It doesn’t matter what kind of technicality some opposition to the Trump executive order that dismantles the Department of Education hides behind; the reality is that education in the United States needs to change.  And no amount of foot-dragging will change the minds of people tired of a losing product.  When Trump issued his order to initiate the process of eliminating the Department of Education and returning policy to the states, he did something that no Republican had the courage to do since it was created in the first place.  Reagan was supposed to eliminate the DOE in early 1981 or 1982.  Then he was almost killed by an assassin’s bullet and was never quite the same.  And the George Bushes were part of the problem, and made things worse.  So, until Trump came along, nobody had the guts to undo what Jimmy Carter had started, a big government approach to a very intimate concept of education and how society approaches it.  Knowing what we do now, competition is the best and really only method of reform, and the way teacher unions have embedded themselves into the education profession, they have done to the minds of children what unions typically do to everything they touch, whether its steel, car manufacture, or even food production and movie making.  Unions only benefit the losers at the expense of the good, and that brings down the quality of the entire effort.  So, it’s no wonder America is not even in the top ten on most education charts, despite being the wealthiest country.  Public education was a noble concept, but the government’s funding of a subpar product has diminished its appeal and has not served our society well.  When you examine the literacy rate among graduating students, it’s clear that if we continue on our current path, our society will crumble into dust.  And we can’t have that.

And I don’t say what I do in a vacuum.  Even as I write this, people are urging me to run for the school board in my community, because the schools there have received a significant amount of funding, yet they are failing in detrimental ways.  And I know what needs to be done, but I don’t want to help facilitate a failed system. Joining a five-person school board that defends a system I am ready to scrap isn’t a good way to spend my time.  I think a society should have an education system, but I think Dewey was way off in the means of delivery.  I would be in favor of a highly competitive model that is more merit-based, similar to the one Vivek Ramaswamy is proposing in Ohio as a future governor.  Currently, school boards act like a moderator for government money allocation, and that entire system, in my thinking, needs to be scrapped.  And for context, I work with many people who hold PhDs and have multiple advanced degrees, and I do not see them offering a solution for the future.  In my opinion, academia has not been very effective and has never been in the history of the human race.  While specific knowledge is honorable, it often comes at the expense of general knowledge, which is far more useful.  I don’t see people with advanced degrees as any different from the geeks at Comic Con who gain particular knowledge about a topic and then build their lives around that specificity at the expense of logic.  No matter what it is, when people lose touch with reality and seek to prop themselves up in a social context with the merit of group acceptance, the results are never positive.  And doing that very thing is the goal of our current education system, so in its current form, I see no hope for it.

And Trump doesn’t have the answer either, nor does Vivek Ramaswamy, nor does Mike DeWine; people who are currently in the midst of redefining what public education means in America, and specifically in Ohio.  Achieving a high academic honor only benefits the system that created that honor. For instance, receiving an Academy Award for a movie used to be considered an outstanding achievement, but woke politics have undermined the entire enterprise.  Now, after years of witnessing Hollywood failure and Democrat political positions, the concept of an Academy Award means nothing to anybody.  And the same has happened in all fields, especially the sciences. I was on a phone call just a few days ago with the head of the EPA and a panel of experts who were trying to explain the rules of conduct for a future project.  And there were reasonable people involved until there was that one guy who wanted to make sure everyone knew how smart he was and how he had built his entire life around making rules and then explaining to people how to live their lives around those rules, rather than dealing with the grim reality that the world didn’t want to deal with his dumb rules.  I am not mad at the guy because he was essentially getting in the way of something I needed to do.  But because he was uselessly in the way of things that needed to be done, which he thought had value and merit, when in reality he was the kind of guy who likely had a mom who put a bicycle helmet on him one too many times.  And his wife and kids were probably miserable with his views about life.  They were built on a bad foundation that the rest of the world could have cared less for.  It’s the same kind of people who are always encountered at the patent office.  Or with a new scientific discovery, especially with this new news about what’s under the Giza plateau in the form of tunnels and a Hall of Records potentially at the feet of the Sphinx.  Academia has become a public validation for individuals who rise in these fields, as they protect their status through stonewalling and bureaucratic rules, believing their social standing is respected.  And they are terrified of that status ever changing because, as people, they are timid at the prospect of competition and have built their lives around that insulation, hoping that nobody ever discovers how worthless they are. 

The first thing that people think who build their lives around such a social enterprise is that Trump is acting in an anti-educational way, and they are agitated and even hostile to the idea of removing the Department of Education which sets social policy for the bench marks of education achievement in the far away land of Washington D.C.  And people who have spent their lives chasing those made up standards want that system to continue because they are personally terrified of competition.  As I’ve experienced with high-degree personalities, they are often shocked in a competitive discussion to discover that they are not the most intelligent people in the room.  They have a paper that shows that someone told them they were.  However, reality has other opinions, and those become apparent in a competitive environment.  Every child in America needs a unique set of educational goals to achieve, as the current benchmarks are mainly ineffective.  If our schools were producing students like Elon Musk, I would have a different opinion.  But what we get are kids who think going to a Tayler Swift concert is a great thing and they grow up to become terrors of the world dropping their kids off at child care while they pursue a life on a second marriage and run like bats out of hell to pay their next car payment and achieve a social status to other people who mean absolutely nothing as well.  I want to see an education system that inspires more people to achieve great things in the world at all levels of society.  Because what has been produced so far has not been very good, and it needs to change dramatically in the years to come.  There is nothing anyone in the world can do to make public education work under the current Department of Education priorities.  It can’t be saved, and the sooner everyone realizes that, the sooner we can have an intelligent discussion about what comes next.  But saving garbage is not it.

Rich Hoffman

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