Who benefits from an uneducated electorate? The people who are already educated and in power of course.
People who work hard but who are not financially literate, and struggle to make ends meet every week, are less likely to question the conditions under which they work, or whether or not their work is being appropriately valued. They are just happy to have a job. Keeping voters uneducated and tied to low income jobs helps the rich and powerful continue to amass wealth, while working people do without health insurance, child care and access to the middle class.
Republicans have launched a coordinated assault on Public Education in America. The biggest offensive was launched on the Federal level when Donald Trump appointed Betsy DeVoss as the Secretary of Education. She stated publicly that she wanted to gut public education and funnel public taxpayer money to private and charter schools. Those schools are FOR PROFIT. Think about that. Running a school like a business means that it is profit driven and not mission driven. Why? Because profit is the mission. Where does the education of your child fit into that model? Don't think that the market will take care of the bad schools, because that takes time; and in the mean time, your child didn't get a quality education. Unless they are home grown, the best and the brightest teachers will go where they always go.....somewhere else. Devoss's legacy continues on the State level.
Here in Virginia, Governor Youngkin has taken the same position and is actively seeking to do the same. He has stoked parental discontent by proclaiming that public educators don't think that parents matter. He is selling his voters the snake oil that their children will somehow be safer and better educated if parents have total control of the curriculum that is taught, rather than the dedicated professionals who are in the classrooms everyday. There is an old saying: "Let the Baker bake the bread". Just because I put my child on an airplane doesn't mean I belong in the cockpit.
At the local level, far right wing advocates have been aggressively attacking School Board Members with verbal assaults and intimidation, in the name of parental rights. Parents absolutely have a role in their children's education. If parents don't value the educational opportunity that public school offers, then neither will their children. If parents allow special interest groups to incite fear in communities they don't even live in, by alluding to some non existent boogie man with a hidden agenda, then their children will be fearful too. The result is the dumbing down of America.
I'll ask again, who benefits from an uneducated electorate?