Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona recently said that while he doesn’t have a problem with differences of opinion, he feels that things have changed regarding the tone of conversations about education. In the past, he says,
There was civility. We could disagree. We could have healthy conversations around what’s best for kids.
Call me old-fashioned, but as I understand it, civility implies an absence of violence or even the threat of violence.
What Cardona is saying is that as long as he gets to take your money — under the threat of violence if you don’t fork it over — and use it the way he and his friends think it should be used, it’s fine for you to disagree, but you should be polite about it.
That’s a ‘healthy conversation’. That’s ‘civility.’
This suggests that maybe we ought to revisit our statutes regarding robbery. If you wear a nice suit, speak politely, and give the person you’re robbing a chance to disagree about what’s best for the two of you (so long as you end up with his money), it’s not really a robbery.
It’s just the kind of civil, healthy conversation that our Secretary of Education says we should be engaging in.
