whites.
By the early 1970s, the Civil Rights movement had forced states to subsidize university-level education for all nationalities, women and people with disabilities. The educational system was also opened up to broad corporate penetration by outside for-profit contractors who offered everything from standardized testing to leadership training to management expertise. School district budgets became multi-million dollar corporate cash cows. Exclusive charter schools became vehicles for for-profit companies.
When the COVID Pandemic hit in 2020, tech platforms began offering schools “free” screens, chrome books and canned lessons. Only later have we learned that the students were providing free unpaid labor to train the computer programs! Tech became a stopgap measure to handle the artificially created “teacher shortage” which results from teachers being unable to afford housing. Canned lessons and standardized testing drove many serious educators out of schools. All of that has increased with the introduction of corporate Artificial Intelligence programs.
FASCISM CONFIGURES A.I.
When the Trump regime took office in 2025, they immediately introduced the fascist measures to “fix” the schools through privatization that were detailed in Project 2025. The slow-moving train wreck of public schools dramatically sped up. Legalizing vouchers was key, where parents take “their share” of tax money as a voucher and offer it instead to private schools. This money is then deducted from school district budgets.
Many vouchers are taken by families that already have kids in private schools, and have even been used to supplement “home schooling” that requires buying things like jet skis and horses.2 Private schools do not have the public mandate to educate all children, so they openly discriminate against working class children, especially regarding disabilities and diverse language needs.
Vouchers also have a terrible impact on the many rural school districts that are very small.
Losing a tiny few families to vouchers means losing critical staff and teachers, which threatens to close rural schools down. Public schools are often the biggest employers in rural communities.
Trump tied the attack on higher ed to the fascist anti-Zionist and anti-science agenda and immediately branded any defense of Palestine or any criticism of Zionist genocide as “anti-semitism”. But anti-semitism refers to racist attacks on Jewish people or the Jewish religion, not State and government policies. Fascists who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 shouted, “Jews will not replace us!” That’s anti-semetic; calling out the Israeli military for deliberately targeting children is not. California governor, Gavin Newsom, a corporate Democrat, forced through AB715, written by Zionists, that criminalizes educators at every level for defending Gaza!
These attacks are just a smoke screen for imposing the economic agenda of Silicon Valley Ai platforms, which supports the further privatization of higher education. Trump quickly fired thousands of federal knowledge workers, from weather scientists to infectious disease monitors. He then trashed the system of federal science grants that sustain the development of science Ph Ds. The goal is not to eliminate science research, but to divert it directly to private corporations as a more direct path to profits. In practice, these steps are destroying US science, once the envy of the world.
Ai today is replacing knowledge workers faster than robots replaced factory workers in the 1990s. Ai taking our jobs, data centers taking our water, screens taking the higher cognitive skills of our children, platforms taking our data, fascism taking our education – all symptoms of the same contagion – the control of technology by private property for private profit. Small wonder, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, proudly proclaimed, “Intelligence will become a commodity!”
This is not a future human beings can survive in.
SHOULD INTELLIGENCE BE BOUGHT INSTEAD OF DEVELOPED?
For over a century, schools have functioned as labor factories, designed to produce compliant workers for industrial economies. Ai threatens to change this system, with its potential to free humanity from compulsory labor. If labor is no longer the center of life, education must change as well. Public education is objectively transforming. Students regularly use Ai to write reports and do homework. This forces public schools to move towards what they are not designed to do; develop higher order learning skills.
In the short term, first Australia and now France have banned screens for children under 15 years old. Los Angeles Unified School District is beginning to limit screens in schools, along with other school districts. China limits screen time and certain types of Ai “partners”. Billionaires who regularly limit their own kids’ screen time are working overtime to force it onto our children. The way for-profit Ai is used demonstrates over and over again that even technical experts lose higher level cognitive skills. Doctors who analyze cancer polyps with visual images repeatedly lose accuracy when relying on Ai.
What does this mean for children, who are developing physically and mentally? People learn developmentally through neuro-physical stages. Physicality builds and cements body-mind networks. There can be no great dancers, or soccer players, without dancing. There are no experts without building expertise. People learn by making mental maps. That’s why you can still ride a bicycle 40 years after you learned how. This takes practice. Developing higher-order skills like planning, synthesis and strategic thinking is the true measure of education, not bogus individual standardized testing.
Consciousness and creativity are the result of neuro-physical activity. That is what screens cut off. Cutting back on excessive screen time is a public health measure. It is the flip side of the data center onslaught which is likewise a public health issue.
Intelligence is a human capacity to be cultivated and unleashed, not an external service to be accessed. Intelligence must be nurtured, developed and built. That is the historical mission of public schools. A system that chooses instead to attack and destroy its intelligence (not to mention savaging its children) is a dying system.
Humans are a social species. We are collective and productive. We are wired to be learners from the earliest age. We learn socially, which is an interactive social process among humans. Story-telling and even gossip are examples.
Our first instinct is mutual aid, recognizing that supporting our neighbors supports ourselves. Our collective nature, which is not in opposition to but interwoven with our individual nature, is shown over and over again in our broad human response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to wildfires and floods today.
Finland, which is considered to have the highest quality of education in the world, organizes cooperative learning projects established together with students. No testing until students are 13 years old. Reading and math are not forced on students, augmented by compulsion and shaming. This is the real meaning of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – supporting everyone’s path of learning and development.
In the US, both reading and testing are pushed down into kindergarten, and even pre-K, regardless of whether students are developmentally ready.3
Removing the coercion of traditional schooling leads to highly motivated, specialized learners. One of the potentials of Ai is that it revolutionizes access to information and shifts the goal of education to self-directed education. Young adults and lifelong learners develop curiosity, creativity, emotional intelligence, and the specialized expertise necessary for real mastery.
Public education stands at the crossroads. If we continue to allow corporations to dictate the agenda, public education will be destroyed. Reclaiming human-centered education is entirely possible. The rising popular rebellion and organizing of so many against data centers points the political direction; we will not let our futures be dictated cyber-bully billionaires.
Public schools are a unique form of local democracy because teachers, staff, students and the community actually occupy and govern their schools. We cannot be kept out if we come together and choose to exert our political power.
The Future is up to Us!
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1) https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47332
2) https://www.sosaznetwork.org/2023/water-skiing-chicken-coops-home-gyms-esa- vouchers-fund-endless-string-of-questionable-purchases/
3) https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/09/10-reasons-why-finlands-education-system-is- the-best-in-the-world/
Published on September 2, 2026.
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