The Senate hearing for Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education–Betsy DeVos–was a cringe-worthy spectacle on many fronts. I, like many conservatives who didn’t support Trump in the general election, have been trying to figure out what it will look like to evaluate, critique, and perhaps even applaud the direction of the Trump campaign. I will say that for the most part, Trump has picked well; although I’m not versant in every cabinet position, things seem to be going better than I would have thought.
Now, the hearing for Betsy DeVos was, shall we say, educational. Senate Democrats were out for blood, as they know that those in charge of educating the next generation can advance their worldview more efficiently. This is a sacred cow for liberals, and their “hand-wringing” was on full display. The prevailing sentiment on social media was that DeVos whiffed hard on many questions and provided all sorts of fodder for viral video clips, intended to make her look like an incompetent rich crony.
However, the response I’ve seen on social media exposed how many Christians have simply gone along with the presumption that education is a primary responsibility of the Government. There was outcry that someone who has not spent much, if any, time in the public orphanage–er–school system should be appointed to lead that department. I saw one person express their they are “tired of people making decisions about education that have never even stepped foot inside a classroom as an educator”! To which I reply, you realize that that defines the majority of politicians; the issue isn’t that DeVos hasn’t been involved in the Public School system, therefore disqualifying here, the problem is that as a nation, we have handed over the keys of educating our children over to bureaucracy.
Fee.org had a tremendously helpful article highlighting that the US has been spending more and more money on education, and getting the exact same results! We spend more per child than any other nation, and yet our results are sub-par to say the least. We score lower than small countries like Macao, Finland, Estonia, Slovenia, and Portugal, despite spending $165,000 per child for a K-12 education.
So the real issue is not that DeVos isn’t versed in all the many government education policies, programs, etc.; the problem is that we think that spending more money on education is the solution. Further, when she was asked whether charter schools that receive Federal funding should be held to the same standards as the typical public school, the response ought to have been, “absolutely not”. Those standards are horrifically ineffective at actually, you know, edumacating our young-uns.
About a hundred years ago, the US public school system took a radical turn to the left and adopted a “child-centric” model of eduction which emphasized “self-fulfillment” as the goal of education. In abandoning older, tried and true methods of teaching children to think, speak, and reason logically, we began a crash course with what we see today: a generation with ambiguous morals, high insecurity, very tender feelings, and rather expensive skulls full of narcissistic mush.
The problem with our Department of Education is really not about who is running it, but the fact that it is run at all. We have entrusted the training of our children to a secular government and have not surprisingly gotten the result of secular thinking children. When a generation is raised thinking that they are god, it will inevitably lead to a cataclysm when that generation discovers the fact of their own impotence. Demands of all sorts are the necessary result of such an upbringing; we taught them they are god, and now they make the demands of a false god: human sacrifice, insatiable greed & lust, and general confusion about which direction is north.
I heard on the radio a few months back that many school are electing to replace history class with courses that are more sensory and will actually prepare students for a life in the globalist & tech driven economy of the 21st century. As the thinking goes, no one can provide a curriculum that presents a cohesive history of past events, and it is always going to be lopsided (after all those who write the history textbooks control the perception of what happened).
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