In November of 2016, shortly after being elected as president, Donald Trump nominated Betsy DeVos to the cabinet position of secretary of education. A brief review of the new secretary and her qualifications is important. As pointed out by various media sources, DeVos is essentially devoid of any past applicable experience in administrating educational policies and procedures related to the complex K-12 public educational system of our country.
Her personal and professional background, necessary to conduct a responsible and effective pursuit of her duties, is absent the necessary qualities to do so. Her experience in education is related almost exclusively to charter schools, voucher systems, and private school choice as well as the pedagogical processes therein. She has no practical experience in public education, which is the focus of her responsibilities as secretary. This means there is a very high potential that policies and procedures emanating from her office will negatively affect K-12 and higher education institutions in our country.
An example of her potential mismanagement can be seen allegorically here: Let’s say you are a college student, or any student for that matter at any level of education, and your institution hires a faculty member who only has a seventh-grade education and limited experience or knowledge of the social, conceptual, and theoretical processes as they relate to the average American student.
The institution places that person in front of you as your teacher. What will you be taught? Will you leave that classroom with anything useful? Will you even pay attention to the teacher? Are the courses being taught by that person pedagogically sound? Are students with special educational needs being left out of the system? Are minority children afforded the same opportunities of everyone else?
The likelihood of pedagogical success related to the allegory above is obviously very low. Currently, some states have removed the teaching certificate and training and education to achieve that certificate in order to be a professional teacher. It is suggested that DeVos as the current secretary will promote this undertrained and dysfunctional model at all levels. She will do this, I am predicting, because she simply doesn’t know what to do in order to facilitate the successful development of K-12 students across the country, thus leaving decisions up to the various state governments.
Additional questions abound. For example, will each state see others as providing quality education? Will subjective and politically driven decisions about quality be consistent? The answers will emerge over the coming months and years.
Another way to look at this is from a ripple perspective.
Younger students become poorly prepared to enter college because of faulty programs, limitations, and procedures put forward by an incompetent secretary of education and various levels of administration under her control. Higher educational institutions will then have to install a multitude of remedial courses in order to facilitate student success in higher education. This will require money, faculty, facilities and time and is basically a redundant process to correct earlier avoidable deficiencies. What will be taught in the remedial courses should have been accomplished earlier in the students’ academic careers. The costs, monetarily as well as in human capital, will be incalculable if not enduring.
Another potential issue is DeVos’s clear testimony during Congressional hearings of the importance of Christian theological instruction at all levels of education. This abrogates the intention of our democratic republic to maintain a separation between church and state.
Religious teaching should be conducted by theologians in the religious environment such as church. Academic teaching of academic content should be conducted by highly educated, skilled, and effective teachers in the public academic setting.
As a member of the academy for the better part of 50 years, I admit to being very weak and unable to put forward a nonsecular body of information to students. Does that require me to adopt and embrace prevailing scriptural dogma to continue teaching? If not, who then will be able to provide both the secular and religious information within the same pedagogical environment? What if those two bodies of information conflict with each other? Where will the student find the most helpful, insightful truth for a successful future?
Another point to review here revolves around Socrates and his rejection of democracy, subsequent trial, and being found guilty and condemned to death for his rejection.
Briefly, Socrates felt that a democratic republic as a governing system was functional only if the large majority of its citizens were accurately informed and educated and were encouraged to actively involve themselves in the process — or to put another way, to be self-governing. Ignorant, undereducated, and misinformed citizens would not understand how democracy functioned and would be unable to self-govern effectively, and thus democracy would ultimately fail. After the fall, anarchy, despotic leaders, confusion, and massive trepidation would emerge and create great turmoil in society. This is fertile ground for the emergence of a power figure to develop and implement omnipotent influence over the population; influence not necessarily in their best interest. History is full of examples of all of this, so Socrates was right.
Here’s the rub: Over time, a weak educational system guided by an incompetent nurtures the creation of a growing population of ignorant, uneducated, and misinformed citizens. Only through strong education, development of critical thinking skills, argumentative discourse, diversity, and the information emergent from the considered interaction between those elements will democracy survive and flourish.
Thus, under current conditions, the danger exists for the demise of democracy and our republic as we know it. The recent national election was fueled in large part by a constituent need for change.
But change was and is only seen as a departure from the status quo. While the journey of change has great potential, that potential can only be realized by identifying a clear and elevated destination that affects all Americans constructively. That objective clarity has never been presented to everyone’s satisfaction, and so we are now confronted with “change” on an almost hourly basis. Those changes are largely shocking, surprising, and generally unacceptable.
As a final observation, it is becoming increasingly apparent that President Trump is nominating individuals who have been charged with diminishing, even destroying, key agencies in our governmental structure such as the Environmental Protection Agency and even attempting to eliminate the Endangered Species Act. If all of this is successful, our grandchildren will inherit a country dismantled, drastically changed for the worse, and under the control of narcissistic demagogues.
Persist in your resistance to you and your children being dumbed down and the dismantling of our democratic republic. Our survival depends on all of us.
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