OPINION:
On March 20, President Trump signed an executive order to begin shutting down several functions of the Department of Education. Everyone should ignore the frantic reaction of the establishment media. Defunding our nation’s educational bureaucracy is one of the best decisions the Trump administration has made. Here’s why.
First, education needs to be returned to local communities and ultimately to parents. The state and federal governments have repeatedly proved that they are the problem, not the solution. Just look at the results of their meddling over the past 50 years. How many “man on the street” interviews have we watched where high school graduates don’t know what America’s three branches of government are or who runs the executive branch? How many times have you watched in stunned silence when a college freshman can’t tell you who the first president of the United States was or whom we fought in the War of Independence?
Second, we need to stop imposing endless government-mandated data collection on our teachers and should instead release them to spend their time teaching our children the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic and American civics (positive, not negative). All the “School to Work,” “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to The Top” talk from elitists who pretend they have our children’s best interests in mind is little more than a “look over there” strategy of smug Orwellian bureaucrats who have hamstrung good teachers and destroyed our public schools to the point where well over half our nation’s students can’t read or do basic calculations at grade level.
Anything we can do to get the government to stop wasting endless amounts of time and money forcing schools to collect more data to facilitate the Chamber of Commerce’s planned economy is good for education. We need to just let teachers teach. Let them instruct our children how to add, subtract, multiply, divide and, maybe, read at grade level. In other words, let the trained professionals in your schools focus on ensuring your children know how to read well, write well and count well. Let them teach the next generation of citizens why America is good and not bad; if your schools were doing this and this alone, they would be a raving success.
Third, in addition to the three R’s and civics, our schools need to teach the “good, the true and the beautiful.” Teach the difference between virtue and vice. This is why American education was founded in the first place. Don’t believe me? Read Harvard’s, Dartmouth’s, Princeton’s and Yale’s founding charters. You will be stunned by what you find: words such as “wisdom,” “morality,” “religion,” citizenship” and “salvation” will jump off the page and shock you. Oh, but these are private schools, some naysayers might shout. Well, go to the original mission statements of your local state schools, public colleges and universities. Check out their corresponding required curriculum. You will immediately see that our entire educational system was created to educate a citizenry of morally upright people who knew the difference between right and wrong, in addition to knowing how to read, write, add and subtract.
Fourth, our public schools should not pigeonhole children. Give students a chance to excel beyond their social class. My land, if you had used collective data to pigeonhole me as a junior high and high school kid, you would have, at best, labeled me as one of Huxley’s “Deltas or Epsilons” and relegated me to being a janitor in a widgets factory. Education should open doors for a blue-collar child to become a college president, not close them. Stop collecting “aggregated longitudinal data” that everyone knows will be used to further the leftist dreams of a “Brave New World.”
If you want to improve your local schools, it’s easy. Tell your government to stop wasting time and money on endless data collection, demand that it quit its top-down elitism and let your local schools do their jobs. Teach the next generation how to read, write and do basic calculations. Add a little instruction on why our constitutional republic is exceptional rather than evil, and we would all be pleased with the outcome. If your teachers and administrators don’t know how to do this, you are hiring the wrong people. Fire them and get someone who does.
The fix to America’s educational crisis is simple. Get Big Brother out of your schools. Defund it and give education back to local communities and parents. Stop wasting time and money on endless data collection. Get rid of all the social engineering implicit in the alphabet soup of DEI, SEL, CRT, BLM, SJW and LGBTQIA. Focus on reading, writing, arithmetic, real science and virtue over vice.
If our next generation excelled in this and nothing else, wouldn’t you be happy? You should.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). He can be reached at epiper@dreverettpiper.com.
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