Today, on the morning update, more from fellow ‘Grokster Ian Underwood and his talk on education. The problem is one of doing too much, or so much that you can’t do anything well or, in some cases, at all.
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Ep 245 Links:
- https://granitegrok.com/right-rally/2026/08/rebel-civics-rethinking-education-with-ian-underwood
Authors’ and Speakers’ opinions are their own and may not represent those of Grok Media, LLC, GraniteGrok.com, its sponsors, readers, authors, or advertisers.
Edited transcript:
Welcome to your Friday, August 21st, 2026, morning update. Yeah, I guess I could use a shave.
Hey, don’t forget to visit GraniteGrok.com, the mothership of all this wonderful morning updateness that you enjoy. And we continued the tradition at least five days a week with a little bit more from Ian Underwood on education.
I’ll preface it with this.
You ever, maybe, yourself or a kid or a family member or somebody, you know, try to carry too much? They’re moving something; they need to get it from A to B. And they’ve got so much stuff in their hands that they’re just dropping everything everywhere, and nothing ever ends up where it’s supposed to, and you make a big mess in the process. Well, that’s not a bad analogy for government-forced taxpayer-funded education.
Ian has a slightly better metaphor. Check it out.
(Ian) The concept I came up with is called the travesty of the umbrella, and I’ve already alluded to it, but the idea is this. Imagine you have this umbrella and it’s x, something x that’s subsidized. And people who are getting that thing think, well, it’s really nice they’re giving me x, but I’d also like this thing y. If I can make y seem to be part of x, then I can drag it over under the umbrella, and I’ll get that for free too.
Okay? And so, you know, just to have an example to think with, I like to use health care, right? So let’s say we’re going to make health care subsidized. Everybody can go to the doctor for free, and so some people are going to be, well, that’s nice, but I can’t get to the doctor because I don’t have a car. So transportation should really be subsidized as part of health care.
My Medicare should pay for my car. And I can’t go if I have to watch my kids. So daycare should be subsidized under health care.
And if I can’t afford to eat, I’m starving, then my doctor’s not going to really be able to help me. So food should be subsidized as part of health care. And, you know, if I can’t dress myself because I don’t know how to do buttons or zippers, you know, I’m going to end up going to the doctor naked.
That’s not good for anybody. So occupational therapy should be part of health care. And, you know, if my family fights a lot or they don’t want me, they’re Christian scientists, they don’t want me to go to the doctor, whatever, I may need social help, social workers to come and help me.
And that should be part of health care. And so on and on and on, all those things should be part of health care, right? And I hope you’re thinking, no, that would be nuts. We would never do that. It makes no sense at all.
Ready for the big reveal?
(Ian) And yet, this is exactly what we do with school. So the umbrella labeled school now contains all those things.
It contains social work, it contains therapy, it contains daycare, it contains transportation, it contains food. Except the thing is, there’s a lot of other stuff in addition to that. There’s, you know, hobbies and team spirit, whatever.
And there are so many boxes that have been dragged under the umbrella labeled education or school that you can’t even find the boxes that are named literacy and numeracy and rationality. Those have been shoved away. They might not even be under the umbrella anymore because there’s just not enough room for them.
As it turns out, the high cost of public education is teaching us something that if we let the government do whatever it wants in the name of teaching children, they won’t learn anything except how expensive it is and how little they actually know when they graduate.
(Ian) Something has to give. And so this is, you know, people ask, well, how come schools cost so much? And I think one of the things, why do they cost so much and perform so poorly? And I think it’s because we are trying to use them for everything so they can’t do anything well. There’s an old Chinese saying, I think it’s Chinese, if you chase two rabbits, you won’t catch either of them, right? You have to pick one and go after it.
And schools are chasing dozens of things and not getting any of them. So, you know, that would be a place to start.
Clearly the solution is to stop doing all those other things and to focus on what really matters.
In New Hampshire, we have a constitutional obligation [to use education] to create good citizens. That means they need to be able to read the bills, write, and do math so they can understand budgets and how the government’s gonna be spending their money, which hints at why the government stopped teaching those things.
That’s it for today. We’ll talk to you on Monday.
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