We modern Westerners have a famously short memory whose span has become even smaller since the internet became a part of most people’s daily lives about 30 years ago. That probably surprised a few people reading (there’s that short memory). Yes, indeed, the internet is blink-of-an-eye-recent.
We forget news stories in about a day, irrespective of how momentous an event may be. Leftist media hatred for Donald Trump and for half the country’s citizenry accounts for most of this, but the shortened attention and memory span somehow managed to make an assassination attempt on live television seem like something that “maybe happened?” Did you notice that? How a former president was shot on live TV and by the next week it was like it never happened?
Our cultural memory problem doesn’t just lead to us forgetting consequential events. We also very quickly adapt to new creations of government and policy with precious little pushback, then we promptly forget that these new government agencies have not existed since Moses ascended Mt. Sinai to receive the stone tablets.
So it is with the U.S. Department of Education. Many of you reading this were alive before it was created; that means many of you were in school and getting an education long before anyone believed the federal government had to be involved in every classroom across the country. In only 100 years, we went from a 15-year-old Laura Ingalls teaching farm boys the three R’s (and doing it well) to a nation that requires teachers to have college degrees (more on that below).
It was President Jimmy Carter who created the Department of Education in 1979, and we can all see the depths to which “education” has plummeted for U.S. students. The DOE seems unconcerned with the extraordinary rate of illiteracy and innumeracy among American students, but very concerned with “helping” confused and abused children realize that they were born into the wrong sex’s body.
Why do we have this department? Does it do a better job than states and towns did before 1979? President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t think so, and he’s vowed to tear down the DOE on several occasions. Whether he will get this far remains to be seen, and the opposition from the credentialed class (liberals) will be histrionic and fierce.
But Trump is already making a start on reforming education by taking aim at the obviously broken college accreditation system. In a new video, Trump laid out his plan to target the left’s influence in higher education.
Trump’s plan to dismantle the U.S. indoctrination system (college) by seizing funds from schools that refuse to comply with his accreditation system.
- “Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system.”
- “Fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”
- “We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again.” “These standards will include defending the American tradition and Western civilization, protecting free speech, and eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs.”
- “Remove all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats, offering options for accelerated at low-cost degrees, providing meaningful job placement and career services, and implementing college entrance and exit exams to prove that students are actually learning and getting their money’s worth.”
- “Direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination.”
- “Schools that persist in explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity will not only have their endowments taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.”
- “The seized funds will then be used as restitution for victims of these illegal and unjust policies.”
Here’s a sampling of online reaction to Trump’s promise to rout “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” who prop up colleges that indoctrinate young people.
But there’s always one, isn’t there?
