Don't Set The Bar Low

Public Education, A Biden Landslide?, &tc.

Dear Friends,

Hope you’re having a lovely summer so far! The weather in Big Sky Country has been wonderful, even if the real heat has started to move in the past couple of days. We had a lot of very late snowfall in the mountains, but the rapid melt hasn’t resulted in the catastrophic floods we had a couple of years ago. Praise God.

The summer schedule is starting to look daunting. The Bailey Band had a concert on Saturday that I was forced to miss due to “flu-like symptoms,” from which I’m still in recovery mode. I always thought it was funny when baseball players were scratched from a game due to “flu-like symptoms.” I thought you either have the flu or you don’t! Well, I definitely had “flu-like” symptoms, with no earthly idea of what it actually was. The poor girls had to do the show as a duo, which they accomplished with aplomb. But they vow to never do it again and have basically forbade me from ever getting sick.

Tara has three upcoming art festivals beginning next week (The Fourth of July outdoors in Livingston, Montana, promises to be lovely!), and two more later in July at the foot of the Grand Tetons. I imagine the whole month will be prepping and recovering from those ventures. Then I’ll be in Philly later in the month to teach a D.Min module at Westminster Seminary. Then we have a wedding shortly on the heels of that. We’re keeping busy! And, yes, more than a bit stressed.

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A couple of years ago there was a huge controversy in Florida over the teaching of LGBTQ “gender” theories in public schools. People on the right were outraged over the Alphabet Brigade teaching their religion to their kids. People on the left were outraged that Governor DeSantis would sign what they called a bigoted “Don’t Say Gay” law.

There is now another huge controversy, and it is the mirror image: the State of Louisiana has passed a law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. People on the left are outraged at these bigoted Christians teaching their religion to their kids. People on the right are outraged that anyone would be outraged.

Here we go again. Sigh.

Time to re-up the essay I wrote last time around: “On The Education Monopoly.” There will not be, cannot be, any social or cultural resolution to these disputes until the entire system of public education is dismantled. If you think that sounds crazy, by all means please click through to see the case I made back then. Compulsory public education was a horrible idea when it was devised and remains a horrible idea today. In addition to simply being a terrible model for actual education, as well as incredibly wasteful, it inescapably invites these polarizing, divisive, and intractable culture wars. I am not holding my breath that this will happen even in my lifetime, but various forms of education reform have made massive inroads over the past couple of decades, and I have hope that eventually they will win out. Maybe sheer exhaustion from these bitter and acrimonious fights will be a catalyst.

I am a pretty disinterested bystander watching this “debate” over posting the Ten Commandments because nobody, as far as I can see, is debating what really matters. Until you liberate education from State (read: coercive) control, people will fight in a death struggle over who gets to determine the content and character of that State (read: coercive) control.

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I suppose the other current event of particular interest this week is tomorrow’s Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. I predicted that it wouldn’t happen, but my predictions are very often wrong. There’s still time for somebody to get “flu-like symptoms,” of course, so it doesn’t happen until it does.