If you missed, skipped, or dismissed Ian Underwood’s Rethinking Education, you should be making time to watch it. In today’s Morning Update, I share the first of several excerpts that should change how you think about education. So much so that we encourage you to watch it and then share it with policymakers and legislators.
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Ep 234 Link:
- https://granitegrok.com/right-rally/2026/08/rebel-civics-rethinking-education-with-ian-underwood
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Edited transcript:
Welcome to your Thursday, August 6th, 2026 morning update. The topic is education, rethinking education. If you haven’t watched the 39-minute presentation by Ian Underwood that we published Sunday at eight PM, you should go look at it. But if you don’t want to, we’re gonna tease you a little, wrestle and pin your paradigms down on education a little bit at a time.
Got a couple clips that I’m going to share over the next days and weeks from that presentation, and you could just jump the gun and go watch the whole thing, and then you’d be ready. You’d be prepared. You could get your mind in the right space. Until then, and if in lieu of that, I’m here to kind of help you along. Ian has helped me see not just the problem of education, but the problem with the questions we’re asking. For example.
[Ian] If you look at what the legislature, what the Department of Education, what the courts are trying to do, they’re trying to answer this question. How should government educate children? Okay? And this is just a terrible question. I mean, for one thing, we could change it to, “How should society educate children?” The difference being that government operates by force and society operates by persuasion. Okay? And so, if you’re having government do something, it’s by definition political, which means people are going to fight, some people are going to win, some people are going to lose.
But when society is doing something, you have unlimited ways to help people with the kind of help they need and not the kind of help they don’t need. And also, just using government is what opens up all of this to pay-and-pray funding, because people would not put up with that. Spending your own money, nobody’s putting up with pay-and-pray for a minute. Just imagine going into Home Depot and going, “Here’s $500. Give me something good,” right? It’s just not a viable model for anything that people have to do.
Keep in mind that I’m not even attempting to address the very real problem in my state of New Hampshire: the state constitution provides absolutely no vehicle for the government at any level to tax anyone, be it property or otherwise, to fund education. We’ve covered some of that in the past; you can search for it on granitegrok.com, and we’re going to cover it some more in the near future.
Because it’s a burning issue that has to be addressed if the question of school funding is ever going to be solved. Once again, Ian asks great questions. Who should and why?
Well, here’s another one for you.
[Ian] So the next thing is, instead of saying, “How should society educate children?” We can look at that and go, “What if we ask, ‘How should society avoid leaving children uneducated?'” That is a very different way of thinking about it in two ways. One is just the difference between educated and uneducated. People have been arguing about what educated means since Aristotle; we are not any closer to a consensus on that. But I believe there is something very close to a consensus on what it means to be uneducated.
So if you can’t play the tuba, not uneducated. If you can’t order in a French restaurant, not uneducated. If you can’t read, yes, uneducated. If you can’t do enough math to balance your life, keep track of your money, and be able to evaluate public policy decisions that you are going to be asked to vote on, yes, uneducated. And so I think a lot about the guy who wrote The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He said once that perfection is achieved not when there’s nothing more you can add, but when there’s nothing left to take away.
And so this, I think, is: if we are going to set out to say, “What do we need to be teaching?” You start taking away as much as you can. And at some point, it’s like literacy. Nope, nope, nope, we can’t get rid of that. We have to keep that. And you end up with this idea of what it means to be uneducated. And you see that not as a thing that has to be done, but as almost like a disease, something to be avoided, okay? So that’s the first way in which to say, “Let’s avoid being uneducated,” is different. The second is, if the idea is that we’re going to give an education or educate kids, then that leads you in the direction of saying, this is a thing we have to give to people whether they need it or not. Your dad makes a million dollars a year; we’re still going to pay for your education, which makes absolutely no sense at all. Especially since the money that you’re taking may be coming from somebody who has to decide each month whether they’re going to pay their property taxes or eat.
What exactly is the goal? What do we want? Do we want property taxes so high that people can’t afford to live in their homes? Or was the goal to actually produce functioning citizens? Well, I think it’s the latter. You don’t even have to guess, right? But what do you think? And then take those questions, take these clips.
Watch the entire presentation, read the books he’s talking about, and then go have a polite conversation with the people who are taking your money and pretending to do something with it that looks nothing like what education should be. That’s it for today. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
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